Manifold Mistakes: A Video-Response to Bart Ehrman's "Manifold Greatness" Lecture

Earlier this year, in January, Dr. Bart Ehrman delivered a lecture as part of the Manifold Greatness project, a traveling exhibit organized in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible.  The lecture is online at YouTube, so those interested in its full contents can view it directly. 

Some of Dr. Ehrman's statements about the KJV, as well as some tangential statements that he made, were highly inaccurate.  So, having been blessed with a little spare time and a lot of coffee, I have prepared some clarifications in the form of another video-lecture, which is at YouTube at 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZPM4sF990c .

Its title:  "Manifest Mistakes:  What Kind of Lecture Did Bart Ehrman Give?"

 

I use annotations throughout my lecture, so if you watch my video-response, watch using the Chrome browser on a desktop computer, to ensure that the annotations are visible.  (I don't think tablets currently display the annotations; results may vary from one to another.) 

The main focus is, of course, the KJV (and perhaps I should once again note that I am not KJV-Onlyist, in case some newcomers get the wrong idea).  Some text-critical subjects are also covered, especially in the second half of my response (specifically, the Johannine Comma, the PA, and Mark 16:9-20).

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.  

Robert Stein and the Ending of Mark

          Robert Stein’s article The Ending of Mark in a 2008 issue of Bulletin for Biblical Research has a lot of good qualities.  Dr. Stein writes clearly.  His statement that Mark’s readers “would not only find 16:8 a difficult ending for Mark but an impossible one” is one in which I am in complete agreement.  Efforts to squint sensibility and skill into the abrupt ending (undertaken, for instance, by Daniel Wallace, J. Lee Magness, John MacArthur -- who misrepresented almost every piece of external evidence he mentioned -- and, more recently, Alistair Begg) are futile exercises.  The abrupt ending of verse 8 looks unintentional because it was unintentional. 

          Dr. Stein wrote that the abrupt ending at 16:8 is found “in two major Greek Codices – Codex Sinaiticus (Aleph) and Vaticanus (B), as well as in 304, certain Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Georgian manuscripts, and is witnessed to by Clement of Alexandrian, Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome.”

Clement of Alexandria does not witness to the abrupt ending.  Clement might even refer to Mark 16:19 in Adumbrationes in a comment on Jude verse 24 as preserved by Cassiodorus -- a reference which seems to have escaped Metzger’s attention.  But, setting aside that possibility, if Clement never used Mark 16:9-20, that is very far from Stein’s claim that Clement weighs in for the abrupt ending.  Clement of Alexandria does not use 12 entire chapters of Mark.  It is unrealistic to treat his silence regarding 12 verses as if it has any evidentiary force. 

Origen does not witness to the abrupt ending.  Origen used Mark more than Clement did, but he never said anything about how the Gospel of Mark ends.  Origen did not use many other 12-verse portions of Mark, and he did not use portions of Mark that are much larger than 12 verses.  So we simply do not know whether his copies of Mark contained 16:9-20 or not.  This finally seems to have sunk into the heads of the editors of the UBS Greek New Testament; after decades of spreading the idea that Clement and Origen support the abrupt ending, the editors finally removed the names of Clement and Origen from the apparatus-entry for Mark 16:9-20 in the fourth edition.  (Yay.  Now if we could just make fresh editions of about 200 commentaries and 20,000 seminary classroom-lessons prepared by people who depended on the apparatus in earlier editions of the UBS Greek New Testament.)

          Dr. Stein is correct that the text of Mark stops at the end of 16:8 in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, but that observation is strongly nuanced by additional factors that Stein did not mention:  Vaticanus has a distinct blank space after 16:8 (not just leftover space below 16:8, but also an entire blank column alongside it) in which a trained copyist could fit 16:9-20.  In Sinaiticus a cancel-sheet contains Mk. 14:54-Lk. 1:56 and the cancel-sheet’s copyist shifted his rate of letters-per-column in a highly unusual way on these pages.  (I won't go into detail about this here, but if I were to take the time to walk through this feature, I believe I could show that these shifts in the lettering betray the copyist's desire not to leave a blank column between Mark 16:8 and Luke 1:1 -- which implies that the copyist was aware that the abrupt ending at 16:8 was not the only known way to conclude the Gospel of Mark.)   In addition the elaborateness of the arabesque after 16:8 should be noticed.    

          The medieval manuscript 304 is very probably just a damaged manuscript.  According to a description by Dr. Maurice Robinson (who, years ago, briefly saw a microfilm of 304), 304 does not display the subscription after 16:8. 

          Stein wrote that "certain Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Georgian manuscripts" lack Mark 16:9-20.  There's considerable ambiguity in that sentence.  Only one Syriac manuscript (the Sinaitic Syriac) ends Mark at the end of 16:8.  And only one Sahidic MS lacks 16:9-20.  (That Sahidic MS, by the way, was initially assigned a production-date c. 425, but Coptic specialist Christian Askeland has recently expressed his opinion that it could be centuries later.)  (A recently-publicized Sahidic amulet which treats 16:8 as the last verse in Mark should also be on the scales, although there's some question about its production-date.) 

          When the Armenian version and the Old Georgian version are listed side-by-side without mentioning that the Old Georgian version was translated from Armenian, many readers are bound to get the impression that these two pieces of evidence are two independent lines of evidence, when they’re not.  Also, if the Armenian manuscripts that lack Mark 16:9-20 are going to be mentioned, then it seems only fair that the hundreds of Armenian manuscripts that contain Mark 16:9-20 should also be mentioned, as well as the testimony of the Armenian writer Eznik of Golb, who utilized Mark 16:17-18 in his composition De Deo hundreds of years before the production-date of the earliest extant Armenian manuscript of Mark 16.    

          Dr. Stein claimed, “A number of the manuscripts have asterisks or other markings by the text indicating that the copyists thought the longer ending was spurious.”  This appears to be an inaccurate appraisal based on Metzger’s statement about “other witnesses."  (Dr. Stein, like most commentators who mention the “asterisks and obeli” claim, did not specify which MSS he was talking about, echoing Metzger's vagueness).  Fourteen Greek manuscripts have special annotations about 16:9-20, but I have not been able to verify the existence of any non-annotated Greek manuscripts of Mark in which 16:9-20 is accompanied by text-critical asterisks or obeli.  (Plenty of MSS have lectionary-related symbols and abbreviations at the beginning of 16:9, but the MSS have the same symbols and abbreviations elsewhere; they are merely part of the lectionary-apparatus.)  

          Stein wrote on page 82 about the “Lack of Attestation by Early Church Fathers,” stating that the failure of Origen, Tertullian, Cyrian [he meant Cyprian], Cyril of Jerusalem, and others” “indicates that they were apparently unacquainted with the longer ending of Mark.”  His reference to Tertullian is somewhat puzzling because in a footnote on the same page, he listed Tertullian as a witness to the longer ending.  Regarding the other three individuals that Stein listed (Origen, Cyprian, and Cyril of Jerusalem):  Origen’s non-use of Mark 16:9-20, as I already mentioned, is a side-effect of his general neglect of Mark.  The same goes for Cyprian (whose silence was badly misrepresented by Hort).  And Cyril of Jerusalem (in Adversus Nestorium, Book 2, chapter 6) quoted Nestorius’ quotation of Mark 16:20, and did not respond by saying, “Whatever was Nestorius talking about?”.    

          By claiming that patristic writers' non-use of Mark 16:9-20 "indicates that they were apparently unacquainted" with the passage, Dr. Stein has built a hurdle which, if consistently applied, would indicate the same thing about many other 12-verse passages of the Gospel of Mark.    

          On page 82, Stein stated that Mark 16:9-20 “contains 18 terms not found anywhere else in Mark.”  That’s true, but why is there no mention that another 12-verse passage – 15:40-16:4 – contains even more terms not found anywhere else in Mark?  Is it too much to ask for some balance?  Do all future commentators have to cherry-pick the evidence in accord with a time-honored tradition?  When the abundance of once-used words in Mark 16:9-20 is mentioned, but the even higher abundance of once-used words in 15:40-16:4 is not mentioned, readers may be forgiven if they feel like shoppers in a fruit-market in which the vendor has designed his display so that the customers can only see one side of the apples.    

          On page 83, Stein referred to “the Harclean Syriac manuscript.”  I’m not sure what he meant by that, because there is more than one manuscript of the Harclean Syriac.  And, if I am not misinformed, in the Harclean (also spelled Harklean) Syriac, the Shorter Ending is not in the text between verse 8 and verse 9; it’s in the margin.

          In a footnote on page 84, Stein mentioned that the evidence from Jerome is unclear.  I think I can help clear that up.  First, regarding the commentary on Mark that Stein attributed to Jerome:  that’s not by Jerome.  Second, Jerome’s statement in Ad Hedibiam is a condensed translation of part of Eusebius’ Ad Marinum.  If Eusebius had never written Ad Marinum, this part of Ad Hedibiam would not exist. 

          It cannot be denied that Jerome took material from Eusebius’ earlier composition and included it in his letter to Hedibia without explaining that he was using Eusebius’ material.  Jerome had no problem answering questions by repeating what had been stated by other writers, whether their answers exactly reflected his own views and observations or not.  (He freely acknowledged doing this sort of thing in Epistle 75, To Augustine.)  In addition, it is plain to see in Ad Hedibiam that he followed up on the statement about “almost all the Greek copies” by recommending (just as Eusebius did) that Mark 16:9-20 be retained and that a comma be introduced into 16:9. 

          And now some thoughts about the implications of the inaccuracies in Dr. Stein's article.  If a distinguished and experienced scholar such as Dr. Robert Stein is capable of those mistakes and misrepresentations, just imagine what lesser scholars are teaching in their classrooms.  It is this sort of thing that continues to give momentum to the rejection of Mark 16:9-20.  The testimony of Clement and Origen should never have been in the equation as witnesses against Mark 16:9-20.  Jerome's statement in Ad Hedibiam should never have been misrepresented as if Jerome was not spontaneously paraphrasing Eusebius in the course of dictating a letter.  Eusebius' vagueness and ambivalence in Ad Marinum, and his recommendation to retain Mark 16:9-20, should not have been overlooked.  The dependence of the Old Georgian on the Armenian version should have been pointed out.  The asterisks-and-obelisks claim should have been checked, and specifics about how many non-annotated manuscripts have text-critically significant symbols alongside Mark 16:9-20 -- which is none, as far as I can tell -- should have been given.  But just the opposite has happened, and the  result of all this is that even when the mistakes are realized, the train of conventional wisdom continues to roll down the wrong track, even though it is out of coal.        

          Meanwhile, weighing in for the inclusion of 16:9-20, we have four second-century witnesses, including Epistula Apostolorum, the existence and testimony of which Stein acknowledged, unlike most commentators.  Julian Hills, who has specialized in the study of the Epistula Apostolorum , has said, "I would vote for a high degree of probability that the author knew the Longer Ending." 

          I wonder how rapidly the current consensus against the genuineness of Mark 16:9-20 would change if commentators stopped making the mistakes that Dr. Stein has made, and took the steps he has taken that were correct.  If commentators stop misrepresenting Clement and Origen, stop parroting Metzger’s vague "asterisks and obeli" claim (unless some demonstrable basis for it is found), stop pretending that the abrupt ending was  intentional, and start to draw their readers' attention to the testimony of Epistula Apostolorum, Justin, Tatian, and Irenaeus, what would happen?  Would very many commentators encourage their readers to believe that a textual variant that is supported by four second-century witnesses, and 99.9% of the Greek manuscripts, and 99.99% of the Latin manuscripts, and 99.5% of the Syriac manuscripts, and 40 Roman-era patristic writers, does not have adequate support, and should be expunged from Scripture?  And if so, would very many commentary-readers take them seriously?

I hope these things will be taken into consideration by readers of Dr. Stein's article.

The Got Questions Website and Mark 16:9-20

It is wearying to focus once again on Mark 16:9-20.  But recall the old saying:  "One must fix the fence where it is broken."  And regarding Mark 16:9-20, many writers have broken the fence of facts, like lost cows, leaving behind a mess.  Today let's consider the inaccuracies, half-truths, and falsehoods about Mark 16:9-20 that are currently spread by the Got Questions website.  We'll look mainly at the claims about external evidence, but some claims about internal evidence will also be addressed.

EXTERNAL EVIDENCE

The Got Questions writer said, “The vast majority of later Greek manuscripts contain Mark 16:9-20.”  That statement is technically true.  But it is an understatement.  A “vast majority” might be 66% or 75%.  But in this case, we’re looking at over 99% of the later Greek manuscripts of Mark 16 that have not undergone damage.  (Only one later Greek manuscript ends without Mark 16:9-20, minuscule 304, which contains a commentary based in part on the commentary by the writer Theophylact, whose commentary includes comments about verses 9-20.  304 may simply be a copy of a damaged manuscript.)  That's over 1,500 manuscripts.  Now, elsewhere at the Got Questions website, one finds the statement, "The sheer volume of biblical manuscripts makes it simple to recognize any attempts to distort God’s Word."  Obviously the author considers the ending of Mark an exception.

The Got Questions writer said, “Mark ends at verse 8 in two of the oldest and most respected manuscripts, the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.”  Again, that’s true, but it is not the whole truth.  The copyist of Codex Vaticanus left adistinct blank space after Mark 16:8, as if he was familiar with the passage and attempted to reserve space for the absent verses in the event that the future owner of the manuscript might want them to be included.  And in Codex Sinaiticus, the page containing Mark 16 is part of a four-page replacement-sheet containing Mark 14:54-Luke 1:56.  These four pages were not written by the same copyist who wrote the text on the surrounding pages.  A careful study of the shift in the rate of letters-per-column on these four pages, and of the emphatic decorative lines which follow Mark 16:8 in Codex Sinaiticus, shows that the copyist who made these four replacement-pages was aware of the existence of Mark 16:9-20.

The Got Questions writer said, “The oldest manuscripts are known to be the most accurate because they were copied from the original autographs (i.e., they are copies of the originals).”  What an error!  The Got Questions writer makes it seem as if Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (the “oldest manuscripts” under discussion) were copied directly from the autographs!  In the real world, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were made in the 300’s.  Also, the assumption that the oldest manuscripts “are known to be the most accurate” is false.  In the Gospels, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus disagree with each other 3,036 times; one or the other (or both) must be inaccurate at those points.  A copyist does not become skillful just by living in the 300’s, and the text of a manuscript does not become more accurate merely by virtue of the manuscript's survival.  Codex Bezae, for example, is almost as old as Vaticanus and Sinaiticus; yet its text of the Gospels is less accurate than the text in a typical medieval Gospels-manuscript.  Or consider Papyrus 46:  it is older than Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, but the editors of the Nestle-Aland text rejected its readings hundreds of times.

In addition, as the Got Questions writer puts Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in the spotlight, he leaves earlier evidence in the shadows!  After describing two manuscripts from the 300’s as if they were copied from the original documents themselves, he did not weigh that evidence against the evidence from Epistula Apostolorum (c. 150), Justin Martyr’s First Apology, (c. 160), Tatian’s Diatessaron, (c. 170), and Irenaeus’ Against Heresies (c. 184).  In Book Three of Against Heresies, Irenaeus specifically quoted Mark 16:19 from the Gospel of Mark.  If the writer really considered the age of the evidence to be decisive, then he ought to have concluded that Mark 16:9-20 is unquestioningly genuine.  In terms of age, manuscripts used by Irenaeus in the 180’s were much closer to the original documents than manuscripts made in the 300’s.  

The Got Questions writer stated, “The King James Version of the Bible, as well as the New King James, contains vv. 9-20 because the King James used medieval manuscripts.”  This is a cheap shot that writers sometimes take at the KJV when they are advertising some other version.  The writer has tried to belittle the KJV's New Testament base-text, as if the fact that a manuscript’s parchment is medieval implies that the text that it transmits is also medieval.  But in real life, one of the manuscripts used by Erasmus was Codex 1, which echoes an ancient text-form from the 400’s.  In real life, Stephanus (the compiler of the 1551 Greek New Testament which is extremely similar to the base-text of the KJV New Testament) cited ancient manuscripts such as Codex Bezae and Codex Regius.  In real life, during the period between 1516 and 1611, textual scholars considered ancient versions such as the Syriac Peshitta and the Vulgate, and a wide variety of ancient patristic quotations.  The text of the Gospels in the Textus Receptus (the base-text of the KJV) is a fairly good representative of the Byzantine Text, which is attested in the 300’s (by the Gothic Version, the Peshitta, and patristic citations) and the 400’s (by Codex Alexandrinus and parts of Codex W).  Only a propagandist, or a victim of propaganda, would ever describe this text as if it is essentially medieval.

The Got Questions writer wrote, “Since 1611, however, older and more accurate manuscripts have been discovered and they affirm that vv. 9-20 were not in the original Gospel of Mark.”  In real life, since 1611, the only two Greek manuscripts of Mark 16 that clearly end the text at verse 8 are the same two mentioned earlier:  Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.  All the other recently-discovered Greek manuscripts of Mark 16, unless they are damaged, include the passage! 

The Got Questions writer claimed, “The fourth-century church fathers Eusebius and Jerome noted that almost all Greek manuscripts available to them lacked vv. 9–20.”  That is another misrepresentation of the evidence.  The statement from Jerome that is being cited here, from his composition Ad Hedibiam, is embedded in a summarization, by Jerome, of part of Eusebius’ composition Ad Marinum.  To put it another way:  Jerome was not describing manuscripts available to him; Jerome was passing along part of Eusebius’ composition.  Jerome included Mark 16:9-20 in the Vulgate, in 383. 

As for Eusebius:   he was aware that copies existed in which Mark's text ended at 16:8, but if you read Ad Marinum you will see that he specifically framed his descriptions of manuscripts that lack the passage as something that someone might say to resolve a harmonization-difficulty.  And instead of instructing Marinus to reject the passage, Eusebius explained how to solve the harmonization-difficulty without rejecting the passage.

The Got Questions writer said that Eusebius and Jerome “doubtless knew those other endings existed.”  However, in real life, while it is plain that Eusebius and Jerome both knew of the existence of Mark 16:9-20, there is no indication whatsoever that Eusebius or Jerome knew of the existence of the Shorter Ending.

The Got Questions writer said, “In the second century, Justin Martyr and Tatian knew about other endings.”  That is a misrepresentation of the evidence.  There is no indication that Justin Martyr and Tatian knew of any way to end the Gospel of Mark except with 16:9-20.  There is no evidence that they knew of copies with the abrupt ending at 16:8.  There is no evidence that they knew of copies with the Shorter Ending. 

The Got Questions writer said, “Irenaeus, also, in A.D. 150 to 200, must have known about this long ending because he quotes verse 19 from it.”  That is correct, but the Got Questions writer left out an important detail:  Irenaeus specifically says that he was quoting Mark 16:19 from the Gospel of Mark!  With that detail in place, it becomes clear that as the Got Questions writer claims that “these verses were added later by scribes,” because they are not in two manuscripts from the 300’s, he also acknowledges that these verses were present in the text of Mark used by Irenaeus in the 100’s.        

The Got Questions writer says, “So, the early church fathers knew of the added verses, but even by the fourth century, Eusebius said the Greek manuscripts did not include these endings in the originals.”

This is problematic for two reasons.  First, the writer has not adequately considered how abundantly the early church fathers show us that Mark 16:9-20 was in their manuscripts:  when we read patristic utilizations of Mark 16:9-20 by writers such as Tatian, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Hierocles, Ambrose, and Augustine, we are reading echoes of the manuscripts that these writers used.  Second, the Got Questions writer treated Eusebius’ statement as if Eusebius was making a direct observation about all manuscripts in all manuscript-collections throughout the Roman Empire.  In real life, Eusebius’ statement is not even a direct statement, and even if it had been a direct observation, it would only describe manuscripts known to Eusebius, not all manuscripts throughout the Christian church.         

INTERNAL EVIDENCE

The Got Questions writer stated, “The internal evidence from this passage also casts doubt on Mark as the author.”  But this is a secondary question.  Internal evidence cast doubt on the idea that the main author of Proverbs was the author of chapters 30 and 31, and on the idea that Jeremiah added Jeremiah chapter 52, but we do not therefore erase or ignore those chapters.  The vital question is not, “Did Mark add these verses?”.  It is, “Were these verses in the autograph, or were they absent from the autograph, when the text’s production-stage ended and the transmission-stage began (that is, when copies began to be distributed for church-use)?”.  If the Got Questions author consistently used single-authorship of a book as the standard for canonicity, he would trim away large segments of text from several books of the Bible.

The Got Questions writer stated, “The Greek word translated “now” that begins v. 9 should link it to what follows, as the use of the word “now” does in the other synoptic Gospels.”  But this claim is simply nonsense.  The word in question is the ordinary Greek word “de,” which is routinely used to make transitions of all sorts, including introductions of entirely new episodes.

The Got Questions author wrote, “What follows doesn’t continue the story of the women referred to in v. 8, describing instead Jesus’ appearing to Mary Magdalene.  There’s no transition there, but rather an abrupt and bizarre change, lacking the continuity typical of Mark’s narrative. The author should be continuing the story of the women based on the word “now,” not jumping to the appearance to Mary Magdalene.”  This is a perfectly valid point, but it applies to the author's imaginary ending-creating scribes as much as it applies to Mark:  why would anyone in the 100’s or later, attempting to create an ending for the Gospel of Mark, begin so abruptly, instead of continuing the scene that is depicted in 16:8?   

The Got Questions author wrote, “For Mark to introduce Mary Magdalene here as though for the very first time (v. 9) is odd.”  But the mere repetition of Mary Magdalene’s name is not objectionable:  Mark mentioned her in 15:40, and again in 15:47, and again, just one verse later, in 16:1.  The core of this objection is that Mark 16:9 adds the detail that Jesus had cast out seven demons from Mary Magdalene, instead of mentioning this when she was first mentioned.  But in 15:40, 15:47, and 16:1, she was not alone; this is the first time the narrative spotlight is on her alone.  It is not all that shocking that additional information about her is included at this point.         

The Got Questions writer stated, “There are eighteen words here that are never used anywhere by Mark.”  He failed to mention, however, that there are 20 words in Mark 15:40-16:4 that are never used anywhere else by Mark.  Does he intend to challenge the genuineness of Mark 15:40-16:4 because of this?  If not, then the ground is gone from under what he is trying to suggest by mentioning the statistic about how many once-used words are in Mark 16:9-20.    

The Got Questions writer stated, “The title “Lord Jesus,” used in verse 19, is never used anywhere else by Mark.”  Nor is it used by Luke except in Luke 24:3.  So what?  Does the Got Questions writer think that any unique feature of a 12-verse passage of Scripture implies that the passage is not genuine?  If so, then hardly any 12-verse passage in the New Testament is safe from his objections of this sort.

The writer stated, “Both the external and internal evidence make it quite certain that Mark did not write it.”  Here’s what he means regarding the external evidence:  although 99.9% of the Greek manuscripts, and 99.99% of the Latin manuscripts, include Mark 16:9-20, and although we have, in patristic compositions, echoes of four manuscripts of Mark in the 100’s that contained 16:9-20, and more than 30 other Roman-Empire-Era utilizations of Mark 16:9-20, all that is certainly outweighed by Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Eusebius, the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript, one Sahidic manuscript, and part of the Armenian version.   

The Got Questions writer stated, “Ending his Gospel in verse 8 with the description of the amazement of the women at the tomb is entirely consistent with the rest of the narrative.”  That is how John MacArthur tried to spin the abrupt ending, in a 2011 sermon that was filled with false and inaccurate claims (claims which, by the way, are still being spread by Grace To You).  But there are problems with MacArthur’s theory; for instance, why would Mark would say that the women said nothing to anyone, knowing very well that they proceeded to report to the disciples?  Why would Mark deliberately leave his readers’ last impression of the apostles as running away in Gethsemane? 

The Got Questions writer stated, “Amazement at the Lord Jesus seems to be a theme with Mark.”  Again, this resembles Dr. MacArthur’s spin.  Of course people reacted to Jesus’ miracles with amazement and sometimes with fear.  Jesus was performing miracles, after all!  But that does not mean that Mark, after foreshadowing a meeting between Jesus and His disciples in 14:28 and 16:7, intended that the scene in 16:8 would be the end of his narrative.  Nor does it mean that Mark intended for his readers to perceive the women’s fear as something to be emulated, rather than as a natural reaction.  

In 16:8, Mark states that the women at the tomb were trembling with fright.  The only parallel to such a state of mind in Mark (in which TREMOS and EFOBOUNTO describe the subject) is in 5:33, in the middle of the episode about the women who touched Jesus’ robe.  If Mark had not written 5:33b-34, and had let the reader wonder what happened next, then we would have a true parallel to 16:8, in which Mark would let the reader wonder what happened next.  But he did write 5:33b-34.  The inconclusive scene in 16:8 is unique in Mark’s Gospel. 

Furthermore, some of the passages in the Got Questions writer’s list of examples of Mark’s depiction of fear as a reaction to Jesus are not really parallels!  The term used to describe the women’s fear in 16:8 is EFOBOUNTO.  This word, or a word with the same root, is used only in 4:41, 5:15, 5:33, 9:6, 9:32, 10:32, and 11:18.  These seven passages are the only ones that involve the same vocabulary that is used at the end of Mark 16:8.  One of them (11:18) describes the feelings of the chief priests and scribes -- obviously not virtuous awe.  Granting that on six occasions, Mark mentions that people were fearful, this does not mean that Mark equated fear with virtuous awe.  Nor does it explain why Mark, knowing about Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances, would intentionally decline to record any of them, instead of preserving Peter's remembrances about Jesus, which is what the early church understood Mark's Gospel to be.  

So:  let the readers of Got Questions beware.  The Got Questions website's answer about Mark 16:9-20 is extremely misleading, and presents only part of the relevant evidence, and the evidence that it presents is in a heavily molded form.  Watch out, too, for inaccuracies in other pages at the Got Questions website which pertain to New Testament textual criticism:  I have seen essays at Got Questions that claimed that the early New Testament papyri are "the remains of the most ancient scrolls," and that Tischendorf found portions of Codex Sinaiticus "in the monastery dump," and other made-up statements.  I suspect that the claims about Mark 16:9-20 at Got Questions are essentially distorted echoes of Metzger and MacArthur, and are not based on first-hand research.  

The NET and the Ending of Mark (Updated!)

The NET, New English Translation,
is Copyright © 1996-2005
by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C.
Cited for review purposes.

The NET’s note at Mark 16:9 is untrustworthy.  The NET’s note contains some statements which are obvious mistakes, some statements which are probably erroneous, and some imprecise statements which give false impressions.  The note also puts blinders over its readers' eyes by failing to mention some important evidence.

Obvious Mistakes in the NET's Note on Mark 16:9-20:

(1) In the NET’s list of manuscripts in which the Shorter Ending appears with verses 9-20, 083 and 0112 are listed as if they are two manuscripts.  However, 083 and 0112 are the same manuscript; one is a portion of the other.

(2) The NET says that Codex W “has a different shorter ending between vv. 14 and 15.”  However, the Freer Logion is not an ending of any kind.  It should be described as an interpolation.

(3) The NET lists 2427 among the witnesses for 16:9-20 after 16:8.  However, 2427 is a forgery and should be removed from the NET’s evidence-list (and all other such lists).

(5) The NET lists “Hier^mss” as a witness for the abrupt ending at 16:8, and states, “Jerome and Eusebius knew of almost no Greek mss that had this ending.”  Thanks to Metzger’s massive influence, this claim is frequently found in commentaries; however, the portion of Jerome’s composition Ad Hedibiam (Epistle 120) in which this statement is found contains Jerome’s loose, condensed Latin translation (made via on-the-spot dictation, like most of his letters in the latter part of his career) of part of Eusebius’ earlier composition Ad Marinum.  Jerome’s composition even includes three of Marinus’ questions, in the same order in which Marinus asked them to Eusebius.  Consider what David C. Parker wrote about this (in his 1997 book The Living Text of the Gospels, on p. 135) as he referred to Ad Hedibiam: “Jerome’s work is simply a translation with some slight changes of what Eusebius had written.  It is thus worthless for our purposes.”  Jerome’s familiarity with, and acceptance of, Mark 16:9-20 is shown by his inclusion of the passage in the Vulgate, and by his casual use of Mark 16:14 to identify where he had seen the Freer Logion “in certain copies, especially in Greek codices.”

Probable Mistakes in the NET's Note on Mark 16:9-20:

(1) The NET’s footnote lists 304 as a witness for the ending at 16:8.  However, although pictures of 304 are elusive, there is plenty of evidence to justify serious doubt about 304's alleged testimony for the ending at 16:8.  For example, 16:8 is not followed by the subscription, and the commentary-material that follows 16:8 does not conclude in an orderly way.  Every indication is that 304 is a damaged manuscript, and should be removed from the list of witnesses against Mark 16:9-20.

(2) After the NET’s footnote says that “Several mss have marginal comments noting that earlier Greek mss lacked the verses,” it says that “others mark the text with asterisks or obeli (symbols that scribes used to indicate that the portion of text being copied was spurious).” However, this assertion about manuscripts that do not have notes, but do have asterisks and obeli accompanying Mark 16:9-20, is not true.  Dallas Theological Seminary professor Dr. Daniel Wallace has spread a claim that manuscripts 137, 138, 264, 1221, 2346, and 2812 have asterisks or obeli accompanying Mark 16:9-20.  This claim falls apart when these manuscripts are consulted.

Manuscripts 137, 138, and 264 were mentioned and described (in 1871) by John Burgon, who reported that 137 only has a cross-shaped symbol that is intended to draw the reader’s attention to a note in the margin, where the same symbol also occurs; 138, Burgon wrote, “exhibits neither asterisk nor cross; but contains the same note.”  Actually, 138 has an asterisk-line mark in the margin alongside Mark 16:9 - but it also has a note, in addition to commentary-material.  Manuscript 264 has a symbol after Mark 16:8 that resembles a hollowed-out “X” but the same symbol appears at Mark 11:12, and at 12:38, and at 14:12; these marks merely serve to point out the beginnings of lections.

In manuscript 1221, lozenge-dots (four dots, arranged north-south-east-west) appear between Mark 16:8 and 16:9. There is no asterisk.  A telos-symbol appears above the word gar in 16:8 and an arch-symbol appears above the beginning of the word Anastas in verse 9.  It would be easy for a novice manuscript-examiner, focused on verse 8, to imagine that this was text-critically significant.  However, the same features which appear after 16:8 also appear in 1221 after Mark 2:12, halfway through 5:24, and at 6:7. These are the beginnings of lections.  These symbols also occur at Luke 1:24, 1:26, at the end of 1:56, and after 2:40. They are lectionary-related and there their significance ends.

In 2346, there is neither an asterisk nor an obelus at Mark 16:9. Lozenge-dots appear in 2346, above the line, between the end of 16:8 and the beginning of 16:9.  In the margin, to the left of the text, is a telos-symbol, and below the telos-symbol in the margin is an arch-symbol.  The meaning of this is pretty clear: the lozenge-dots are located where one lection ends and another lection begins; the person who added this piece of lectionary-equipment did not want to reduce the legibility of the text by placing the telos-symbol and arch-symbol in the text itself, so he placed them in the margin, and put the smaller lozenge-dots in the text instead to signify the point to which they referred.  Anyone who compares the lectionary-equipment at Mark 16:9 to the lectionary-equipment at John 1:28 can see that it is the same thing: at John 1:28, superscripted lozenge-dots appear, and a telos-symbol is in the left margin, and an arch-symbol is in the right margin.  Again: these symbols signify lection-breaks and have no text-critical significance.

Minuscule 2812, which is kept at Madrid in the National Library of Spain.  It is known as the Zelada Gospels.  (For a while in the 1800s, it was thought to be lost.)  In 2812, a symbol appears at the base of the page on which 16:9 appears; the same symbol appears on the next page, and that is where one finds the relevant comment, which is the same comment attributed to Victor of Antioch in the Catena Marcum.  This symbol is doing the same job that footnote-numbers do:  it refers the reader to a note in the margin.

The entire claim about asterisks and obeli accompanying Mark 16:9-20 in non-annotated manuscripts should be withdrawn.  Every attempt to show that it has a factual basis has shown the contrary.

Imprecise Statements in the NET's Note on Mark 16:9-20:

(1) Instead of saying, “This shorter ending is usually included with the longer ending,” it would be more precise to say, “In the witnesses in which the Shorter Ending appears after 16:8, it is always followed by 16:9 except in k, in which an interpolation describing Jesus’ ascension at the time of His resurrection is inserted between verse 3 and verse 4.” 

(2) Instead of saying, “Most mss include the longer ending (vv. 9-20) immediately after v. 8,” it would be more precise to say, “Except for Vaticanus and Sinaiticus and the five Greek manuscripts in which the Shorter Ending appears between 16:8 and 16:9, all undamaged Greek manuscripts of Mark 16 include verse 9ff. after 16:8.”

(3) Instead of saying, “Eusebius knew of almost no Greek mss that had this ending,” it would be more precise to say that Eusebius knew of some Greek manuscripts in which Mark’s text stopped at 16:8.  In his composition Ad Marinum, as Eusebius responded to a question about how to harmonize Mark 16:9 with Matthew 28:1, he wrote that one way to resolve the question might be to reject Mark 16:9-20 on the grounds that the passage is not in every copy, or is absent from the accurate copies, or that verse 9 is in some copies but not in all of them, or that almost all Greek manuscripts end the text at the end of verse 8; yet in the same composition, Eusebius also explained how to harmonize and punctuate, and thus retain, Mark 16:9, and at one point he mentioned, without qualification, that Mark says that Jesus cast seven demons out of Mary Magdalene (which is stated in Mark only in 16:9).  Eusebius did not include verses 9-20 in the Eusebian Canons, a cross-reference system that he developed for the Gospels. (Additional details about Eusebius’ statements about the ending of Mark can be found in Roger Pearse’s book Eusebius of Caesarea: Gospel Problems and Solutions.)

(4) Instead of saying, “Several mss have marginal comments noting that earlier Greek mss lacked the verses,” it would be much more precise to say, “Fourteen manuscripts have notes stating that some manuscripts lack verses 9-20; in three manuscripts the note also says that the ancient manuscripts contain the entire passage; in 10 of them the statement that some manuscripts lack the passage is balanced by the statement that in many, the passage is present.”  

Errors of Omission

(1) The NET’s footnote neglects to mention the early and abundant patristic support for the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20.   It would be better balanced if it contained a statement such as, “Mark 16:9-20 was utilized in the 180’s by Irenaeus, in the 170’s by Tatian, around 160 by Justin, and probably by the unknown author of Epistula Apostolorum, around 150.  Many other patristic writers, such as Hippolytus, Ambrose, and Augustine, also used the passage.”  The NET's failure to mention four pieces of evidence from the 100s, and other Roman-Empire-era patristic evidence, while mentioning evidence that is considerably younger, shows very clearly that the NET's note was designed to persuade readers to regard Mark 16:9-20 as spurious, not to describe the relevant evidence in a balanced and unbiased way.  

Problematic Descriptions of the Internal Evidence

(1)  The NET’s claim that the vocabulary of verses 9-20 is “decidedly non-Markan” should be qualified by a comparison to the data collected by Bruce Terry, who showed that a nearby 12-verse passage (Mark 15:40-16:4) contains even more once-used words (that is, “non-Markan” words, using the NET’s loaded language).

(2) The NET’s phrase “the strange variety of dissimilar endings” misrepresents the facts of the case, considering that only the abrupt ending and the Shorter Ending do not involve verses 9-20.  It would fit the evidence better to say instead, “The existence of the Shorter Ending attests to the earlier existence of copies without vv. 9-20.”

(3) The second of the NET’s “three possible explanations” is, “(2) the Gospel was never finished.”  This should be reworded, because in its present form it looks like the NET’s note-writer has plagiarized: Metzger also listed three possibilities (see the footnote in TCGNT, p. 126), and the second one is, “(b) the Gospel was never finished.”

(4) The NET’s proposal that copyists “filled out the text with what seemed to them an appropriate conclusion” clashes with internal evidence that very strongly indicates that verses 9-20 were not written as a continuation from verse 8.  Second-century copyists, if they had been engaged in writing an ending for Mark, would have resumed the narrative-threads that are left hanging in 16:8, instead of resetting the narrative stage, so to speak, in verse 9, and they would have focused on post-resurrection appearances in Galilee, not in/around Jerusalem.  The NET’s note should be rewritten to allow room for the possibility that Mark 16:9-20 was attached to 16:8 when the Gospel of Mark was still in its production-stage, rather than decades later.

  

The scholars who contributed to, or oversaw, the production of the NET’s notes in the Gospels are:

Darrell L. Bock (Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary),

Michael H. Burer (the NET’s Editor and Assistant Project Director, and Associate Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary),

Buist M. Fanning, III (the NET’s New Testament editor and Senior Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary).

W. Hall Harris III (the NET’s Project Director and Managing Editor, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary),

Gregory J. Herrick (a researcher and writer with the Biblical Studies Foundation, which sponsors the NET; he received his Ph.D. in 1999 from Dallas Theological Seminary),

David K. Lowery (Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary), and

Daniel B. Wallace (the NET’s Senior New Testament editor, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary).  

Let the readers and the students beware.

Why Was the Gospel of Mark So Popular?

            “It looks like GMark suffered an almost total eclipse in the second century CE.”  So said Dr. Larry Hurtado last month (February 2013).   (“Gmark” means the Gospel of Mark, and “CE” is secularese for “Common Era,” better known to Christians as “A.D.,” that is, Anno Domini, the year of our Lord.)  He went on to say that in the 100s, the Gospel of Mark was "practically lost from sight, submerged from view."

            Why has Dr. Hurtado proposed that the Gospel of Mark was used only sparingly in the 100s, compared to the other Gospels?  His reasons are basically two:  (1)  Only one manuscript of Mark (P45) from the first three centuries is extant, whereas from the same time period, we possess remnants of over 12 copies of Matthew, 16 copies of John, and seven copies of Luke.  (2)  In patristic writings of the first three centuries, there are fewer clear quotations from Mark than there are from the other Gospels.
            Neither reason justifies Dr. Hurtado’s conclusion.

            Let’s first consider the evidence from extant manuscripts.  It is arbitrary to assume that a fragment of Matthew, when pristine, was part of a manuscript of only the Gospel of Matthew, and not a part of a manuscript of the four Gospels that included Mark.  As far as I know, not a single second-century manuscript of any Gospel can be shown to have initially been part of a volume that contained only one Gospel-account.  So what can a fragment, containing a dozen verses from Matthew, or three verses from Luke, tell us about the relative popularity of Mark?  In its current condition,  it tells us nothing about Mark’s 16 chapters that it is not telling us about 27 chapters of Matthew, or of 23 chapters of Luke:  those chapters have not survived.  That is not the same as telling us that those chapters were not there when the manuscript was in pristine condition.  There is simply not enough evidence to say one way or the other.
            If we don’t want an assumption of single-Gospel volumes to predetermine our conclusions, then we cannot validly treat small fragments as indicators of a Gospel’s relative popularity, any more than we can treat a fragment of Matthew chapter 1 as an indication that Matthew 1 was much more popular than Matthew chapter 2.  Removing early fragments of Matthew from consideration means removing all of the manuscripts of Matthew upon which Dr. Hurtado built the premise that Matthew was more popular than Mark in the 100s.
            In addition, Dr. Hurtado’s manuscript-evidence, besides being very fragmentary, is chronologically too broad and geographically too narrow.  The manuscript-fragments which form the main basis of his case include several from the late 200s or early 300s, a period which he acknowledges to be “toward the end of, or perhaps beyond, the period of our concern here.”  If fragments such as P39 (200s), P53 (200s), P80 (200s), P95 (200s), 0162 (200s or 300s), and 0171 (c. 300) are to be in the equation, then so should manuscripts from the 300s and 400s – including, besides the well-known uncials that contain Mark, fragments such as 0313 (containing Mark 4:9 and 4:15) and 0315 (containing Mark 2:19, 21, and 25, and 3:1-2), inasmuch as these copies had second-century ancestors too.  And because the fragments enlisted by Dr. Hurtado come from approximately the same place (Egypt, and mainly Oxyrhynchus), they cannot tell us about the relative popularity of the Gospel of Mark in other locales.  Meanwhile, wherever there is anything to see, we observe the Gospel of Mark being given the same treatment as the other three canonical Gospels in early versions of the Gospels, whether Sahidic or Latin or Syriac.
            What about the patristic evidence, or rather, the alleged lack of evidence of much use of Mark in the 100s?  Here we must begin by considering two things about the Gospel of Mark:  (1)  it is shorter than Matthew and it is shorter than Luke, and therefore, fewer quotations from Mark ought to be expected, because Mark has fewer words from which to quote.  (2)  While Matthew and Luke both have large sections which are unique to each one, about 90% of the Gospel of Mark is paralleled in either Matthew or in Luke.  As a result, unless a patristic writer specifically says something like, “Now I am reading from the Gospel of Mark,” it is difficult to confidently identify, as quotations from Mark, quotations of passages which appear in both Matthew and Mark, or in both Mark and Luke, or in all three.  Because Mark has so much less distinct material than Matthew and Luke, Mark has a special disadvantage:  short quotations from almost 90% of Mark, unless they are specifically identified, are impossible to confidently identify as quotations from Mark.

(Students of the Synoptic Problem wishing to indulge in a little mental exercise may wish to test Dr. Hurtado’s case for the unpopularity of Mark in the 100s by seeking out patristic quotations, from that century, from the parts of Matthew and Luke which overlap, and attempting to specifically identify which Gospel is being used.  I suspect that they will find that Dr. Hurtado’s approach will yield the strange conclusion that those passages were similarly unpopular – not because they actually were unpopular, of course, but because they, like unspecified quotations from Mark, are difficult to confidently isolate as quotations from one specific Gospel.)

            So:  the reasons why there are more identifiable quotations from Matthew and Luke than from Mark in patristic writings of the first three centuries of Christendom are (1)  because there is more of Matthew and Luke from which to quote, and (2) because there is much more unique material from which to quote in Matthew and in Luke than there is in Mark.  (A third reason is because Origen's commentaries on Matthew and John are (mostly) extant; this one factor is capable of tilting the statistics.)  When these two considerations are not ignored, the proposed support for the idea that Mark was less popular than Matthew or Luke disappears.

            In addition, the second-century uses of Mark are not trivial:  Papias (c. 110) tells us about the setting of its production; the anonymous author of Epistula Apostolorum (c. 150) shows familiarity with Mark; Justin Martyr (c. 160) refers to the unique contents of Mark 3:17; Tatian incorporates the Gospel of Mark into the Diatessaron (c. 172); Irenaeus (c. 184) quotes from Mark 1:1 and 16:19 in Against Heresies Book 3.  Irenaeus also mentions that a group of heretics existed which used Mark especially.   In the early 200s, Clement of Alexandria very loosely quotes from Mark chapter 10; Hippolytus uses Mark, and Origen refers to Mark 2:14, stating that he found a statement that Levi was one of the apostles “in some of the copies of the Gospel according to Mark.”  The manuscripts used by these writers have not survived, but their statements plainly imply the existence of at least ten copies of Mark, all produced no later than 250.  So, when we consider the special conditions that are required to identify a patristic quotation of Mark -- the writer must either say that is he quoting from Mark, or else he must quote something from Mark that is different from the parallels in Matthew and Luke -- the evidence for patristic use of Mark compares very well against the evidence for patristic use of Matthew and Luke.
            So is there any real evidence that the Gospel of Mark was relatively unpopular in the 100s, compared to Matthew, Luke, and John?  No.  When statistical mirages and the oversimplified manipulations of fragmentary evidence are rejected, nothing stands in the way of the idea that the Gospel of Mark was as popular in the 100s as the other three canonical Gospels.

Matthew 14:33 - Did They Come to Jesus?

In Matthew 14:33, after Jesus has entered the boat after walking on the Sea of Galilee, do the disciples come to Jesus, and then worship Him, or do they simply worship Him?  To put it another way:  does the word elthontes belong in the Greek text of Matthew 14:33, or not?   Among major English translations, only the King James Version, the New King James Version, the Good News Version (the paraphrase, not the translation), and the World English Bible reflect a base-text that includes elthontes here.

 Edward Miller’s 1899 A Textual Commentary on the Holy Gospels, covering Matthew 1-14, provides some valuable information.  (Miller’s book, which is more like a detailed textual apparatus than an analytical commentary, can be downloaded at http://archive.org/details/textualcommentar00mill .)  The UBS Greek New Testament is remarkable unhelpful in this case, because although this variant clearly has an impact on translation, neither the second nor the fourth edition of the UBS GNT acknowledges its existence.

The Byzantine Text, including the Textus Receptus and almost all uncials (Miller lists Phi D E F G K L M P S U V X Gamma Delta Pi) and “Much the most minuscules,” that is, almost all of them (but not 1, 22, 118, 300, and 700, and a few others) support elthontes (having come) between ploiw (ship) and prosekunhsan (worshipped).  The Nestle-Aland apparatus also mentions uncial 0106 (from the 600’s) as support for elthontes.  Miller lists several patristic writers who support the inclusion of elthontes, including Didymus (in Egypt), Chrysostom (in Constantinople and Antioch), Jerome, and Augustine.  Clearly, elthontes has very broad, diverse, and ancient support.  There is another reading, proselthontes (having come near), supported by Theta, 13, 124, 346, 503, 556, and 1424, and by the Sinaitic Syriac.  And, although Miller lists the Curetonian Syriac as support for elthontes, Willker has listed it as an ally of its Syriac relative, supporting proselthontes like the Sinaitic Syriac.

The reading ploiw prosekunhsan, without anything in between these two words, is supported by Aleph, B, C, N, 22, 579, the first hand of 892, and a few other MSS, as well as by one Old Latin MS (ff1) and the Bohairic and Sahidic versions.  With the exception of Codex N, the Greek support is mainly Egyptian. 

This is an instructive variant-unit.  Observe what has happened:  an early copyist, with the words of Matthew 14:12 fresh in his memory, added a slight editorial touch, altering elthontes to proselthontes, via the addition of pros.  Thus he produced the reading ploiw proselthontes prosekunhsan.  A subsequent copyist, inheriting this slightly altered text, accidentally skipped from pros- to pros-, omitting the letters in between and thus losing an entire word.

A sustained attempt to correct the addition of pros was probably undertaken at Caesarea:  manuscripts 118 and 209 (representatives of the Caesarean Text) read ontes.  It is as if copyists were given instructions to remove the first part of the word, and this was overdone, resulting not only in the loss of the extra pros but also of the neighboring letters elth.

While elthontes is the Byzantine reading (and is supported by Western representatives as well), and the simple lack of any word is attested by the best representatives of the Alexandrian, a relatively minor group, displaying the Caesarean Text – the text of a relatively small group of MSS that hardly ever gets its readings chosen (mainly because this is a highly harmonized text-form) – is the one that provides the key to developing a hypothesis about the steps from a form of text with elthontes to a form of text without it.  Without the intermediate step (i.e., the addition of pros-) we would see no simply mechanism by which the word could be lost.  This is one reason why, in textual criticism, it is important to seek help wherever help might be found, even if this means that the enterprise, when it begins, may appear to be a matter of a lion being helped by a mouse.     

Against this two-step hypothesis, the only alternative explanation that might be made to defend the Alexandrian reading is that a copyist, for some unfathomable reason, thought that a narrative in which Jesus and His disciples are already close together in a boat needed to state that the disciples came to Jesus before they worshipped Him.  This is rather less likely than the alternative.  (Willker balanced the theory that proselthontes is probably “a harmonization to immediate context” against the observation that the context does not naturally suggest that the disciples in the boat would need to come to Jesus before they could bow down to Him.  The same consideration applies to elthontes.)

 

Daniel Wallace and Changes in the KJV

What I am writing about today is not directly related to the text of the Gospels.  Today, I want to address some misrepresentations that are being spread about the King James Version.  I am not a KJV-Onlyist, but I do not like seeing the KJV misrepresented and belittled by a writer whose descriptions of the KJV have consistently been the verbal equivalent of a funhouse-mirror.  

Some time ago, Daniel Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary (where belief in the authority and inerrancy of Scripture is one of seven essential “Core Beliefs,” according to the DTS website at http://www.dts.edu/about/doctrinalstatement ) responded to someone's clarification of his earlier claim that the KJV has undergone more than 100,000 changes.  His response is at http://bible.org/article/changes-kjv-1611an-illustration and it is that painfully specious essay that I am writing about here.

The author of the rebuttal to which Wallace responds observed that if one sets aside changes to spelling and punctuation, changes related to differences of fonts, and changes consisting of shifts in the form of the same word (from “amongst” to “among,” for example), then there are only 421 changes from the 1611 KJV to the typical KJV that you can buy off the shelf today.  The author pointed out that Wallace, in his earlier essay, “clearly intended his reader to believe that the King James Bible of 1611 is significantly different than the King James of today.  As usual, however, the facts don’t bear the critics out.”

           

Wallace could have said, "Guilty.  My statement was inaccurate and misleading.  In the text of the 66 books of the Bible, there are actually only several hundred meaningful differences between the 1611 KJV and the KJV as it is published today."  We all make mistakes.  Rare indeed are the individuals who are immune from the axiom that the more one speaks, the more one misspeaks; therefore the most generous speaker tends to be the subject of the most complaints.  

But how did Wallace respond?  With the most poorly argued essay he has ever put online (and that's saying something).  Here is the gist of his tactics: 

(1)  The person who objected to my claim wrote vigorously, like a person who has been offended or outraged, and this makes his claims questionable. 

(2)  What, me, intentionally mislead my readers?  I was just passing along information I received from other sources.  

(3)  The claim that font-changes account for the vast majority of changes to the KJV cannot be true, since a change of fonts would affect every word in the text. 

(4)  When comparing II Samuel 12:20-31 in the 1611 KJV to the same passage in a modern-day edition of the KJV, I found 41 changes, of which, after spelling-changes, punctuation-changes, and capitalization-changes are removed from the list, exactly none remain which result in a change of meaning.  Which is, of course, exactly what I wanted my readers to conclude from my earlier remark that today's KJV-text has 100,000 differences from the KJV-text of 1611!

Then he leaves the ring, stops talking about the rebuttal (which exposed the deceptive nature of his earlier statement),  and says:  “What is not admitted by KJV-only folks is that the changes in most modern translations from the KJV (though on a verbal level are certainly greater than these) do not affect the essentials of the faith.”  That is true as long as "essentials of the faith" are never defined, and everyone is allowed to move a doctrine from the “essentials” category to the “non-essentials” category at will.  Wallace knows very well that some variants that some very influential textual critics have regarded as original (at Mt. 13:35, for example) pose a real problem for the doctrine of inerrancy.  Yet he maintains his claim by gently putting the doctrine of inerrancy in the category of peripheral, rather than essential, doctrine.

Let’s briefly give this claim of his some attention:  do changes in most modern versions, where they mean something other than what the KJV means, affect the essentials of the faith?  I have already written several parts of a series of essays showing that textual variants have a significant impact on doctrine, and the series is not yet complete.  But to read those essays would take much time.  A speedier option is available:  let’s ask one of the translators of the 1881 Revised Version, the first popular English version (besides the earlier attempts by Unitarians and private individuals such as Abner Kneeland) based primarily on the Alexandrian Text, for his thoughts on this question.  George Vance Smith was a Unitarian who participated in the committee that produced the New Testament of the 1881 Revised Version of the New Testament.  And he was not a minor participant; he was a major participant:  C. J. Ellicott, another committee-member, noted that Vance Smith participated in 245 of the committee’s 407 meetings.  (For comparison:  Hort attended 362; Westcott attended 304.)

 Here is what Vance Smith said in his 1881 book Texts and Margins of the Revised New Testament Affecting Theological Doctrine Briefly Reviewed: about the claim that "the great doctrines of popular theology remain unaffected, untouched by the results of the revision." -- “To the writer [i.e., to Smith], any such statement appears to be in the most substantial sense contrary to the facts of the case.”  And he proceeded to give reasons, citing the absence of most of First John 5:7, the adjusted wording of John 5:44, the rendering of EIS in Matthew 28:18 as “into” rather than “in,” the textual change in I Tim. 3:16, the uncertainly conveyed by marginalia at Acts 20:28, Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13, and I Peter [II Peter is meant] 1:1, the wording of Philippians 2:9, and the disappearance of the term “atonement.”  Then he proceeds:  “The changes just enumerated are manifestly of great importance, and are they not wholly unfavourable to the popular [i.e., non-Unitarian] theology?  Many persons will deny this, but it is hard to see on what grounds they do so.  Or, if it be true that the popular orthodoxy remains unaffected by such changes, the inference is unavoidable that popular orthodoxy must be very indifferent as to the nature of the foundation on which it stands.”       

Back to Wallace’s essay:  he writes, “My argument about the KJV is not that it has undergone radical changes in its long history . . . but that it has undergone changes — 100,000 of them.”  But look at his earlier statement (at http://bible.org/article/why-so-many-versions ):  “We must remember that the King James Bible of today is not the King James of 1611.  It has undergone three revisions, incorporating more than 100,000 changes!”  The impression given by this is most definitely not true, because almost all of those 100,000 changes are trivialities that do not affect the meaning of the text.  His own list from II Sam. 12:20-31 illustrates that aside from 421 alterations, the modern-day text of the KJV is the same as the text of the KJV of 1611, allowing for updates in spelling, capitalization, fonts, punctuation, and the removal of the books of the Apocrypha.  Such updates are categorically different from changes to the base-text, or changes to what the translation was intended to mean, and Wallace knows it.

He then states that supporters of the KJV should not object to the changes that are observed among versions, or among different editions of the same version, on the grounds that the KJV has undergone similar changes:  “As the adage goes,” he concludes, “Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”  But this completely misses the real objections about (a) shifts in the base-texts of modern versions (such as the recent shift in the NIV at Mark 1:41, where a reference to Jesus' compassion has been replaced by a statement that Jesus was indignant) and (b) renderings in modern translations and paraphrases which mean two very different things despite being based on the same base-text. 

And there the main part of Wallace’s essay concludes.  But his argumentation continues, in a meandering way, in an Appendix, in which his main subject is not the rebuttal of his his earlier statement, but some aspects of KJV-Onlyism.  So now we reach tactic #5:  Let’s change the subject. 

Not far into the Appendix, I encounter tactic #6:  misrepresent your opponent.  Wallace wrote, “When Scott details a handful of changes that are indeed trivial, he says, “Friends, this is the ENTIRE extent of the nature of the changes from the King James Bible of 1611 to the King James Bible of the present day.” As we mentioned above, that is not correct. Some of the changes in the KJV through the centuries have been fairly significant."  But in the same material to which Wallace refers, it was reported three times that there are 421 non-trivial changes in the KJV. 

So desperate is Wallace to defend his indefensible claim that he resorts to treating the loss of the word “not” in the 1631 “Wicked Bible” as an example of a change in the KJV.  But the objection is not that modern translations have been poorly printed.  The objection, blazingly obviously, is against deliberate changes.  Wallace claims that a change is a change, whether it’s accidental or deliberate, and thus “the principle is still the same” -- even if the change is accidental, and is manifestly a printing-mistake, and the person responsible for it is punished, and it is retracted after being detected.  But that is simply not true!  The changes in modern versions against which the objection has been made are not accidental; they are not printing-mistakes; they are not punished, and they are not retracted, because the people responsible for them consider them improvements, not mistakes.  This is so obvious that further comment should not be necessary.

 

Also in the appendix, Wallace recycles his claim that Matthew 23:24 in the KJV has a typo; the idea is that the text was intended to read “strain out” instead of “strain at.”  This theory has been shown to be dubious because several English writers earlier than, or contemporary with, the KJV use the phrase “strain at,” and it is highly unlikely that all their writings endured the same misprint.  Nevertheless Wallace continued to repeat his claim.  Waitasecond:  did I say his claim?  I should say, instead, that he is repeating a claim that was expressed on pages 150-151 of the 1873 book The Revision of the New Testament (by Lightfoot, Trench, and Ellicott), at about the same time that those three men were busily working on the Revised Version alongside Vance Smith.  Is it not obvious that Wallace is echoing this claim, not because it can be shown to be true, but because it is convenient propaganda against the KJV? 

Wallace, near the end of the Appendix, says:  “To put all this in perspective: There are approximately 25,000 changes made in the KJV of the New Testament from the original version of 1611.  But in the underlying Greek text, the numbers are significantly smaller: there are approximately 5000 changes between the Textus Receptus (the Greek text used by the KJV translators) and the modern critical texts (used as the base for modern translations).  That’s one-fifth the amount of changes that have occurred within the KJV NT itself.”

But such a comparison gives a false impression, because almost all of the 25,000 changes in the KJV to which Wallace refers are trivialities involving spelling, capitalization, fonts, and punctuation, whereas a large proportion of the differences between the Textus Receptus and the Revised Texts (and the Re-Re-x27-Revised Texts) yields a translation-affecting change.    

To illustrate:  in Room A there are 24,500 bubbles [representing benign differences between the 1611 KJV and modern editions of the KJV] and 500 dollars [representing sense-changing differences between the 1611 KJV and modern editions of the KJV].  In Room B there are 3,500 bubbles and 1,500 dollars.  Do both rooms have basically the same amount of money?  No.  Likewise Wallace’s analogy is false.   

As he closes, Wallace reaffirms that he does not regard the KJV as the best translation because (1) "its underlying text is farther from the original than is the text used in modern translations;" (2) "its translation is archaic, with now over 300 words that no longer mean what they did in 1611;" (3) "four hundred years of increased knowledge of the biblical world and languages have rendered many of the KJV renderings obsolete."  To which I answer:

(1)  The KJV’s NT base-text deviates sometimes from the original text, but at least it is stable, and the deviation is almost always benign, reaffirming a truth that is taught elsewhere in the New Testament, whereas the base-text of most modern translations is unstable and, because the text-compilers erroneously used a principle of preference for the shorter reading, it has lost some content.  I would rather sail in a ship with barnacles than in a ship with holes.    

(2)  Free tools to help readers learn these 300-400 archaic words are available online.  See, for example, the first 16 pages of the PDF at http://www.tbsbibles.org/pdf_information/1-1.pdf .

(3)  Since Wallace claims that “the Bible must be translated afresh every fifty years or so” in order to remain accessible, this charge that the KJV is full of verbal antiques, if valid, will apply, 50 years from now, to our modern versions too.  But inasmuch as Wallace made this claim about obsolete renderings without giving examples, I do not grant that he has shown that many renderings in the KJV are obsolete to the point of obscuring the meaning of the base-text.  No doubt such renderings exist, but I believe it could be concisely shown that the KJV’s archaic language (such as the distinction between thee and ye, reflecting the base-text’s distinction between singular and plural pronouns) makes the KJV more precise (compared to most modern version) more frequently than it makes the meaning obscure, and I also believe that some words that have been called archaic are merely obscure, and sometimes it is necessary to use an obscure term (that is, a term that will be obscure the very first time it is encountered, before being learned) in order to make a precise translation.  If a Bible-translation contributes to the expansion of its readers’ vocabulary, this is not necessarily a bad thing.    

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.