Mark's Double Ending: Two New Greek Witnesses

            For decades, commentators on the Gospel of Mark have mentioned that there is an alternative ending to the Gospel of Mark (that is, an alternate after verse 8 that does not involve verses 9-20).  The ESV presents this alternative ending, which is known as the “Shorter Ending,” in a footnote, attributing it to “some manuscripts” – “But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told.  And after this, Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to west, the sacred and inperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”

          The ESV’s “Some manuscripts” was, until recently, a total of six continuous-text Greek manuscripts, plus one bilingual Greek-Sahidic lectionary (lectionary 1602):  019, 044, 083 (a.k.a. 0112), 099, 279, and 274mg.  

           The Double Ending is also attested in quite a few versional copies:

          Sahidic copies (for example, Pierpont Morgan Manuscript 11 (c. 700), Pierpont Morgan Manuscript 4 (c. 800), Vienna 9075 and 9076 (700s), and British Museum Oriental Manuscript 7029 (900s) – and a Sahidic fragment in the collection of Duke University (P. Duke Inv. 814), from the 700s).

          The Armenian MS Etchmiadzin 303 (1200s).

          The Bohairic MS known as Huntington 17 (1174), and

          Many Ethiopic copies (at least 131 – as described by Bruce Metzger in 1980 in “The Gospel of St. Mark in Ethiopic Manuscripts,” in New Testament Tools and Studies, Vol. 10; in the course of this study Metzger withdrew the well-circulated claim that a number of Ethiopic copies conclude Mark’s text at 16:8 – although the false claim can still be found in some sources, including p. 322 of the fourth edition (2005) of Metzger’s The Text of the New Testament, of which Bart Ehrman is named as a co-author).  (The corrected description of the Ethiopic evidence is on p. 120 of the same book.)  

        The Double Ending has also been found in a few representatives of the Harklean Syriac version (such as DFM 00829, a witness from the 1200s-1300s discovered by Mina Monier), and even in a copy of the Peshitta (British Library MS Add. 14456, as David Taylor has shown).

The third-to-last and last page of Mark
in Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis (VL 1, k)

     Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis (VL 1)  is the only witness to the Shorter Ending in which the Shorter Ending is not accompanied by at least part of the usual twelve verses 9-20 (which are supported by at least 1,650 Greek manuscripts, plus the non-extant manuscripts used by many patristic writers such as Tatian and Irenaeus in the 100s). (VL 1 also attests to an interesting interpolation between Mark 16:3 and 16:4, and does not attest to the final phrase of 16:8.  Its scribe also made various errors in the course of writing the Shorter Ending.)

         There are slight variations in the text of these witnesses – mainly the presence or absence of the explicit reference to Jesus’ appearance (ο Ις εφανη in 044 and 274mg and Greek-Sahidic lectionary 1602, and Ις εφανη αυτοις in 099) and the presence or absence of a final Amen.  But today I shall overlook the interesting implications of these variants to focus on a recent discovery made by Mina Monier:  there are now eight Greek manuscripts (plus Greek-Sahidic lectionary 1602) that support the Double Ending (i.e., the Shorter Ending followed by verses 9-20):  the newly confirmed manuscripts are GA 1422 and GA 2937 .  GA 1422 is assigned to the 900s-1000s; GA 2937 is assigned to the 900s.

          These two new witnesses for the Double Ending, via their agreements in shared format and shared annotations with several of the other known Greek witnesses for the Double Ending, convey more clearly than ever before that as a Greek reading, the Shorter Ending’s early circulation had a very limited geographic range, in one specific area in Egypt. 

          On folio 178v of GA 1422, alongside the text of the Gospel of Mark 16:7 (beginning with ὄτι προάγει) to 16:13 (up to and including λοιποῖς), the catena-commentary that frames the text on three sides refers to, and includes, the Shorter Ending.   Variants within the Shorter Ending in 1422’s commentary are: (1) the non-inclusion of ὁ before Ἰς), (2) the non-inclusion of ἐφάνη or ἐφάνη αὐτοῖς after Ἰς, and (3) ἀπ, rather than ἀπό, before ἀνατολῆς.     

          (One might suspect that the Shorter Ending that appears in the lower margin of GA 274 (below the text of Mark 16:6b-15, up to and including ἃπαντα κη-) was extracted from a commentary-manuscript such as 1422 or 2937, rather than from a commentary-free continuous-text manuscript.)

 

Mina Monier

        Following the Shorter Ending, 1422’s commentary has a note:  Εστι[ν] δε κ[αι] ταυτα φερόμενα μετα τὸ ἐφοβοῦντο γαρ.  This is the same note that introduces verse 9 in 019 (Codex L), 044 (Codex Ψ), 083, and Sahidic-Greek lectionary 1602.  Each member of this small cluster of manuscripts must be connected to the same transmission-stream from which this note emanated.

          Mark 16:8 in GA 2937, meanwhile, is followed by – according to Mina Monier’s transcription – “ειχεν δε αυτας τρομος and several lines of commentary, concluding with Αυτη η υποθεσις οπιθεν εστι εις το “εφοβουντο γαρ:”  This is followed by the Shorter Ending, in a form which is nigh-identical to what is in 274^mg.  And this is followed by – again following Monier’s transcription – “Eστι δε και ταυτα φερομενα μετα το εφοβουντο γαρ” (the same note that is in  019, 044, 083, 1422, and Greek-Sahidic lectionary 1602) – followed by “αναστας δε πρωϊ πρωτῃ σαββατον και τα εξης.”  More commentary-material (from Gregory of Nyssa, according to a rubric in the margin), which makes use of Mark 16:9-20, follows.

A page from Sahidic-Greek
lectionary 1602.

          Notice that in 2937, ειχεν δε αυτας τρομος (that is, the second half of 16:8, with δε instead of γαρ) follows 16:8.  2937 shares this “rewound” feature with 099 and Sahidic-Greek lectionary 1602.  Thus, by sharing the note “Εστι[ν] δε κ[αι] ταυτα φερόμενα μετα τὸ ἐφοβοῦντο γαρ,” or by restarting Mark 16:8b before continuing with 16:9 (or both), all these witnesses to the Shorter Ending show that they belong to the same narrow transmission-line – which, by virtue of including Sahidic-Greek lectionary 1602, must have been in Egypt.    

          More information about GA 2937 can be found in the article Greek Manuscripts in Alexandria, by H.A.G. Houghton and Mina Monier, which appeared in Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. 71, Issue 1, April 2020, pp. 119-133.

[Readers are encouraged to explore the embedded links in this post.]

         

Mark 16:9-20 - Grace To You vs. The Evidence

 

            Watch the new video about the false claims that Grace To You has been spreading about Mark 16:9-20 for the past ten years on YouTube.            

It has been almost ten years since Dr. John MacArthur preached a sermon titled “The Fitting End to Mark’s Gospel,” in which he called Mark 16:9-20 a “bad ending.”  Since then, the ministry of Grace to You has promoted his claims over and over.

            But many of his claims are false.  I’m not challenging his doctrines here; I mean that  he says many things in that sermon that are flat-out untrue.  He says things that are fictitious.  In the next ten minutes, I will focus on just some of them.

(1)  John MacArthur says, “I would say there is massive evidence that the Holy Spirit not only inspired the Scripture but preserved it in its purity through all history.”   He also says, “There are twenty-five thousand ancient manuscripts of the New Testament.  Such an abundance preserved by the Holy Spirit through faithful men in the church makes it possible to reconstruct the original books with virtually complete accuracy.”

           There are 1,653 Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark.  Almost all of them – over 99% – include the 12 verses that MacArthur calls a “bad ending.”  There are just three Greek manuscripts in which the text of Mark ends at Mark 16:8.

            If “massive evidence” shows that the text of Scripture has been preserved in its purity through all history, then massive evidence also refutes MacArthur’s idea that Mark 16:9-20 should be rejected.  

            To put it another way:  if “massive evidence” – say, 99% of the Greek manuscripts,  99% of the Syriac manuscripts, 99% of the Latin manuscripts, and 100% of the Ethiopic manuscripts – is what shows us the text that the Holy Spirit has preserved for the church to use, then Mark 16:9-20 is part of that divinely-approved text.  But if, instead, we should rely on 1% of the Greek manuscripts, 1% of the Syriac manuscripts, 1% of the Greek manuscripts, and none of the Ethiopic manuscripts. what happens to MacArthur’s claim about “massive evidence”?  It disintegrates.  It dissolves into dust.

 

(2)  John MacArthur claims that after the Council of Nicea in 325, as Christianity became established as the religion of the Roman Empire, persecution ended, and starting then you have the proliferation of manuscripts.  “They all survived,” he said, “because no one is banning them or destroying them.”

            That claim is downright silly.  Even after Roman persecutions stopped, humidity still worked.  Outside the exceptionally dry climate of Egypt, papyrus manuscripts experienced natural decay.  Eusebius of Caesarea claimed that Emperor Constantine instructed him to make 50 manuscripts for churches in Constantinople.  Do we have 50 Greek manuscripts from the 300s?  No we do not.  The claim that “they all survived” is ridiculous.

 

(3) MacArthur demonstrated his ignorance of New Testament manuscripts again when he identified Codex Sinaiticus as “The earliest and most important of the Biblical texts that have been discovered.”  But Sinaiticus is not the earliest New Testament text; other substantial manuscripts, such as Papyrus 45, and Papyrus 46, are earlier. 

 

(4) As part of the basis for his rejection of Mark 16:9-20, MacArthur appeals to “Eight thousand copies of Jerome’s Vulgate.”  The thing is, in Jerome’s Vulgate, Mark 16:9-20 is included.  MacArthur also appealed to “Three hundred and fifty-plus copies of the Syriac Bible.”  But in the standard Syriac text, Mark 16:9-20 is included. 

 

(5)  MacArthur then says,  “When you compare all of these manuscripts, they’re all saying exactly the same thing.”

            But that is not true.  The text in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus is different from the text of the Vulgate, and it is different from the text of the Peshitta – and one difference is that the Syriac Peshitta and the Latin Vulgate include Mark 16:9-20.  When you compare the vast majority of the Greek, Latin, and Syriac manuscripts, they say the opposite of what MacArthur seems to think they say!

            If we’re going to say, “Let’s accept the text that is supported by all these Greek and  Latin and Syriac manuscripts,” we should be accepting Mark 16:9-20.    

 

(6)  John MacArthur tries to appeal to patristic quotations, claiming that “you can virtually put the entire New Testament together from the quotes of the fathers and it matches perfectly all other manuscript sources.”

      
      That claim is fiction.  You can easily demonstrate that it is fiction by picking up a textual apparatus and looking through the list of patristic writers who are listed as support for different rival readings.    

            But MacArthur doesn’t let the obviously false nature of his claim slow him down.  He keeps going:  he says, “There are over 19 thousand quotations of just the Gospels in their writings, and they read the Gospel text the very same way you read them in your Bible today.”   That is another fictitious claim.  MacArthur seems unaware that what he calls a “bad ending” is quoted far and wide by patristic writers from the days of the Roman Empire.

     

(7)  MacArthur continues to spread falsehoods when he compares the history of the transmission of the New Testament with the transmission of Homer’s Iliad.   He claims that “The oldest manuscript of the Iliad that we have is in the thirteenth century A.D.”  That is false.  There are dozens of fragments of the Iliad from way before the thirteenth century A.D.  Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 560, from the 200s, is just one example.  Are the personnel at Grace To You aware that John MacArthur is making these false claims?  Then why has  Grace To You been spreading them for the past 10 years?  Do they just not care?  It’s been ten years.  So much for the pretense that Grace To You believes that truth matters.    

 

(8)  John MacArthur says we can be confident that our English translations are accurate because “We have so many accurate, consistent manuscripts.”  But he’s not relying on many Greek manuscripts in this case; he is relying on three.  One is a medieval commentary-manuscript.  The two early ones are the ones that matter, and one of them has a distinct blank space that includes a whole column after Mark 16:8, and in the other one, the last page of Mark is written by a different scribe than the scribe who wrote the surrounding pages. 

            John MacArthur is thus rejecting the testimony of 1,653 Greek manuscripts, including early manuscripts such as Codex A, Codex C, and Codex D,  and he is basically depending on two Greek manuscripts.  And, inasmuch as they disagree with each other at 3,036 places in the Gospels, they can’t both be very “accurate, consistent” copies of the Gospels.     

(9)  MacArthur claims that “Somewhere along the line, they started piling up optional endings.”  But in real life, besides verses 9-20, there was just one other ending after verse 8:  the “Shorter Ending” – and that was in one particular locale:  Egypt.   It is preserved in eight Greek manuscripts, and all eight of them also support the usual 12 verses.   

            Let me say that again:  a total of eight Greek manuscripts have preserved one rival ending, along with the normal ending.  There is also one manuscript, Codex W, which has extra material between verse 14 and verse 15, but that is an interpolation, not an ending.  The claim that endings “started piling up” is rubbish and nonsense!  Anyone who tells you that there were “several endings” or “various endings” – I’m looking at you, Philip Comfort; I’m looking at you, New Living Translation footnote-maker – is deceiving his readers.     

 

(10)  MacArthur makes his false fantasy even falser, if it were possible, when he says that “Justin Martyr and Tatian show knowledge of other endings,” and that “Even Irenaeus shows knowledge of other endings starting to float around.”

         What Justin Martyr and Tatian and Irenaeus show is that they used a text of Mark that included Mark 16:9-20.  There is no evidence in their writings of any other ending.  MacArthur is just making things up!  Instead, he should state that  Irenaeus' quotation from Mark 16:19 in Against Heresies, Book 3, chapter 10, around the year 180, (long before Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were made in the 300s), it means that Irenaeus’ manuscripts of Mark 16 included verses 9-20.

 

             In conclusion:  I call on John MacArthur to retract the false claims that he has been spreading for the past ten years.  And I call on Grace To You to stop circulating the materials that contain and promote those false claims. 

             Until this is done, I say to everyone who regards John MacArthur as a reliable source of information about New Testament manuscripts, and to everyone who thinks of Grace To You as a responsible organization that would never promote false claims:  you have my pity.

Video Lecture: Mark 16:9-20, the Shorter Ending, and Internal Evidence

 

Lecture 17

Lecture 17 in the series Introduction to NT Textual Criticism is online at YouTube!  In this lecture, slightly more than 25 minutes long, I focus on the internal evidence pertaining to Mark 16:9-20 - with a lengthy detour about the Shorter Ending.
  Here's an excerpt (from the part about the Shorter Ending):
     The textual variant known as the “Shorter Ending” goes like this:

            “Everything that had been told to them, they related to Peter and those with him.  And after this, Jesus Himself appeared to them and sent forth, through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.  Amen.”

             This is found between verse 8 and verse 9 in six Greek manuscripts:  Codex L, Codex Ψ, 083 – this is the same manuscript as 0112 – 099, and 579.  All six Greek manuscripts that attest to the Shorter Ending also support the inclusion of verses 9-20, although a few of them are damaged.  

                                            

Some of the Greek manuscripts that feature the Shorter Ending between verse 8 and verse 9 also feature notes that introduce each ending.  Codex L has a note that says “In some, there is also this” before the Shorter Ending, and before verses 9-20, Codex L has a note that says, “There is also this, appearing after ephobounto gar.”

This note echoes a situation in which the scribes were aware of some copies in which the Shorter Ending was present after verse 8, and also aware of some copies in which verses 9-20 were present after verse 8.

In Codex Psi, there is no such note between verse 8 and the Shorter Ending, but after the Shorter Ending, Codex Psi has the same note that is seen in Codex L:  “There is also this, appearing after ephobounto gar.”  

083 is a damaged fragment.  After Mark 16:8, 083 has the closing-title of Mark at the end of a column.  In the next column, the Shorter Ending appears, and then before the beginning of verse 9, 083 has the note:  “There is also this, appearing after ephobounto gar.”  It is possible that 083 also had the same note that is found in Codex L before the Shorter Ending, but that part of the page is not extant, so it can only be said that there appears to have been enough room on the page for that note.

083 thus testifies to a situation in which copyists were aware of copies of Mark in which the text of Mark ended at verse 8, copies in which the text ended with the Shorter Ending, and copies in which the text ended with verses 9-20.

099 is another heavily damaged fragment, from the White Monastery in Egypt, assigned to the 600s or 700s.  After Mark 16:8, 099 had a note that is no longer legible.  This is followed by the Shorter Ending.  Then the text of most of 16:8 is rewritten, beginning at the words eichen gar and continuing to the end of the verse.  Verse 8 is followed immediately by verse 9, and verse 9 is followed by the beginning of verse 10, at which point we reach the end of the fragment. 

Greek-Sahidic Lect 1602
(Image from the digital holdings of the 
Albert Ludwig University of Frieburg)

Now we come to the Greek-Sahidic lectionary 1602.  In this witness, assigned to the 700s, the text of Mark 16:8 comes to a close at the end of a page.  At the beginning of the next page, a note introduces the Shorter Ending.  It says, “In other copies this is not written.” 

Then the Shorter Ending appears.  After the Shorter Ending, there is another note – the note also found in Codex L, Codex Psi, and 083:  estin de kai tauta meta feromena.”  Then, like 099, it repeats the second half of verse 8, beginning with the words eichen gar, and verse 8 is followed by verses 9-20.

So:  Codex L, Codex Psi, 083, and the Greek-Sahidic Lectionary 1602 share the same note after the Shorter Ending:  they all introduce verses 9-20 with the note that says, “Estin de kai tauta meta feromena.”

099 and Greek-Sahidic Lectionary 1602 both repeat the same part of verse 8 before verse 9.

Thus, four of the six Greek witnesses to the Shorter Ending are all connected to the same locale, namely, a location in Egypt. 

Greek-Sahidic Lect 1602
(Image from the digital holdings of the 
Albert Ludwig University of Frieburg)

This leaves two minuscules, 579 and 274, as the only remaining Greek witnesses to the Shorter Ending.  The text of Mark in 579 has Alexandrian characteristics, and it is known for featuring a rare method of dividing the Gospels-text into segments that is shared by Codex Vaticanus.  Even though 579 is from the 1200s, its testimony, in which the Shorter Ending follows verse 8, and the Shorter Ending is followed immediately on the next page by verses 9-20, does not take us away from the influence of a very narrow transmission-line. 

   Minuscule 274 has Mark 16:9-20 in its main text.  Mark 16:9 begins on the same line where verse 8 ends.  The Shorter Ending is featured at the bottom of the page, like a footnote, with a column of five asterisks beside it.  An asterisk beside the end of verse 8 conveys that the Shorter Ending was seen in the text at that point. 

Thus, the Greek evidence points to Egypt as the locale where the Shorter Ending originated, and nothing points anywhere else. 

Versional evidence interlocks with this very well.  The Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis, the only manuscript in which only the Shorter Ending is included after verse 8, almost certainly was produced in Egypt, written by a scribe who did not know Latin very well.    

The Bohairic-Arabic MS Huntington 17, made in 1174, has verses 9-20 in the text, and the Shorter Ending is in the margin.

The Ethiopic version was closely considered by Bruce Metzger in 1980, in the course of a detailed essay in which he retracted the claim that some Ethiopic manuscripts of Mark do not have Mark 16:9-20.  Metzger observed that out of 194 Ethiopic manuscripts consulted by himself and another researcher, 131 included both the Shorter Ending and verses 9-20. 

Some copies of the Harklean Syriac version, made in the early 600s on the basis of manuscripts in Egypt, also feature the Shorter Ending as a supplemental reading; verses 9-20 are in the Syriac text.

            According to E. C. Colwell, even a medieval Armenian manuscript, Etchmiadzin 303, which has verses 9-20 at the end of Mark, managed to include the Shorter Ending as the final verse of the Gospel of Luke. 

            The Shorter Ending clearly had wide distribution in versional transmission-lines.  But those lines all echo, in one way or another, a form of the text that began in Egypt, when verses 9-20 were circulating everywhere else.           

Before moving on to the internal evidence, it should be observed that it is misleading to convey that there were “multiple endings” of the Gospel of Mark, as if four or five different endings were written to continue the narrative after verse 8.

Aside from the abrupt non-ending at verse 8, there are two independent endings of the Gospel of Mark:  one is the Shorter Ending, attested in six [2022 update:  eight] Greek manuscripts, all of which also support verses 9-20.  The other one is verses 9-20.     

The Freer Logion, which was mentioned in the previous lecture, is not a different ending.  It is a textual variant.  Its existence depends upon the previous existence of verses 9-20.  It does not turn into a different ending any more than a whale turns into an eagle when a barnacle attaches itself.

   Likewise, the notes in some members of the family-1 cluster of manuscripts do not turn verses 9-20 into something that is not verses 9-20.  

   And, the inclusion of both the Shorter Ending and verses 9-20 is also not a different ending; it is the combination of the two endings that circulated side-by-side in Egypt. 

   And, as far as I can tell, non-annotated Greek manuscripts in which Mark 16:9-20 is accompanied by asterisks or obeli do not really exist.

   So when someone refers to “multiple endings” as a reason to doubt the genuineness of verses 9-20, the first thing to do is to clarify that in terms of independent endings of the Gospel Mark after verse 8, there are exactly two.

P.S. Thanks to Georgi Parpulov and Daniel Buck for help finding those page-views of Gr.-Sah. Lect 1602!