Papyrus Support for Mark 16:9-20

Some Coptic text from the papyrus
manuscript of Acts of Pilate at Turin.
Red = damaged text.
Yellow = use of Mark 16:15-18.

          That headline is technically correct, but there is more to the story.  Similarly, when you read the Gospel of Mark and encounter headings and footnotes at 16:8 that say, “The most reliable early manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark end at verse 8” (NLT) or,  “The earliest manuscripts and some other ancient witnesses do not have verses 9–20,” a closer look at the evidence may yield a very different impression than what one might initially receive, particularly when one notices that there are only two early Greek manuscripts of Mark in which the text ends at 16:8, and that both of those manuscripts from the 300’s (Vaticanus and Sinaiticus) have unusual features at the end of Mark, and that there is significantly earlier support for Mark 16:9-20, unmentioned by the footnote-writers.  

          But if you’ve read my book, Authentic:  The Case for Mark 16:9-20, you already know that.  Let’s look at something new:  papyrus support for Mark 16:9-20!  The papyrus in question is a manuscript of a composition called the Acts of Pilate (or Gesta Pilati), also called the Gospel of Nicodemus.  Though little-known nowadays, the Acts of Pilate was widely circulated in medieval times, often in an expanded form that featured an account of the “Harrowing of Hell.”  

          It is precarious to assign production-dates for such stratified texts.  At least three points involving patristic testimony should be considered:

          ● Justin Martyr, writing in his First Apology chapter 35, around 160, stated that a record of the events involved in Christ’s trials and crucifixion could be confirmed by consulting the Acts of Pontius Pilate, but Justin gives no further details and so it is impossible to determine from such a statement that Justin was referring to this particular composition, or if he was referring to another text, or if he simply assumed that the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius (to whom Justin’s First Apology was addressed) would have access to archives that contained Pilate’s annual reports. 

          ● Eusebius of Caesarea (in Book 9, chapters 4-5 of Ecclesiastical History, around 320) mentioned that an anti-Christian book called the Acts of Pilate had been concocted and circulated by agents of Emperor Maximinus as part of his persecution efforts, but Eusebius does not mention any similarly titled texts written from a pro-Christian perspective. 

          ● Epiphanius of Salamis (around 375), in Panarion, (under heading IV, part 50, on the Quartodecimans), commented that some persons had found, in their copies of the Acts of Pilate, a reference to the eighth day before the calends of April as the precise day on which Christ was crucified.  Epiphanius also stated that he had seen copies of the Acts of Pilate in which the date of Christ’s crucifixion was given as the fifteenth day before the calends of April.  In the opening chapter of the extant text of Acts of Pilate, there is a reference to the date of Christ’s crucifixion as the eighth day of the calends of April, in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius (or, in some copies, the nineteenth year); so it would seem from this that by the time Epiphanius wrote, the earliest form of Acts of Pilate had been already been written and had been in circulation long enough to undergo some corruption where its numerals were concerned.

Codex Einsidlensis 326, 18v,
with a utilization of Mark 16:15-16.

          In 1973, H. C. Kim produced an edition of the Gospel of Nicodemus based mainly on the text as found in a Latin manuscript from the 900’s, Codex Einsidlensis (or Einsiedeln).  On page 18v of the manuscript, an excerpt from the fourteenth chapter runs as follows:

“Now a certain priest named Phinees, and Addas a teacher, and a Levite named Haggaeus came down from Galilee to Jerusalem, and told the chief priests and all the synagogue-rulers, ‘We saw Jesus who was crucified, speaking with his eleven disciples, and sitting in their midst upon the Mount of Olives, and he said to them, “Go into all the world; preach to all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he who believes and is baptized shall be saved.  And as he was saying these things to his disciples, we saw him ascend up into heaven.” 

          We now turn to the papyrus manuscript, which is housed in Turin, Italy, at the Egyptian Museum, where it is catalogued as item 129/18.  This papyrus manuscript was produced in or near the 700’s.  It was probably once housed in Thinis, Egypt.  (This location is named in a note in another manuscript which was taken to Italy around 1820 along with the manuscript that is in view here.) 

          It, too, contains the Acts of Pilate in its early form.  However, the text in this manuscript is in Coptic, rather than Latin.  Its Coptic text was published in Patrologia Orientalis, Volume 9 (1913) by Eugene Revillout, who also provided a French translation of it.  Its text had previously been published by Francesco Rossi in 1883, and had been studied by Amedeo Peyron, whose research-work was used by Tischendorf.   

          Compared to the excerpt from Codex Einsidlensis, the Coptic text in the Turin papyrus at this point is somewhat different:  instead of blending Matthew 28:19 with Mark 16:15-16, it presents Mark 16:15-18, as follows (I have relied upon the recently released English translation by Anthony Alcock, whose work I have somewhat adjusted) –

“One of the priests named Phineas, and Addas the teacher, and Ogias the Levite came from Jerusalem and said to the synagogue leaders and the people of the Jews, ‘We have seen Jesus and His eleven disciples sitting on the mount called Mambrech and saying to them, “Go into the world and preach to the entire creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved. He who does not believe will be judged in the Judgment. You, my disciples, will cast out demons from those who are afflicted by them. You will speak in another new language. You will take poisonous serpents in your hands and they will do nothing to you. You will be given deadly lethal potions, and nothing will be able to harm you. You will lay your hands on the sick and they will be healed. Everything that you ask in my name will be granted to you.” We heard Jesus saying these things. Then He ascended to heaven in great indescribable glory.’”

An account of the "Harrowing of Hell," pictured here
in the Beaupre Antiphonary (from 1290), was part of a
secondary portion of the Acts of Pilate (or, Gospel of
Nicodemus) which was very widely circulated
in the Middle Ages.

          The Latin text probably preceded the Coptic text, for the most part.  Without delving into a detailed comparison, it looks like the initial author used and condensed material from the fifty-fifth chapter of the Diatessaron, and his work is reflected in the Latin text; a revisor replaced the Diatessaron-text with a block of text from Mark 16 (and a flourish based on John 13:14).  There is not much way to tell if this happened in Latin, or exclusively in the Coptic text; however, the reference to taking up serpents “in your hands” in the Coptic text of Acts of Pilate suggests that this particular detail, at least, was introduced by a revisor who possessed a text of Mark 16:18 that contained the phrase about serpents being taken “in their hands”).        

          If the Latin text of Acts of Pilate utilized the Diatessaron at this point, then here we have yet another piece of evidence that Tatian, around 172, used a text of Mark that contained 16:9-20.  If not, then the author of Acts of Pilate is a witness for Mark 16:9-20 (for when part of the section is used, it implies awareness of the whole section, as when part of a skeleton is excavated; the existence of the rest of the body is deduced) from the mid-300’s, contemporary with the copyists of Codex Sinaiticus, and the papyrus manuscript at Turin is an additional witness for the Coptic text of Mark 16:15-18. 

Early Latin Evidence for John 7:53-8:11

          Many commentators reject John 7:53-8:11, echoing Bruce Metzger’s well-known comments.  The NET, for example, states that this passage (the passage about the adulteress, also called the pericope adulterae) “is not contained in the earliest and best MSS and was almost certainly not an original part of the Gospel of John.”  Yet all major English Bible translations include it.  It may seem difficult to account for this friction as a result of any factors other than ecumenical or financial priorities, but there is another consideration:  recognition of the possibility that the vast consensus of commentators are wrong, and that the 1,495 Greek manuscripts which contain the passage are right. 

          But in that case, how does one account for the early manuscripts which do not have these 12 verses between John 7:52 and 8:12?  My basic answer is that very early in church history, John 7:37-52 was read in some churches as the annual Scripture-passage for Pentecost-day, and that 8:12 was used as the conclusion of the reading, skipping the 12 verses in between.  A lector marked his manuscript to signify that those 12 verses were to be skipped during the Pentecost-reading – but when his manuscript was later used as an exemplar, the copyist misunderstood the marks as if they meant that he, the copyist, was to skip those 12 verses, and that is what he dutifully did, and thus they disappeared in all subsequent copies descended from manuscripts of John made by that particular copyist.       

          Another possibility is that instead of merely skipping the passage, a copyist simplified the Pentecost-lection by transplanting these 12 verses to the end of the Gospel of John – where indeed the passage is found in the best representatives of the Caesarean text of the Gospels (minuscules 1 and 1582 among others).  (Via this step, the Pentecost-lection became one uninterrupted block of text.)  Although these manuscripts are medieval, their line of descent is traceable to an ancestor-manuscript made in the late 400’s, the text of which has some affinities with a form of text used by Origen in the 200’s.  (For instance, Origen mentioned that he had manuscripts which called Barabbas “Jesus” in Matthew 27:16-17, and this rare reading tends to be supported by the leading members of this group of manuscripts.)

          If, in earlier manuscripts, John 7:53-8:11 was transplanted to the end of the book, we would have no way to know it from the earliest Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John.  Due to damage, the text of Papyrus 66 cannot be confidently reconstructed after 21:17.  Papyrus 75 is in even worse shape; incidental damage has caused its extant text of John to end in 15:10.  Due to damage, the Lycopolitan Codex of John (an early Coptic manuscript) has no more text after 20:27.  Codex N, too, is damaged, and its last extant text of John is in 21:21, leaving it an open question if anything followed after 21:25.  As for Codex L and Codex Δ, their copyists testified to the presence, as well as to the absence, of the passage, as I have shown previously. 

          These six Greek manuscripts – P66, P75, N, L, and Δ – constitute five of the first ten Greek manuscripts that are typically listed as evidence against John 7:53-8:11; however, on the question of whether or not they retained the passage after John 21:25, they appear to be silent.  Similarly, we cannot discern with certainty that the blank spaces after the end of John in Codex Sinaiticus, Codex A, and Codex W are merely examples of filler-space, or of space reserved for the pericope adulterae by copyists whose exemplars lacked the passage but who revertheless recollected it. 

          But I want to give you more today than just a reminder of the tentative and incomplete nature of the testimony of most of the major Greek uncials which are often described or listed by commentators as if they speak uniformly and without qualification against the inclusion of the pericope adulterae.  Regarding the often-asked question about why the account appears in different locations within John 7-8, and even at the end of Luke 21, I will simply refer you to my book, A Fresh Analysis of John 7:53-8:11, so that we may focus today on something else which I am confident you will find interesting.

          It is not unusual to find, in ancient Gospels-manuscripts, book-divisions, often marked by chapter-numbers, chapter-titles, and sometimes brief chapter-summaries.  (These divisions are different than the Eusebian Canons and Sections, which I have described elsewhere.)  Latin copies contain a variety of chapter-lists, or capitula, and chapter-summaries, or breves.  (The terms are practically interchangeable.)  One of the earliest examples of Latin capitula is in Codex Fuldensis (produced c. 546), in which the Vulgate Gospels-text was formatted to correspond to an exemplar which bishop Victor of Capua thought might have been a Latin version of the Diatessaron made by Tatian around 172.  The chapter-numbers and list from Victor’s lost exemplar were preserved in Codex Fuldensis – and they include a chapter-summary which covers the pericope adulterae – #120:  “De muliere a Iudaeis in adulterio deprehensa.”

          As old as Codex Fuldensis is – and its exemplar must have been older yet – another form of Latin chapter-summaries is assigned to the 200’s – the Cy form, so-called to signify that it was created by a contemporary of Cyprian.  This is one of several forms of Latin chapter-summaries which were collected in 1914 by a researcher named Donatien De Bruyne.  His book, Sommaires, Divisions et Rubriques de la Bible Latine, written in French, is helpfully available online at the Gallica website as a free download.  When one turns to page 320, one can find the relevant chapter-summary, #30, that is, in Roman numerals, XXX: 

“Ubi adulteram dimisit et se dixit lumen saeculi et de testimonio suo et patris; ibi ait :  si me nossetis, et patrem meum nossetis, loquens in gazofilatio et quod non eum inuenientes in peccatis suis morituri essent, et quod illi essent de isto saeculo, ipse non esset et quod quaerentibus quis esset respondit : initium, et de patre locutus est non cognoscentibus quia cum illo est qui eum misit.” 

Click here to see the full-color page-view of this chapter-summary.

          As far as the pericope adulterae is concerned, the opening words of this chapter-summary are very significant, because they refer to the dismissal of the adulteress before summarizing the other contents in the thirtieth portion of John.  The beginning of this chapter-summary runs something like this in English:  “Wherein he dismissed the adulteress, and said that he was the light of the world, and described his testimony and the testimony borne by his Father.  He said, If you knew me, you would have known my Father also.  And he was saying in the temple-treasury that those who did not find him would die in their sins, and that they were of this world, but he was not.”
          The Cy form of the chapter-summaries, though initially created to accompany an ancient Old Latin text, has survived – barely – by being grafted onto a standard Latin text.  The Cy chapter-summaries are extant primarily in only two known manuscripts:  Vatican Barberini 637, and Munich BSB Clm. 6212.  (They are partly preserved in the British Library in Harley 1775.)  

          Happily, digital images of both of these two manuscripts are accessible online.  The Vatican’s page-views are under strict copyright, but once you arrive at the Vatican Library’s website, it is easy to find Barberini 627, and to turn to page 99r, looking for chapter-summary #30 in the left column of the page.  Similarly, to view the full-color page-view of the same chapter-summary at the top of page 131v of the other manuscript, visit this embedded link.  Hugh Houghton has noted that the Munich manuscript was thought by McGurk, who studied it, to have been copied from a much earlier exemplar produced in the 500’s.  

          You may be asking, why is this form of Latin chapter-divisions, extant in just two manuscripts from the 800’s and 900’s, associated with Cyprian?  Basically this is a conclusion drawn from cumulative evidence in the form of special repeated points of correspondence between the text that is used in the chapter-summaries (especially where rare terms are used, and when quotations are included) and Cyprian’s Gospels-quotations.  Hugh Houghton, in a 2011 article in Revue Benedictine, noted that the text embedded in this form of chapter-summaries has affinities “to the citations of both Cyprian and Tertullian.”    

          As Hugh Houghton has reported, De Bruyne also noted the antiquity of the chapter-summaries known as Type I; Houghton has placed this form in the 300’s.  In John, Type I’s chapter-summary #16 says, “Adducunt ad eum mulierem ‘in adulterio deprehensam,’ and in one form of this chapter-summary, found in six manuscripts, the text continues, “in moechatione ut eam iudicaret.”    The form of the chapter-summaries which De Bruyne lists as Type D also has these words, followed by “quod nemo miserit super illam manus.”  (See page 264 of his book.)  An interesting feature of this particular chapter-summary is that it contains the loan-word moechatione, suggesting that this chapter-summary was based on an Old Latin text which someone had translated from Greek rather literally, at least at this point.

          Type I of the chapter-summaries tends to accompany a distinct form of the Old Latin text which is basically a form of the Gospels-text which was used by Ambrose of Milan in the 370’s-390’s.  According to Houghton, this was also, in general, the form of the Latin text used by Zeno of Verona (c. 300-371).  

          So, to sum up:  various forms of Old Latin chapter-summaries, the earliest of which has been deduced via the detection of shared readings to have been based on a form of the Latin text of the Gospels used by, or at approximately the same time as, Cyprian in the 200’s, are a cluster of significant witnesses for the pericope adulterae.   To those who may want to locate where the pericope adulterae is summarized in the forms of chapter-summaries of the Gospel of John which are presented by De Bruyne, here they are:

A:  (none)

B:  (none; this is a shorter form of Type A.)

B^r:  VII:  Iesus supra mare ambulat . . . . [and after several sentences] De muliere adultera.  Iesus lumen mundi se esse non credentibus Iudaeis in gazophilacio docens praedicat.

Ben:  XXI:  De muliere in adulterio deprehensa.

C:  XX:  Mulierem in adulterio deprehensam atque ad se adductam nec ab accusatoribus condemnatam ipse sub condicione qua ulterius non peccaret absoluit.

D:  XVIII:  De muliere in adulterio depraehensa. [in moechatione u team iudicaret, quod nemo miserit super illam manus].  

I:  XVI:  Adducunt ad eum mulierem in adulterio deprehensam.  (See above for expanded form.)

W:  XVI:  De muliere in adulterio deprehensa.

Cat:  XVI:  Adducunt ad Iesum mulierem deprehensam [in adulterio], et ego sum lux mundi, et uos secundum carnem iudicatis, et neque me scitis neque patrem meum, et si non credideritis quia ego sum moriemini.        

I^for:  (none) 

Pⁱ:  XVI:  De muliere in adulterio deprehensa.       

Cy:  XXX:  Ubi adulteram dimisit et se dixit lumen saeculi . . .  (See above)

In:  No mention of the adulteress, but XVI:  Iesus autem ascendit in montem Oliueti.

Vich:  VII:  (at the end of the summary) Mulierem adulteram liberans lucem mundi se dicit.

Z:  XVIII:  De muliere in adulterio deprehensa.

  

          The pericope adulterae is not supported by forms A and B (which are the same in John), or by form I^for; however, even this is conceivably an effect of the conciseness of these summaries rather than evidence that the passage was absent in the texts accompanied by the chapter-summaries.  In any event, we have here twelve witnesses (much more, of course, if we were to count each manuscript individually instead of the chapter-lists themselves, but less if we were to group together four similar forms) for the inclusion of the pericope adulterae.  

          Furthermore, none of them show any signs of deviation regarding the sequence in which the episode occurs in the text of the Gospel of John.  This is quite strong evidence that the passage was in its usual location following John 7:52 before it was moved to the back of the book.  This should motivate those who treat the pericope adulterae’s dislocations as anything other than the effects of lection-cycles and special formatting of the Pentecost-lection to reconsider their position.  In addition, claims that convey that no early versions included John 7:53-8:11 should be withdrawn.

New Coptic Evidence for Mark 16:15-18

          If you’ve already carefully read Authentic:  The Case for Mark 16:9-20, then you may recall that in the list of patristic witnesses supporting the passage, there was one called The Enthronement of the Archangel Michael.  Even though this short book was composed before the year 600 – and is thus older than several other witnesses which are routinely cited when the subject of the ending of Mark is addressed – it is not mentioned in the lists of witnesses in the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, nor in the Nestle-Aland compilation, nor in the notes in the New English Translation.  Bart Ehrman does not mention it in his descriptions of the evidence pertaining to the ending of Mark; nor did Bruce Metzger, his mentor, who authored the influential (but obsolete) A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament.         

A page from a manuscript of
The Investiture of the Archangel Michael

          The tendency to ignore The Enthronement (also called the Investiture, or Institution) of the Archangel Michael – a tendency exhibited by almost all English-writing commentators on the Gospel of Mark – may now be remedied by the availability of an English translation by Anthony Alcock of the Sahidic text of this composition.  As Alin Suciu recently noted at his blog, The Investiture of the Archangel Michael was translated into several languages and dialects in ancient times but it was probably composed in an Egyptian language.       

          This implies that sometime before bishop John of Parallos (c. 540-620) wrote his criticism of heretical books, including objections against The Investiture of the Archangel Michael, someone in Egypt borrowed verbiage from Mark 16:15-18 when constructing the closing narrative of this text – and this implies, in turn, that at that time, copies of Mark were circulating in Egypt that contained verses 9-20 of chapter 16. 

          Because the composition-date for The Investiture of the Archangel Michael is centuries earlier than the production-dates of Armenian and Old Georgian manuscripts that are often mentioned by commentators as witnesses against the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20, The Investiture of the Archangel Michael should be mentioned in any future commentaries’ discussion of the ending of Mark that mention those versional copies, lest the authors risk being accused of cherry-picking the evidence deliberately as so many of their predecessors have done accidentally.   

          The author of The Investiture of the Archangel Michael covered a variety of topics, ranging from the rebellion of Satan (the story in this text resembles one that was known to Muhammad, and which is echoed in the Quran in surah 7:11-18) and the promotion of Michael to take Satan’s place, to the benefits of acts of piety done in the name of Jesus and Saint Michael, especially when they are done on the annual feast-day of the archangel Michael (the 12th of Hathor in the Coptic calendar).  Along the way, the author utilized Matthew 26:29, Acts 3:6 (with the variant “rise and walk”), and Matthew 13:16, as well as the Gospels’ narratives about the death of John the Baptist.  And in the 20th chapter, the author makes extensive use of Mark 16:15-18, depicting Jesus telling His apostles the following:

Another manuscript
of the Investiture text.
See the Morgan Library's website
for the full-color image.

“Now then, my disciples, go forth into the world and preach the four gospels and the sweet teaching that I told you when I was teaching. . . . . Everything you eat, pray over it first, because everything is purified by prayer.  Everything you embark on, pray first before you do it and preach the gospel to all creation.  The one who believes and receives baptism will not be slighted.  These signs will be revealed to those who believe.  They will cast out demons in my name.  They will speak other languages.  They will seize serpents in their hands.  Even if they drink poison, it will do them no harm.  They will place their hands on the sick, who will be healed.” 

          A clearer utilization of Mark 16:15-18 could hardly be asked for.  It should be noted that the text which the author used included the variant “in their hands,” showing that his text of Mark likewise contained this phrase at the beginning of Mark 16:18.  This little detail suggests that the author was using a form of the text of Mark that was indigenous (because this reading tends to be found in the Alexandrian form of Mark 16:18), not something newly arrived from a locale where the Byzantine Text was in use (because the Byzantine Text does not have “And in their hands” in Mark 16:18).

          Anthony Alcock is to be thanked for this new English translation of The Investiture of the Archangel Michael.  May the news of its existence be shared with, and by, future commentators!

  

Defend Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11 This Christmas

          Are you looking for a Christmas present for someone who rejects, or is unsure about, Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11?  Do you know a preacher, seminary professor, student, or apologist who would enjoy spending a winter evening delving into detailed research involving manuscripts, patristic testimony, and internal evidence pertaining to the two most significant textual variants in the New Testament?

          If so, this Christmas may be the perfect time to provide your friends with resources to help them become thoroughly informed about these two passages.  A Fresh Analysis of John 7:53-8:11: With a Tour of the External Evidence is on sale now at Amazon – available as a Kindle e-book – for 99 cents.  The 2015 edition of Authentic: The Case for Mark 16:9-20 is also on sale for 99 cents.  Previews of both books can be read at the Amazon website.  

          In A Fresh Analysis of John 7:53-8:11, I advocate the theory that in the early church, a specific passage was selected to be read annually on Pentecost, consisting of John 7:39-52, with John 8:12 attached to give the passage a positive concluding flourish, and the intervening verses (7:53-8:11) were skipped because they were considered thematically alien to the celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit to the church.  As a result, in a very early copy that was used in church-services by a lector (Scripture-reader), marks or notes were put in the margin, instructing the lector to skip from the end of John 7:52 to the beginning of John 8:12. This manuscript was then used by a copyist who was unfamiliar with the annual use of the text at Pentecost, and he interpreted the marks to mean that he, the copyist, should skip from the end of 7:52 to the beginning of 8:12, and that is exactly what he did, and thus the passage was lost in an influential transmission-line.  A substantial appendix at the end of A Fresh Analysis of John 7:53-8:11 describes major and minor witnesses for, and against, the passage.

          Here is a summary of the Table of Contents of A Fresh Analysis of John 7:53-8:11 –

PREFACE

EXTERNAL EVIDENCE:  

(1) Early Greek Manuscripts                                     

(2) Early Versions 

(3) Lectionaries                                                         

(4) Writings of the Early Church 

(5) Marks that Accompany John 7:53-8:11 or 8:3-11 in Some Copies 

(6) Notes About John 7:53-8:11 in Some Copies     

(7) Variations in the Location of the Passage   

(8) Augustine’s Theory of Excision

INTERNAL EVIDENCE:  

(1) Vocabulary                                                           

(2) Linguistic Style 

(3) The High Number of Variants in the Pericope Adulterae 

(4) The Continuity of John’s Narrative With or Without the Pericope Adulterae

FIVE MISCELLANEOUS CONCERNS 

CONCLUSION

Appendix:  A Tour of the External Evidence

          In Authentic:  The Case for Mark 16:9-20, I advocate the theory that Mark was interrupted as he was writing Mark 16:8, and his colleagues finished the otherwise unfinished narrative by attaching a brief summary about Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances that Mark had already written. Only after the narrative was thus completed did people begin to make copies of the Gospel of Mark for church-use. Thus, Mark 16:9-20 should be regarded as inspired, authoritative, canonical Scripture, just as the last two chapters of Proverbs are regarded as inspired, authoritative, canonical Scripture even though they were not added by the main author of Proverbs.  Along the way I demonstrate that many claims that have been spread by commentators and various other writers (including some Bible-footnote-writers) about this passage and the evidence pertaining to it are incorrect.

          Here is a summary of the Table of Contents of Authentic: The Case for Mark 16:9-20:

PART ONE: EXTERNAL EVIDENCE:  

(1)  External Evidence from the 100’s 

(2)  External Evidence from the 200’s 

(3)  Chapter 3: External Evidence from the 300’s 

(4)  External Evidence from the 400’s 

(5)  Some External Evidence from the 500’s and Later 

(6)  External Evidence with the Double-Ending 

(7)  Lectionary Evidence 

(8) Phantom Evidence

PART TWO: INTERNAL EVIDENCE

(9)  “Ephobounto Gar”
(10)  The Vocabulary and Style of Mark 16:9-20
(11)  Evidence of the Independence of Mark 16:9-20

PART THREE: PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

(12)  Four Theories about How the Ending was Lost
(13)  Why Mark 16:9-20 Was Excised in Egypt
(14)  Closing Thoughts

APPENDICES
(1)  The End of Mark and the Synoptic Problem
(2)  A Response to Dan Wallace’s Chapter in Perspectives on the Ending of Mark

          Also available at Amazon as Kindle e-books, and also 99 cents, are The Letter of James – Translation, Commentary, and Greek Text, and Assorted Essays on New Testament Textual Criticism.  Assorted Essays (though marred by typographical errors and font-glitches where some non-English terms occur) supplies two of my own essays and eight notable public-domain resources; here is its Table of Contents:

(1)  Equitable Eclecticism: The Future of New Testament Textual Criticism by James Snapp, Jr. (2010)

(2)  The Common Origin of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus by J. Rendel Harris (1893)

(3)  Selections from The Criticism of the New Testament (1902 – The St. Margaret Lectures)

(4)  Two Lectures on the Gospels by F. C. Burkitt (1901)

(5)  A Defense of “in the Prophets” in Mark 1:2 by James Snapp, Jr. (2010)

(6)  Selections from The Palaeography of Greek Papyri by Frederic G. Kenyon (1899)

(7)  Some Thoughts on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament by George Salmon (1897)

(8)  The Freer Gospels and Shenute of Atripe by Edgar Goodspeed (1909) 

(9)  Selections from Praxis in Manuscripts of the Greek Testament by Charles Sitterly (1898)

(10)  The 1897 Oxford Debate on N.T. Textual Criticism, in American English.

My response to Reza Aslan’s book Zealot is also available as an e-book, for $1.50 – Jesus: Zealous Savior of the World.

James White and the Ecclesiastical Text - Part 2

          Today I am briefly wrapping up my consideration of James White’s recently expressed objections against the Ecclesiastical Text advocates’ approach to the text of the New Testament.  Among the most prominent of his objections in the second half of his video-lecture is the objection that the Ecclesiastical Text contains Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11, and one of those two passages [39:17] “is not found in a manuscript prior to the fifth century.”  This objection has three (at least) problems:

          ● Heavy dependence upon early manuscripts contradicts the often-mentioned notion of an “embarrassment of riches” of New Testament manuscripts.  It involves the frequent rejection of the testimony of the vast majority of Greek manuscripts in favor of the testimony of only about a dozen Greek manuscripts (or less, depending on which passage is being addressed).   

          ● Heavy dependence upon early manuscripts sets the stage for a probability-based objection against the integrity of the text.  Suppose that we possessed a manuscript of chapters 1-10 of the Gospel of John that was produced in the 100’s.  If we gave this manuscript special weight due to its age, and reckoned that it contains ten unique readings that are original, then we could deduce that its non-extant pages probably also contained ten or eleven unique readings that were original.  And, if it is granted that there were ten (or 20 or 30) other manuscripts in the 100’s of equal importance which are no longer extant, then the loss of dozens and dozens of original readings may be extrapolated. 

          ● Heavy dependence upon early manuscripts unrealistically minimizes the input from ancient patristic sources, from versional sources, and from groups of manuscripts for which it is reasonable to assume an ancient line of descent.  In addition, because the early papyri have survived primarily due to the low-humidity climate of Egypt, heavy dependence upon early manuscripts effectively puts blinders on textual researchers, so that they focus on the text in Egypt, although there is no strong basis for the theory that the text in the manuscripts from Egypt in the 100’s-300’s was the same text being used in other locales.  

          When White referred to Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11, he was guilty of cherry-picking the evidence that he chose to mention to his listeners, but in the interest of brevity I will move along to the rest of his comments about the Ecclesiastical Text, or Confessional Text, position.  At one point, he quoted a statement that said, “the doctrine of Scripture is being attacked by unbelieving academia,” and responded by asking, “What is ‘unbelieving academia’?”.   

          It’s a fair question – but perhaps White should answer it concretely rather than rhetorically.  By White’s standard of orthodoxy, were Roger Omanson and Bruce Metzger believers?  What about Stephan Pisano and Carlo Martini?  And what about David Trobisch, who is presently listed as a member of the Nestle-Aland compilation-committee and as a member of the secularist Center For Inquiry?  If White feels as if some criticisms are aimed in his direction, perhaps he should consider who he is standing beside, and consider whose compilation-work it is that he is defending.       

          White would argue, I suspect, that if a compilation is indeed the original text of the New Testament, it doesn’t matter if the devil himself endorses it, because its authority is inherent.  What White seems to fail to see is that Confessionalists believe this, too (at least the ones with the best case for their position).  They just also believe (as adherents to the Westminster Confession) that God has not inspired a Greek text that means one thing, and let His church collectively use a Greek text that frequently means something different, that is, a text that was impure. 

          What White calls a “poisoning the well” tactic is a logical implication of the Confessionalists’ belief that the Greek text of the New Testament has been kept pure in every age, because if the Greek text used in the Reformation-era is pure, then a text that frequently means something different is not pure, and therefore is not the original text.  Granting that manuscripts attesting to the Reformation-era text of the New Testament are lacking from the 100’s and 200’s, that need only mean that such manuscripts from those centuries have not survived, which one would not expect any manuscripts to do outside Egypt in light of those regions’ higher humidity-levels (and other factors such as waves of Roman persecution).

          In the late 300’s, a text-form closely resembling the Confessional Text (not perfectly identical to it, but resembling it rather than the Alexandrian Text) was in use in multiple locales – which is just what one would expect if (a) the Ecclesiastical Text very closely resembles the original text, and (b) the New Testament manuscripts spread “all across the known world,” as White states that they did.  We would see a relatively uniform text in use in multiple locales.  Yet White habitually rejects readings in the New Testament text that have widespread attestation, in favor of readings attested primarily in the local text of Egypt.

          Finally, White asserted that the Confessional Text position renders it impossible to resolve text-critical questions.  This is simply untrue.  Confessionalists resolve text-critical questions; they just do so in a way that White apparently does not consider valid.  Confessionalists take it on faith that the Greek text used in the Reformation-era means what the text of the autographs meant.  The acceptance of this premise reduces the amount of meaningful variation in the manuscript-record exponentially, so as to remove readings that are distinctly Alexandrian, Western, or Caesarean from contention if they yield a meaning that diverges from the meaning of the Confessional Text.        

          While this leaves some unanswered questions where two or more rival variants convey the same meaning, such points of instability are also present in the Nestle-Aland compilation, so if White were to insist that this is a small weakness in the Confessional Text position, it must be acknowledged that it is a much larger weakness in his own position, which favors a compilation that, after 100 years, remains provisional and tentative.  For example, the compilers of NA28 rejected a variant in Second Peter 2:18 that previous NA-compilers had regarded as “certain,” and in Second Peter 3:10, the NA28-compilers adopted a variant that is not attested in any Greek manuscript.

          White’s advocacy of the Nestle-Aland compilation means that he runs the risk that the Greek compilation that he regards as the original text today will be changed in the future by David Trobisch & Company, and the edition published tomorrow will say something that today’s edition does not say.   The Confessionists run no such risk.  While their approach is thoroughly unscientific, it is not difficult to see its theological appeal.    

James White and the Ecclesiastical Text - Part 1

          Recently, apologist James White (of Alpha & Omega Ministries) made some comments about the Ecclesiastical Text approach to the text of the New Testament in a video-lecture.  In this post I offer a response.  First, however, it is important to know what the Ecclesiastical Text approach is, and to an extent, that means knowing what the Ecclesiastical Text approach is not:  it is not a text-critical technique.  The text recognized as authoritative by advocates of the Ecclesiastical Text approach is not established primarily via the analysis of the relative strengths of external and internal evidence supportive of rival variants.  

Paragraph 8 of Chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession (1646)

          Instead, Ecclesiastical Text advocates seek to establish the New Testament text via the application of the premise that the Greek text of the New Testament preserved by the church is pure and authoritative.  This premise is primarily dogmatic rather than scientific.  Because its fundamental premise is virtually identical to what is stated in the eighth paragraph of the first chapter of the Westminster Confession of 1646, and because the term “Ecclesiastical Text” has been treated in the past as a synonym for “Byzantine Text,” perhaps a more appropriate and more focused moniker for this approach would be “Confessional Text,” because it emanates from part of a formal creed.  I will take the liberty of using this term here, and the term “Confessionalists” for its advocates.

          By affirming that the Greek text of the New Testament has been kept pure in all ages by God’s singular care, Confessionalists greatly simplify the task of establishing the New Testament text, because if the text is pure in every age, it is also pure in any age, and thus what was used by the church in the age of early Protestantism (in the 1500’s and early 1600’s) sets a sufficient standard, if not for the exact form of the text regarded as authoritative, then at least for the authoritative meaning of the text.  Thus the text-critical enterprise facing Confessionalists is so small as to be almost trivial, consisting of decisions between rival variants which convey the meaning of the Greek text that was in use in the Reformation-period.

          Against that position, James White objects that if one is going to say that a text is established via church use, then one needs to ask, “Which church?”.  However, which church, before the Reformation, ever endorsed White’s favorite compilation – a Greek text without Mark 16:9-20, John 7:53-8:11, Luke 22:43-44, Luke 23:35a, etc.?  A Confessionalist who advocated the Nestle-Aland compilation would be compelled to admit that if such a Greek text is pure, then the Greek pure text was used somewhere in Egypt for a few centuries but later, the churches everywhere else, and in all other centuries, used something else – but thus the Westminster Confession’s affirmation is denied, because such a Greek text is not attested to be in use by the church in all ages. 

(It seems to me that the person who wishes to uphold the Westminster Confession while advocating the Nestle-Aland compilation must reckon that whether one includes, or excludes, two 12-verse passages in the Gospels, and whether one includes, or excludes, over a dozen other one-verse or two-verse passages, and regardless of how one decides hundreds of variant-units involving contests between different phrases and different words, it all yields no meaningful effect on the purity of the text.  However, if one were to concede this point, then why insist on pursuing a technically exact form of the text at all, if it is granted that the text that is observed to have been used in the Reformation-era is pure?)

          When it comes down to it, James White believes that the decisive factor when considering whether or not a specific variant is authoritative Scripture is not a matter of which congregations used it, but is, instead, a matter of what was in the autographs before the church began to perpetuate their contents.  I concur with such a view – but I do not see how one can believe that, and believe that the Nestle-Aland compilation extremely closely resembles the original text, and believe that via God’s singular care and providence, the form of the Greek text of the New Testament has been kept pure in all ages.

          White’s preference for the Nestle-Aland compilation answers his “Which church?” question for him, because the Nestle-Aland compilation, at points where the Alexandrian Text disagrees with the Byzantine Text, is at least 98% Alexandrian.  A little over halfway through his video-lecture, White asserts that the individuals who made the early papyri did not have Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11in their manuscripts.  To those who are familiar with the testimony of the papyri, the problematic nature of White’s heavy dependence upon this assertion is demonstrated two ways:

          ● First:  if the papyri are to be given a decisive role, then why doesn’t White adopt their readings at the many points where they disagree with the Nestle-Aland compilation?  Is White willing to accept all of the readings found in P45, P46, P66, and P72 that disagree with the Nestle-Aland compilation?  Surely White, like any sane well-informed person, would answer “No,” because those papyri have so many singular readings.  So it is unrealistic to say, “We appeal to the papyrus court!” and think that this is sufficient; nobody considers the testimony of the early papyri, in and of itself, to be decisive.  Furthermore, to what early papyrus manuscript of Mark 16 is White referring?!  Surely he is aware that no such papyrus is extant. 

Bear in mind that Irenaeus quoted Mark 16:19,
and Jerome stated that the story about the
adulteress was found in many manuscripts,
both Greek and Latin.

          ● Second:  why does White treat the papyri as if their testimony echoes a variety of locales?  Or to put it another way:  how does White, or anyone, know what was at the end of Mark 16, or in John 7-8, in papyrus Gospels-manuscripts that were used outside of Egypt in the 100’s?  The early papyri are exclusively from Egypt. This is a mere side-effect of Egyptian low-humidity climate, which is especially friendly to papyrus-material. One might as well say, “Let us make our textual decisions on the basis of which manuscript experienced better weather,” or, “We should adopt the readings found in the best manuscripts, by which I mean, the ones which were made the farthest to the south.”

          By rejecting the testimony of other locales, White focuses on essentially one locale’s text – a text used in Egypt – to answer the “What church?” question.  His approach assigns a crucial role to the churches in Egypt, as if one cannot ascertain the original text without their input.  But we know next to nothing about the Egyptian congregations in 100-200, and even less about the historical connection between those congregations and these particular papyri. 

So:  if no one locale's text is decisive,
then why does the Nestle-Aland compilation
heavily favor Alexandrian readings
even when they stand virtually alone?

          This creates an apparent inconsistency with something that White says later in the video-lecture.  Although White says that the mechanism that God used to preserve His Word was the sudden spread of the text to multiple locales, so that the transmission of the text was never under the control of any one group, when it comes to deciding textual contests, White almost always favors the text from one particular locale, namely Egypt, thus introducing the exact opposite mechanism.  Although White claims to employ an eclectic approach to the evidence, he endorses a compilation which is, in the Gospels, Acts, and Pauline Epistles, 98% Alexandrian.

          Confessionalists believe that the Greek text used in the 1500’s is a sufficiently pure representation of the contents of the autographs.  White believes that a Greek text used in early congregations in Egypt fits that description.  It is generally easy (except where the Confessional Text contains readings for which there is minimal support, and which convey a different meaning than their rival or rivals) for Confessionalists to maintain their view that a text closely resembling the Confessional Text has been in use in all ages; they need only grant that there is a lack of evidence for the existence of that text’s use in the early centuries of Christendom (which is true about any New Testament text in the early centuries of Christianity in a lot of territory outside Egypt).  It is not so easy, however, to maintain that the Greek Alexandrian Text has been preserved in all ages in any reasonable sense, inasmuch as there is abundant evidence that a different Greek text – the Byzantine Text – was used instead, as attested by at least 85% of the extant Greek New Testament manuscripts.        

To be continued.

The Kloha-Montgomery Debate - Final Thoughts

          John Warwick Montgomery, in his recent debate with Jeffrey Kloha, raised a concern that the thoroughgoing eclectic method tends to destabilize the text, risking the production of a “Designer New Testament.”  Montgomery criticized Kloha for stating, “We now have a text of the New Testament that makes no claim to being fixed and stable, for it is subject to continuous improvement and change.”  But anyone can read the introduction to the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland compilation and read a similar statement from the compilers themselves:  “This text is a working text (in the sense of the century-long Nestle tradition); it is not to be considered as definitive, but as a stimulus to further efforts toward defining and verifying the text of the New Testament.” 

          Kloha cannot be faulted for mentioning that parts of Novum Testamentum Graece are unstable, unless one is willing to imply that the editors of the NA-text are also at fault.  Montgomery acknowledged that thoroughgoing eclecticism “doesn’t differ greatly from reasonable eclecticism,” by which he meant to refer to reasoned eclecticism, the term which is used to describe the method of New Testament textual criticism that has yielded the base-texts of the ESV, HCSB, NLT, NIV, etc.  Montgomery may not realize it, but most of his objections apply to the Nestle-Aland-28 compilation too.  In the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland compilation, the text of First Corinthians differs from the 25th edition at 24 places (not including instances where brackets were either added or removed).  These are actual changes to the compilation.  So when Kloha recommends a few more changes, why is this a problem? 

          Similarly, compared to the text of NA-25, the compilers of NA-27 introduced ten changes into the text of the first five chapters of the Gospel of Luke.  Montgomery has raised no objection.  But when Kloha suggests one more change – “the main illustration” of why Montgomery considers thoroughgoing eclecticism problematic – Montgomery called it a threat to inerrancy.

          Montgomery and Kloha both want Christians to be able to read their New Testaments with confidence that they are reading the Word of God, not man-made corruptions.  The difference (or, the main difference) is that Montgomery recommends that when the external evidence overwhelming favors one variant against its rival variant(s), there is a simple way to settle the contest:  “Go to the best text, for goodness’ sake.”  But this is circular.  The best text is the correct text – the reading that is the same as the original text – and that is precisely the question:  at this particular point, which reading is the best?   It simply would not make sense to say, “To discover what is the best text of Luke 1:46, go to the best text of Luke 1:46.”  Yet that is the essence of the method that Montgomery seems to propose.

          The thoroughgoing method employed by Kloha may reveal points of instability in the text which reasoned eclecticism might not (because a reasoned eclecticism might not consider variants with very poor external support to be significant).  This raises a question:  how is a method that increases (however slightly) the number of uncertain or unstable points in the text consistent with the goal of increasing readers’ confidence that the text is the Word of God? 

          The answer is when thoroughgoing eclecticism favors readings which have very poor external support, or even no Greek manuscript-support at all (as in the case of Kloha’s suggested reading in Luke 1:46), the method invites uncertainty which future discoveries and future research might vindicate.  This is preferable to the alternative of feeling certain about specific readings that future research might show to be scribal corruptions.  Thoroughgoing eclecticism yields a loss of confidence at some specific points where other methods do not – but this is more than compensated for by the net gain in confidence for the rest of the text, where external and internal evidence interlock.

          The uncertainty that thoroughgoing eclecticism invites at specific points in the text has been occasionally vindicated, yielding a compilation that more accurately resembles the form of the original text.  For example, Erasmus suggested that the original text of James 4:15 was και ζήσομεν και ποιήσομεν even though the Greek manuscript evidence available to him supported και ζήσωμεν και ποιήσωμεν.  Subsequently, manuscripts became available that had the reading that Erasmus had suspected was correct, including Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, and Sinaiticus.  The Nestle-Aland compilation now reads και ζήσομεν και ποιήσομεν (although most Greek manuscripts read και ζήσωμεν και ποιήσωμεν).  Erasmus also suspected that the final phrase in John 10:26 in his manuscripts (“as I said to you”) was an interpolation.  The Nestle-Aland compilers agree, along with Papyrus 75, Sinaiticus, and Vaticanus.

          Erasmus and/or Theodore Beza expressed several other suspicions, including the following:

● In Matthew 3:4, the original text might have referred to wild pears, αχκράδες, instead of ακρίδες, locusts.

● In Matthew 28:17, the original text, written in uncial lettering with no spaces between the words, might have said that the apostles did not doubt (ουδε εδιδασταν) rather than that some doubted (οι δε εδιδασταν).

● In First Corinthians 6:5, the Vulgate might echo the original text better than the Greek manuscripts.

● In James 1:11, the original text might have read πορίαις instead of πορείαις, because “in his abundance” fits the context better than “in his pursuits.”

● In James 4:2, instead of “You commit murder” (φονεύετε) Erasmus proposed that James wrote φθονειτε in light of the mention of jealous desires in verse 5.

          Similarly, Hort mentioned 60 New Testament passages where he suspected a “primitive corruption” had resulted in a scenario in which no extant manuscripts display the original text.  My point is not that all of these suspicions are justified; rather, it is that what Montgomery condemns in Kloha’s work as dangerous and reckless has been an aspect of New Testament textual criticism for over 400 years.

So:  Is The Text Plastic?

From one of Dr. Kloha's slides.

          Kloha stated in the debate that he regrets using the word “plastic,” even though that term fits the Nestle-Aland compilation at hundreds of points.  A better term is “uncertain,” helping readers understand that thoroughgoing eclectics do not aspire to creatively shape the text; their goal is reconstruction. 

          There is something in the King James Version’s preface, The Translators to the Reader, that is highly applicable here (though it was initially written about margin-notes that supplied alternative meanings, rather than alternative readings).  Referring to cases where a term (especially rare terms referring to plants and animals) could mean more than one thing:  “Fearfulness would better beseem us than confidence, and if we will resolve, to resolve upon modesty with S. Augustine, (though not in this same case altogether, yet upon the same ground) Melius est dubitare de occultis, quam litigare de incertis, it is better to make doubt of those things which are secret, than to strive about those things that are uncertain.”  And:  “As it is a fault of incredulity, to doubt of those things that are evident: so to determine of such things as the Spirit of God hath left (even in the judgment of the judicious) questionable, can be no less than presumption.  They that are wise, had rather have their judgments at liberty in differences of readings, than to be captivated to one, when it may be the other.”

          A similar desire – that one’s judgment may be at liberty, where a contest between two rival variants is difficult to decide, and the textual critic is unsure if the original text is one or the other (or a conjecture) – means that when one affirms Biblical inerrancy, one will not be 100% certain about the form of the text that one is affirming to be inerrant.  But why should that be problematic, when we routinely grant that we are less than 100% certain about the meaning of the text, often even when its form is certain?  In addition, a compilation dogmatically affirmed to be 100% flawless (as some affirm about the Textus Receptus) is incapable of being refined by future discoveries and analysis, whereas a compilation compiled by the principles of thoroughgoing eclecticism, with resultant points of instability, is more readily refined so as to resemble more accurately the authoritative original text.
           Certainty about the original text is good.  Certainty that something that is not the original text is the original text is bad.  Injudicious use of thoroughgoing eclecticism (for example, inserting a reading with no Greek manuscript support into the text, as the compilers of NA28 have done in Second Peter 3:10) risks decreasing the former, but to prohibit thoroughgoing eclecticism would be to risk the latter.  I consider it better to allow textual critics to be free to support the readings of small minorities of witnesses (which is very frequently done by the compilers of NA28) and to suggest conjectures, rather than to treat “the best texts” as if they are always the best, even in specific cases where they may not be.