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.]

         

Vaticanus and the Shorter Ending of Mark

          Codex Vaticanus is our oldest substantial manuscript which includes most of the Gospel of Mark, having been produced around the year 325.  (P45 is older, but is missing most of its pages from Mark.)  This date is based on paleographical grounds.  We usually have no way of knowing if a scribe was young – say, 20 years old – and had just started his career as a scribe, or if he was nearing the end of his career – at, say, 70 years of age.  So there is a default degree of variation of about 50 years in either direction to most paleography-based production-dates. 

          But Christians were not likely to be capable of producing manuscripts like Codex Vaticanus – a large parchment book that probably contained, when produced, almost the entire Greek Old Testament and almost all of the New Testament (it is still debated whether or not Vaticanus initially contained the Pastoral Epistles and Revelation) – until the time when copyists could do so without the threat of Roman persecution, i.e., until 313, when Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, declaring that Christianity was a legal religion.  Another factor influencing the dating of Codex Vaticanus is something it doesn’t have:  the Eusebian Section-numbers, which are in the margin of most other Greek manuscripts of the Gospels.  The other famous very large codex from the 300s, Codex Sinaiticus, has the Eusebian Section-numbers, albeit incompletely and somewhat imprecisely. 

          With the exception of GA 304, a medieval commentary-manuscript which may have been copied from a damaged exemplar, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are the only Greek manuscripts in which the text of the Gospel of Mark stops at 16:8.  (1420 and 2386, once cited by William Lane as if they also stopped the text of the Gospel of Mark at 16:8, have turned out to merely be damaged MSS at this point.)  The copyist of Vaticanus, though, left a blank space after Mark 16:8, including a blank column – the only blank column in the New Testament.  This blank space is sufficient to include verses 16:9-20, as I have shown here. 

          But in Egypt, there was another ending of Mark, known as the “Shorter Ending.”  It is extant (along with at least part of the usual 12 verses) in eight Greek manuscripts:  Codices L (019), Y (044), 083, 099, 274 (in the lower margin), 579, and in 1422 and 2937 (these last two MSS were recently verified by Mina Monier as witnesses to the Shorter Ending and to 16:9-20).  The Shorter Ending, followed by 16:9-20, is also found in Greek-Sahidic lectionary 1602, and in numerous Ethiopic copies.  The double-ending (SE + vv. 9-20, with marginalia) appears to have been distinctly Egyptian at first, before being adopted later adopted in several versions.

          Codex Vaticanus itself, though, is the focus of a specific question which can be answered here:  when the scribe of Vaticanus left blank space after 16:8, was he thinking about the Shorter Ending?

         The answer is, “No,” and this is shown by two things:  first, the Shorter Ending fits in the second column in the blank space following 16:8.  Thus there would be no need to leave column 3 blank.  Second, in Ad Marinum (which is available as a free download from Roger Pearse, so there is no need for commentators to keep repeating (and distorting) Metzger’s misleading context-free snippets (looking at you, Ben Witherington III)), Eusebius never mentions the Shorter Ending when, as he addresses a question about how to harmonize Matthew 28:2 and Mark 16:9, he describes what a person might say about the ending of Mark. (Eusebius wrote in the decades which immediately followed the Diocletian persecution, so it should not be imagined that he had the ability to survey MSS beyond his reach.)

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!

Mark 16:9-20, Inerrancy, and Liberal Propaganda

            Have you ever been told that textual variants have no impact on Christian doctrine? Of course you have, if you have read text-critical handbooks by evangelical authors. However, some textual variants exist which are capable of having a strong doctrinal impact. For example, consider the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. This doctrine is so cherished by some Christians that Dallas Theological Seminary lists it among seven “essentials” for students. 

            The adoption of some Alexandrian readings, however, would render the doctrine of inerrancy unsustainable. In Codex Sinaiticus (popularized as “The World’s Oldest Bible”), Matthew 13:35 attributes to Isaiah a passage from Psalm 78 – which was composed by Asaph, not Isaiah. And in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the text of Matthew 27:49 includes a report that Jesus was pierced with a spear before He died – in direct contradiction to the account in John 19:30-35, which says clearly that Jesus was pierced with a spear after He died. If inerrancy is an important doctrine, then at least two textual variants found in manuscripts that some Bible-footnote writers consider “the most reliable manuscripts” are capable of having an impact on at least one important doctrine.

            Perhaps, in addition to Sinaiticus’ textual variant in Matthew 13:35, and in addition to the variant found in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in Matthew 27:49, the abrupt ending of Mark (a reading unique to Vaticanus and Sinaiticus among all our early Greek manuscripts) should be added to the list of textual variants that can have a doctrinal impact, because some liberal theologians who prefer the abrupt ending – rejecting verses 9-20 as a scribal accretion – tend to use it as a platform for the notion that the accounts about Jesus’ bodily resurrection in the other three Gospels are embellishments that originated with later sources, rather than with eyewitnesses.

            For example, a recent article by Dr. Candida Moss, published at The Daily Beast, describes a book by Dallas Theological Seminary graduate Matthew Larsen, Gospels before the Book, in which the author proposes that the Gospel of Mark “might never have been intended for publication and was more like a rough draft or collection of notes than a book.” The textual contest about the ending of the Gospel of Mark comes into play in Larsen’s theory. Moss writes: “The conclusion to Mark bears the hallmarks of a draft. Historians will tell you that the oldest manuscripts (and, we thus say, the earliest “original” version) of Mark finish at Mark 16:8, with the women who had come to the tomb running away in fear. But there are at least four other endings to the Gospel in the ancient manuscripts, which serve as evidence of early Christian readers’ efforts to revise, polish, and improve the text.”
            This is used as a platform for the idea that accounts about Jesus’ bodily resurrection were later additions to the story of Jesus. Moss continues: “Later texts, including the Gospel of Matthew, added additional resurrection stories and prologues to the text and constantly repurposed this collection of notes.”
            Now, I have no intention of investing time today to review Larsen’s interesting book, or to address the proposal that the Gospel of Mark is a mere collection of notes. I just want to zoom in on what was not said by Moss: she did not mention any of the evidence that is earlier than Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Due to this omission, readers who believe Moss are likely to draw two conclusions:
            (A) The earliest evidence supports ending the Gospel of Mark at 16:8,
            (B) There are at least four other endings of Mark in the ancient manuscripts.

Both statements are false. Moss has put two manuscripts from the 300s in the spotlight, while keeping evidence from the 100s in the shadows. As I explain in my book Authentic: The Case for Mark 16:9-20, four patristic writers in the 100s (and more in the 200s, 300s, and 400s) utilized Mark 16:9-20 in one way or another:

● Epistula Apostolorum (written c. 150, and reissued c. 180) owes some of its narrative framework and verbiage to Mark 16:9-20. For example, nowhere in the Gospels except in Mark 16:10-11 is there a report of a woman seeing Jesus after His resurrection, and then telling the disciples that Jesus is alive, and not being believed by them. This sequence of events is related, however, in Epistula Apostolorum; the disciples are depicted stating, “We believed her not that the Savior was risen from the dead. Then she returned to the Lord and said to him, ‘None of them has believed me, that you live.’” (For more examples, see my book.)  Specialist Julian Hills (Th.D., Harvard) has stated, “I would vote for a high degree of probability that the author knew the Longer Ending.”

● Justin Martyr’s First Apology (written in 160) features the following excerpt in its 45th chapter, as Justin interprets part of Psalm 110 as a prophetic description of Jesus’ ascension to heaven:
            His statement, “He shall send to Thee the rod of power out of Jerusalem,” [i.e., David’s statement in Psalm 110:2] is predictive of the mighty word, which His apostles, going forth from Jerusalem, preached everywhere.”
            (Only rarely in any of his writings did Justin make specific quotations; most of his utilizations of the Gospels are loose and imprecise; it is not unusual to see Justin combine phrases from more than one Gospel when relating episodes in Jesus’ ministry, and this phenomenon has led some researchers to deduce that Justin often relied not upon a copy of the Gospel of Matthew, and a copy of the Gospel of Mark, and a copy of the Gospel of Luke, but upon a Gospels-harmony in which the contents of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were blended together.)
In his statement about Psalm 110:2, Justin utilizes Mark 16:19, using three words which appear together nowhere else in Scripture except in Mark 16:19:
            Justin’s phrase in Greek: εξελθόντες πανταχου εκήρυξαν
            Justin’s phrase in English: went forth everywhere preaching
            Mark 16:20’s phrase in Greek: εξελθόντες εκήρυξαν πανταχου
            Mark 16:20’s phrase in English: went forth preaching everywhere.

Justin may also utilize the contents of Mark 16:9-20 in chapter 50 of his First Apology, where he states, after a lengthy quotation from Isaiah 53, that after Jesus’ crucifixion, “Even those who were acquainted with him all denied and forsook him. But afterward, when he had risen from the dead, and was seen by them, and they were taught to understand the prophecies in which all of this was foretold as about to happen, and when they had seen him depart into heaven, and had believed . . . they went forth to the whole race of mankind.”
            The phrase in bold print is reminiscent of the text of Mark 16:14 as preserved in the early Greek manuscript Codex Alexandrinus, which adds “from the dead” to the words “after He was risen.”

● Tatian, in his Diatessaron (produced in the 170s), blended together the contents of the four Gospels. (Tatian was, for a while, a student of Justin, and it is possible that Tatian got the idea to present the contents of all four Gospels into one continuous narrative from Justin’s Gospels-harmony that blended together Matthew, Mark, and Luke.)  The Diatessaron has only survived in versional and fragmentary evidence, but by comparing the different branches of evidence for its contents, the Diatessaron’s treatment of Mark 16:9-20 can be reconstructed: by comparing the arrangement of the contents of Mark 16:9-20 in the Arabic Diatessaron (a translation of an earlier Syriac copy) to the arrangement of the contents of Mark 16:9-20 in Codex Fuldensis (made in 546), we can see that the arrangement in both of these witnesses – one from the Western transmission-branch, and one from the Eastern transmission-branch – is almost exactly the same, implying that both echo the earlier arrangement by Tatian.
            Further evidence of Tatian’s use of Mark 16:9-20 comes from Ephrem Syrus’ commentary on the Diatessaron, upon which some fresh light has been provided by the discovery of Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709, from c. 500: In the eighth segment of his commentary, Ephrem Syrus wrote that Jesus had told His disciples, “Go into all the world and baptize in the name of the Father, and Son, and Spirit.” This is a combination of Mark 16:15a and Matthew 28:19. In the Armenian text of Ephrem’s commentary, Ephrem utilizes Mark 16:15 again later in his commentary, as he describes Jesus saying, “Go out into all the world and preach My gospel to all creation” (Mk. 16:15).

● Irenaeus, in Book 3, chapter 10 of Against Heresies (c. 180), specifically quoted Mark 16:19:  “Toward the conclusion of his Gospel, Mark says: ‘So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sits on the right hand of God.’”
            Irenaeus’ testimony is not only clear and specific, but it also reflects the view of someonw who was familiar with the Gospels-text used in three locales:   Irenaeus grew up in Asia Minor; he visited Rome, and he served as bishop in what is now southern France.  Irenaeus was not hesitant to point out the existence of textual variants in his discussion of Revelation 13:18 (he refers to copies which read “616” instead of “666,” but rejects them, appealing to the oldest manuscripts, and to those with a known provenance); yet here he mentions no rival variants, as if the only form of the Gospel of Mark that he encountered anywhere was the text with 16:19 present.
            Irenaeus may also allude to Mark 16:15-19 in Book 2, chapter 32 of Against Heresies; although his comments there lack striking verbal parallels, he writes there like a person with that passage on his mind; after mentioning that the risen Lord “manifested himself to his disciples, and was in their sight received up into heaven,” he proceeds to point out that true disciples perform miracles in Jesus’ name, and drive out demons, and foresee future events, and that some “heal the sick by laying their hands upon them, and they are made whole” (see Mark 16:18).

            Yet these four pieces of evidence from the 100s, supportive of the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20 in the text of the Gospel of Mark, seem unworthy of mention in the world of liberal theologians who are intent on obscuring or simply ignoring whatever affirms the bodily resurrection of Christ. So let the reader beware: researchers who mention that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus end the text of Mark at 16:8, without mentioning that second-century patristic testimony supports the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20, are misleading their readers. And the same can be said for vague Bible-footnotes that mention “the oldest manuscripts” while leaving readers in the dark about patristic evidence that is much older than those two fourth-century manuscripts,

(In the interest of brevity, I skip over the testimony of other patristic witnesses as old or older than Codex Sinaiticus such as Hippolytus, Vincent of Thibaris, Hierocles, Acts of Pilate/Gospel of Nicodemus, the pagan writer Hierocles, and the Latin written Fortunatianus.)

            Now about the claim by Moss that “There are at least four other endings of Mark in the ancient manuscripts.”  One can truthfully say that there are two endings that follow Mark 16:8 in the ancient manuscripts, but only writers who want their readers to get a false impression would leave it at that.  More than 99.5% of the Greek manuscripts of Mark include 16:9-20. Besides Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, there is only one other Greek manuscript in which the text stops abruptly at the end of 16:8 – the medieval commentary-manuscript 304, which does not include a subscription to the Gospel of Mark, and which has undergone some damage, and which may be just the first volume of a two-volume set (the second volume of which, per this theory, began with the final comments on Mark before moving on to Luke and John).
            The “Shorter Ending” appears in six Greek manuscripts, all of which also include at least part of 16:9-20 – and various small but cumulatively decisive features in these manuscripts’ presentation of the Shorter Ending show that they all echo the text that circulated in a particular region in Egypt. In other words, while verses 9-20 are attested by early witnesses from Ireland, France, Rome, North Africa, Asia Minor, Constantinople, Cyprus, Israel, Syria, Egypt, Armenia, etc., the Shorter Ending’s early support is traceable to one locale. Nobody imagines that the Shorter Ending is original, and readers may reasonably suspect, as George Salmon did in 1890, that the primary reason why the Shorter Ending is given any prominence is to distract from the wide support given to the usual twelve verses. (For similar reasons, some commentators mention that Clement does not show an awareness of Mark 16:9-20, as if this is some suggestive thing – neglecting to tell their readers that Clement also does not show an awareness of twelve of Mark’s sixteen chapters.)          

More data is in my e-book,
available at Amazon.

          The way to justify claiming that there are “four other endings of Mark” is to call 16:9-20 an ending, and call the Shorter Ending an ending (and so far, all is well) – and to call the inclusion of both the Shorter Ending and 16:9-20 an ending, and to call 16:9-20 with the Freer Logion (an interpolation preserved in Codex W between verses 14 and 15) an ending. But that is a nonsensical way to describe the evidence; to illustrate:
            Suppose I have two dogs – let’s name them Magnus and Parvus – and I have 1,600 pictures of Magnus, and six pictures of Magnus and Parvus together, one blurry picture of Parvus, and a picture of Magnus wearing a hat. If I were to tell you that this means that I have four dogs, or a multitude of dogs, you might tell me that I am misrepresenting the evidence, and that I need to sober up. And when any writer claims that there are “at least four other endings of Mark,” (or, as Larsen says in his book, that there were “a multitude of options” regarding how to conclude the Gospel of Mark), that should be the gist of readers’ responses. Whenever such misleading language is used, you may confidently conclude that you are reading propaganda, and not honest research.


Readers are invited to explore the embedded links for addition resources.

Mark 16:9-20: Does John MacArthur Know What He's Talking About?

John MacArthur

            Grace To You, a California-based ministry, is still spreading the false statements about Mark 16:9-20 that are found in John MacArthur’s infamous sermon, The Fitting End to Mark’s Gospel.  Here are some of them.           

● MacArthur conveyed that copyists of New Testament books wrote one letter, and then took a bath, and then wrote another letter, and took a bath, and so forth.  This is false.  When Grace To You spreads this sort of nonsensical fable, they insult viewers’ intelligence.

● MacArthur said that all manuscripts of the New Testament survived after the Council of Nicea in 325 because no one was banning them or destroying them.  This is false.  The natural effects of humidity destroyed many papyrus manuscripts.  There were still areas where Christianity was opposed.  And there are many cases in which Christians themselves destroyed ancient manuscripts by recycling their parchment to use as material with which to make new books.             

● MacArthur stated that the earliest copies of Biblical texts are Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.  This is false, inasmuch as the Dead Sea Scrolls are older than those two manuscripts, and so are some New Testament papyrus manuscripts (P52, P104, P45, et al).

● MacArthur said that Codex Vaticanus contains both the Old Testament and the New Testament.  It should be clarified however that Codex Vaticanus does not contain the books of First Timothy, Second Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and Revelation; in addition, the Old Testament text in Codex Vaticanus is a Greek text, primarily a form of the Septuagint, which includes apocryphal books  (Tobit, Bel and the Dragon, etc.) and which varies in many other respects from the Hebrew-based English translations that MacArthur uses and endorses.

● MacArthur, referring to Latin manuscripts, conveyed that there are “eight thousand copies going back to the fourth century” but what ought to be said is that the Vulgate was translated in the fourth century, and our extant copies of the Vulgate were produced later.  There were later revisions of the Vulgate, such as the revision undertaken by Charlemagne’s scholar-advisor Alcuin.  It is not as if all existing copies of the Vulgate read the same as the Vulgate as it existed at the end of the fourth century.

● MacArthur stated, referring to Syriac manuscripts, “There are 350 copies that go back to the 200s, very ancient manuscripts.”  In real life, the number of Syriac manuscripts with text from the New Testament that were made in the 200s is zero.  There are two major Syriac manuscripts that represent an early Syriac text of the Gospels (not the whole New Testament).  The 350 Syriac manuscripts to which MacArthur refers are copies of the Peshitta, a translation which scholars such as Syriac-specialist Sebastian Brock do not consider earlier than the late 300s in terms of its creation.  In terms of the production-dates of manuscripts of the Peshitta, its representative manuscripts are all significantly later than the 200s.   

● MacArthur, after describing Greek, Latin, and Syriac manuscripts, said, “When you compare all of these manuscripts, they’re all saying exactly the same thing.”  That is outrageously false – so false than it must be concluded, if one assumes that MacArthur had no desire to deceive, that MacArthur does not know very much at all about the contents of ancient manuscripts of the New Testament.  It boggles the mind that MacArthur was capable of saying such a thing in the course of a sermon in which he rejected Mark 16:9-20, because in those thousands of copies of the Vulgate, and in those dozens of copies of the Peshitta, Mark 16:9-20 is in the text.  MacArthur makes it seem as if the opposite is the case.  Grace To You spreads this severe misrepresentation of the evidence every day they keep MacArthur’s sermon online.      

● MacArthur claimed that using 32,000 Scripture-quotations made by patristic writers, it is not only possible to reconstruct the entire New Testament, but that “it matches perfectly all other manuscript sources.”  This too is absurd.  Dozens of patristic writers, in the era of the Roman Empire, quoted from Mark 16:9-20 and used the passage as Scripture; this alone proves that what can be reconstructed from patristic quotations does not match perfectly with “all other manuscript sources.”  A brief investigation of practically any major patristic writers – Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil of Jerusalem, Chrysostom – will show that their quotations do not match perfectly with each other, let alone with “all other manuscript sources.”  MacArthur’s claim about this is preposterous, and the staff of Grace To You should be ashamed to participate in the circulation of such nonsense. 

● MacArthur claimed that over 19 thousand quotations from the Gospels in patristic writings “read the Gospel text the very same way you read them in your Bible today.”  This is not just one absurdity, but a stack of absurdities, a tower of absurdities.  It is a statement which can only be made by an honest man if he has vigilantly avoided studying the materials about which he is speaking.  Anyone who picks up an ordinary UBS Greek New Testament and reads its textual apparatus with a modicum of understanding will see that there are hundreds of textual contests in which some patristic writers favor one reading, and other patristic writers favor a rival reading.  Grace to You should not expect to be trusted while it spreads claims that are refuted by a basic familiarity with the evidence.    

For more data,
watch my 26-minute video
John MacArthur and
the Ending of Mark. 

● MacArthur conveyed that the original text of the New Testament was “preserved and protected as it was passed down.”  Without testing this claim, I merely wish to raise a point:  considering that out of 1,670 Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark, only three end the text at 16:8, how can MacArthur say one minute that the original text has been preserved and protected as the text was passed down, and then say the next minute that 99.8% of the Greek manuscripts of Mark contain a “bad ending” that shouldn’t be there? 

● MacArthur explicitly appeals to the number of manuscripts as evidence of the preservation of the original text:  “we have so many accurate, consistent manuscripts that we know without hesitation that what we hold in our hands is an English translation of the original with no loss.”  By “many,” he cannot mean three.  But if he were to consult 99.8% of the Greek manuscripts of Mark (plus lectionaries, in which Mark 16:9-20 is routinely found), he would find the passage that he rejects!  The moment one posits that the text of the vast majority of manuscripts is the text that should be accepted without hesitation, one surrenders any objection against Mark 16:9-20.

● MacArthur claimed that the oldest manuscript we have of Homer’s Iliad is from the thirteenth century A.D.:  “We don’t have anything between the thirteenth century and the eighth century B.C. of Homer’s Iliad.”  That is false,  Over two dozen fragments of the Iliad exist which were produced before the thirteenth century A.D.  Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 560, from the 200’s, is just one example.

● MacArthur claimed that Irenaeus, a prominent Christian writer in the 100s, was aware of “other endings starting to float around.”  This too is false.  In real life, Irenaeus – writing well over a century before Codex Vaticanus was made – clearly quoted Mark 16:19, stating that he was quoting from near the end of Mark’s Gospel-account.  This shows that as far as Irenaeus’ manuscripts of Mark were concerned (and Irenaeus had been in Asia Minor, and southern Gaul, and Rome), the Gospel of Mark ended with verses 9-20.  Contrary to MacArthur’s claim, the only way in which the Gospel of Mark ended, as far as we can tell from Irenaeus’ testimony, is with verses 9-20 included.  Irenaeus does not express an awareness of the existence of manuscripts of Mark that end at the end of verse 8.  Irenaeus does not indicate in any way that he is aware of manuscripts of Mark that end with the “Shorter Ending.”  MacArthur’s statement about Irenaeus is 100% fictitious and 100% misleading. 

● MacArthur claims that two other second-century writers – Justin Martyr and Tatian – also “show knowledge of other endings.”  This too is false.  The only ending of Mark attested in any way by Justin Martyr and Tatian is the ending that consists of verses 9-20.   

For even more data,
read my book Authentic:
The Case for Mark 16:9-20.

● MacArthur claims that several endings were composed by people who tried “to help Mark a little bit with his abrupt ending.”  However this too is false; exactly one alternative ending, the Shorter Ending, was created in Egypt, where the text had formerly circulated with no words after the end of verse 8.  Except for the Shorter Ending – which stands alone after (most of) Mark 16:8 in exactly one Latin manuscript, and which appears along with verses 9-20 (or at least verse 9; incidental damage having affected the rest) in six Greek manuscripts (sometimes in the margin, sometimes with notes – see my book for details) – there are no endings of Mark after 16:8 that do not involve the presence of verses 9-20.  When Grace To You spreads the claim that “several endings” were floating around, as if referring to several independent compositions, Grace To You misleads people.

    

            And where are the faculty members of The Masters Seminary on this subject?  Where are the staff-members of Grace To You?  Or the officers of Grace Community Church?  These trusted men are entirely silent as far as I can tell – either too scared, too apathetic, too distracted, or too misinformed to adequately address the wild inaccuracies that are being spread daily by their school’s founder.      

            Grace To You, you have one proper course of action:  take down the video in which John MacArthur makes these false claims.  This is not about debatable points of theology; this is not even about whether or not Mark 16:9-20 belongs in the text.  It is about whether Grace To You’s leadership and staff want to spread false statements, or not.    

            Any teacher who aspires to inform listeners, rather than misinform them, would be happy to improve his work by removing false claims.  If Dr. MacArthur and Grace To You do not stop spreading these claims, having been informed that the claims are false, the only conclusion that can reasonably be drawn is that these men continue to spread false claims because they have decided to do so.  I do not mean for this to be construed as an accusation but rather as an invitation:  please show me, Dr. MacArthur and Grace To You, that you do not want to continue to spread false claims.

Defending Inerrancy and Mark 16:9-20 -- Aren't You Glad They're Not Lying?

Today, let’s look briefly at claims made by Dr. Norman Geisler about Mark 16:9-20.  This shows the contents of part of the Defending Inerrancy website, accompanied by my comments.  (And although the inaccuracies that are being spread by Dr. Geisler and the Defending Inerrancy website are pretty bad, the ones spread by John MacArthur are even worse.  And don’t even get me started about the Credo Courses from Dallas Theological Seminary professors.)

Codex Regius (019) - The Manuscript-King of France

The first page of Mark
in Codex L.

          Many of the manuscripts currently in the National Library of France – the Bibliothèque nationale de France – were once part of the royal library.  It is for this reason that Codex L (019), a Gospels-manuscript from the 700’s, is known as Codex Regius – the royal book.  A strong case can be made that Codex L is the most important New Testament manuscript in France.  Its text and its history are both highly interesting.

          Although it is sometimes claimed that the scholars of the 1500’s only had access to relatively young and unimportant manuscripts, that is not the case.  Codex L is a very important manuscript of venerable age, and its readings were cited by Stephanus in the notes of his 1551 Greek New Testament; it was identified as witness ηʹ, that is, #8.  This manuscript has long been recognized by the compilers of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece as a member of the elite group of “Consistently cited witnesses of the first order” for all four Gospels – one of only eight uncial manuscripts that share this status.  Its uncial text is written in two columns per page, with many initials decorated in red, green, and blue.    

          In the Gospel of Matthew, L’s text initially looks like nothing very unusual; for the first 17 chapters, it is essentially Byzantine.  Around Matthew 17:26, however, its character abruptly becomes Alexandrian, as if, somewhere in its ancestry, a copyist began to conform an Alexandrian manuscript to the text of a Byzantine exemplar, but gave up at this point.  This makes its agreements with the Byzantine Text in the remaining portion of the text (agreements such as the inclusion of Luke 22:43-44 and John 5:4) all the more weighty.  (For more information see Robert Waltz’s description of the codex at the newly updated Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism.)  

The Alexandrian
addition in Matthew 27:49.

          Codex L features a distinctly Alexandrian reading at Matthew 27:49 that states that Jesus was pierced with a spear before He died.  This reading, also supported by Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, has been consistently ignored by the annotators of most modern English translations, even though it has far more Greek support than the famous abrupt ending of Mark.  In the ESV and CSB, there is no mention of this variant.  It is no wonder that so many evangelicals consider it is a good idea to prefer the Alexandrian Text over the Byzantine Text, and regard Vaticanus and Sinaiticus as superior manuscripts, when they are kept in the dark about errant passages such as this one embedded in the Alexandrian Text.             Codex L also agrees with À and B by lacking the story about the adulteress after John 7:52.  However, there is more to the picture:  after John 7:52, the copyists of Codex L left “memorial space” in the manuscript, signifying that although their master-copy did not contain the absent passage, the copyists recollected its presence in another manuscript, or in other manuscripts.  (Someone later drew a doodle in part of the blank space.)
          Codex L represents two opposite testimonies regarding John 7:53-8:11 – on one hand, its main exemplar apparently did not have these verses; on the other hand, the copyists clearly knew the passage and wanted future readers to know that they knew.  (Alas; we cannot know whether or not Codex L contained the pericope adulterae at the end of the Gospel of John.  Codex L’s last extant page ends in John 21:15.)

The blank space in Codex L
between John 7:52 and 8:12.

          Codex L’s most famous feature involves the ending of the Gospel of Mark.  Codex L’s scribes inserted a row of “>” marks below the first column of a page, where Mark 16:8 ends (with the letters το γαρ on the final line, which happens to be a feature shared by À and B).  At the top of the next column, a framed note says, Φερετε που και ταυτα, that is, accounting for an itacism in the first word, “Some have this too.”  This is followed by the paragraph known as the Shorter Ending.  Here is the exact text of the Shorter Ending as it appears in Codex L, line by line:

Πάντα δὲ τα παρη / γγελμενα τοῖς / περι τον πετρον / συντομως ἐξη /
γγιλαν – Μετα / δὲ ταῦτα καὶ αὐτος / ο ΙΣ, ἀπο ἀνατολης / και ἀχρι δυσεως / ἐξαπεστιλεν δι / ἀυτων το ϊερον / καὶ ἀφθαρτον κη / ρυγμα – της αἰω / 

νιου σωτηριας – .

After Mark 16:8, the Shorter
Ending appears,
preceded and followed
by notes, followed by 16:9.

          Unlike the text of the Shorter Ending found in Codex Ψ (which includes the word εφανε – appeared –  after Jesus’ name), the fragment 099, some Sahidic manuscripts, Bohairic MS Huntington 18, and the Ethiopic version (which support εφανε αυτοις – appeared to them), Codex L does not specify that Jesus appeared to the apostles.  In this respect, although Codex L, as a manuscript, is centuries younger than the fifth-century Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis (which has the reading adparuit, i.e., apparuit – appeared), the text of the Shorter Ending in Codex L appears to echo an earlier stage of the Shorter Ending’s existence.

          After the Shorter Ending, a framed note in Codex L says, εστην δε και ταυτα φερομενα μετα το εφοβουντο γαρ – that is, “There is also this, appearing after efobounto gar.”  After this, the first part of verse 9 begins, filling the last two lines of the column; the first line is written in red, with a large initial “A” colored with red and green.  The next two pages contain Mark 16:9b-20, with distinctive variants which confirm what the notes already show:  not only does Codex L display a distinctly Egyptian treatment of the ending of Mark, but the text of verses 9-20 here is in a distinctly Egyptian form, with readings that set it apart from the other text-types. 

         Here are some non-Byzantine readings in Mark 16:9-20 in Codex L:

9 – L reads παρ’; Byz reads ἀφ’.

11 – L reads Εκεινοι; Byz reads Κἀκεινοι.

14 – L omits αυτοις (probably a simple parableptic error); Byz reads αυτοις.

16 – L adds ο before βαπτισθεις; Byz does not.

17 – L reads ακολουθησει ταυτα; Byz reads ταυτα παρακολουθήσει.

17 – L omits καιναις; Byz reads καιναις.

18 – L reads και εν ταις χερσιν; Byz does not.

18 – L reads ἀρωστους; Byz reads ἀρρώστους.

19 – L omits ουν; Byz reads ουν.

19 – L reads ΚΣ ΙΣ (i.e., Lord Jesus); Byz reads Κύριος (i.e., Lord).

Mark 16:9b-17a

          Inasmuch as these readings were not derived from the Byzantine text of verses 9-20, the implication is that they attest to a local form of the text in Egypt.  And inasmuch as the text of the Shorter Ending in Codex L precedes the form attested by Codex Bobiensis (from the early 400’s), we are probably looking at an Egyptian text from the late 300’s on any given page of Mark, Luke, and John in Codex L.  Although, as a manuscript, Codex L is a few centuries later than Codex Sinaiticus, in terms of their texts, Codex L’s text, in general, is only a few decades later than Codex Sinaiticus, where Codex L is free of scribal errors that originated with its copyist.  Codex Regius is truly worthy of royal status among Greek manuscripts of the Gospels.

          Here are some additional details about this manuscript which may come in handy for those who wish to study it further.  (Digital page-views can be accessed at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, and the images of Codex L there have all been conveniently indexed.  A PDF of the manuscript can also be downloaded from the BnF website.)  It is missing a few pages, which contained Matthew 4:22-5:14, Matthew 28:17-20, Mark 10:16-20, Mark 15:2-20, and John 21:15b-25.  Also, some of its pages are bound out of order, so when you look through the digital images, the pages containing John 5:29b-7:34a appear in Matthew, after Matthew 14:8a (and before Matthew 18:10b), and the pages containing Matthew 14:8b-18:10a appear in John, after John 5:29a (and before John 7:34b). 

Mark 16:17b-20,
the subscription,
and the beginning of
the chapter-list
for Luke.

          Codex L has some interesting meta-textual (or para-textual) features, too.  Chapter-lists precede Matthew, Mark (incomplete, due to the loss of a leaf), and Luke, but not John.  The numerals for the Eusebian Sections and Canons appear in the margins, but they contain lots of mistakes, as if the person who added them was not quite sure what he was doing.  The manuscript also contains αρχη (start) and τελος (stop) symbols to signify the beginnings and ends of lections.  Red crosses accompany some lections that were particularly important.  A foot-index (similar, in concept, to individual lines of a line-by-line canon-table) comes and goes.  And, in the upper margins, most of the chapter-titles have survived, written in red.  The scribe frequently added embellishments to capital letters at the beginnings of sections, especially alpha, epsilon, kappa, omicron, and tau.  In a few places, the middle bar of the large initial epsilon is transformed into a forearm; the large initial at the beginning of Luke is a good example of this.

          Finally, one more feature of Codex L may be mentioned:  its division of the text into sentences.  Although Codex L is by no means unique, the correspondence between its sentence-divisions, and our modern verse-divisions, is rather impressive.  On page after page, they square up remarkably well.  It is tempting to think that when Stephanus established our modern-day verse-divisions in the 1550's, it was after a careful consultation of the sentence-divisions in this manuscript at Paris.