Earlier
this month at
The
Gospel Coalition’s blog, Elijah Hixson posted some thoughts about Mark
16:9-20, addressing the question of why anyone would question the authenticity
of the passage – as several Bibles versions, such as the ESV, incite readers to
do, by means of their vague and misleading footnotes.
Hixson points out that although such
footnotes refer ambiguously to “Some manuscripts” or “Some of the earliest
manuscripts,” the actual number of Greek manuscripts of Mark in which the text
ends at the end of 16:8 is exactly
two.
Hixson
also points out that those two manuscripts are from the 300s, and “around AD 180, Irenaeus unambiguously quoted
Mark 16:19.” He also points out that two
other writers from the 100s, Justin Martyr and Tatian, “likely knew the verses.” Thus the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20, besides
being supported by over 1,600 Greek manuscripts (and hundreds of Greek
lectionaries), is supported by the very early patristic evidence. Furthermore, the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20 is
supported not only in terms of antiquity
(the oldest witnesses) and quantity
(the greatest amount of witnesses), but also in terms of range of attestation: Mark
16:9-20 has early support from numerous authors – not named by Hixson – in
many different locations across the Roman Empire (from Patrick in Ireland, to
Ambrose in Milan, to Augustine in North Africa, to Macarius Magnes (and the
pagan author whose work he addresses) in Asia Minor (SW Turkey), to Aphrahat in
Syria, and to Eznik of Golb in Armenia, to name a few).
Hixson did not go into detail about
the very strong patristic support for Mark 16:9-20. He gave an inordinate proportion of his
attention to evidence against the inclusion of these 12 verses. Nevertheless, I like his conclusion: “Because Mark 16:9-20 is undeniably early, is
present in 99 percent of manuscripts, and has traditionally been considered
canonical, I recommend keeping it in the text.”
Hixson qualified that, stating, “It’s probably not from Mark” – but the crucial
question concerns its presence, or absence, in the autograph, not its
authorship. If we were to start erasing every part of Scripture that is present
due to the involvement of a redactor or supplemental author, the books of Psalms, Proverbs, Jeremiah, etc., would significantly shrink.
Some other commentators on Mark
16:9-20 have misled their readers in ways that Hixson avoided:
Wallace,
Evans,
Wright,
and numerous other commentators have made false claims that Mark 16:9-20 is
marked by text-critically significant asterisks and obeli in non-annotated
manuscripts.
●
Norman
Geisler and numerous other commentators have spread the false claim that
Mark 16:9-20 is absent from “many manuscripts.”
● Ben Witherington III and several other
commentators have spread the false claim that Eusebius showed no knowledge of
Mark 16:9-20.
(The cascade of
misinformation about Mark 16:9-20 from commentators and Bible-footnotes escaped
mention in the recent book
Myths
& Mistakes.)
Although Hixson did not fall into
such egregious errors, there are five ways in which his good analysis might be
made better.
 |
A note about Mark 16:9-20
in GA 22. |
(1) Hixson commended the treatment that the medieval
scribe Ephraim in GA 1582 gave to Mark 16:9-20.
However, there was more to Ephraim’s treatment that Hixson did not
mention. Yes, Ephraim perpetuated the
note, Ἔν τισι μεν τῶν ἄντιγράφων, ἔως ώδε πληροῦται ὁ ἐυαγγελιστής, εως ου και
Ευσεβιος ο Παμφίλου εκανόνισεν· ἐν πολλοῖς δὲ ταῦτα φέρεται – “In
some of the copies, the evangelist finishes here, up to which point also
Eusebius of Pamphilus
[i.e., Eusebius of Caesarea, who was a student of Pamphilus] made canon sections. But in many the
following is also contained.” But he
also did something else.
Ephraim
included another note (also borrowed from his exemplar) at Mark 16:19: Ειρηναιος ο των αποστόλων πλησίον εν
τω προς τας αιρέσεις Τριτωι λόγωι τουτο Ανήνεγκεν το ρητον ως Μάρκω ειρημένον –
that is, “Irenaeus, who lived near the
time of the apostles, cites this from Mark in the third book of his work Against Heresies.”
If footnote-formaters really want
to emulate Ephraim, (as the
Tyndale
House Greek New Testament attempts to do) they should not only mention
that 99% of the extant Greek manuscripts of Mark – or “many,” as Ephraim’s note
says – include Mark 16:9-20, but also mention that Irenaeus quoted from Mark 16:19
when he wrote Book 3 of
Against Heresies in about A.D. 180
– long before the production of any extant manuscript that contains Mark 16.
 |
Top: The last page of Mark in Codex B,
ending the text at 16:8.
Bottom: the same page, with 16:9-20
superimposed in the copyist's lettering. |
(2)
In addition to mentioning that
Vaticanus (B) and
Sinaiticus (ℵ) are the only
Greek manuscripts of Mark in which the text of 16:8 is followed by nothing but
the closing title, it would be helpful to draw readers’ attention to the
remarkable unusual features in these manuscripts pertaining to the ending of
Mark:
Codex
Vaticanus has a distinct blank space after the end of Mark 16:8 – the only
such blank space in the entire New Testament portion of the manuscript, and (
contra Wallace) the only blank space
that is not explained as a natural effect of factors involved in the codex’s
production.
Verses 9-20 fit within this
blank space with a minimal reduction in letter-spacing.
Meanwhile,
Codex
Sinaiticus contains a replacement-sheet at the end of Mark – that is, the four
pages that contain Mark 14:54-Luke 1:56 were not produced by the same copyist
who made the surrounding pages – and the rate of letters-per-line by the
copyist who produced the text on those pages (almost certainly the
diorthotes, or supervisor) shows that he
made a deliberate effort to
avoid
leaving a blank column after 16:8.
Thus
while B and ℵ echo exemplars in which verses 9-20 were absent, they also attest
to their copyists’ awareness of exemplars in which verses 9-20 were included.
(3) Witnesses for Ephraim’s note, and for the
Shorter Ending, should be brought into focus.
Hixson mentioned that “At
least 23 Greek manuscripts that include Mark 16:9-20 also have anomalies
like extra endings or notes that express doubts concerning the authenticity of
these verses.” It should be emphasized
that the manuscripts with additional notes are not independent witnesses; they
represent the family-1 manuscript-cluster, echoing the same scribal tradition
shared by Ephraim’s exemplar.
Manuscripts 1, 205, 2886 [that’s
2886, the same MS also known as 205abs,
not 2866 – readers of my book,
Authentic: The Case for Mark 16:9-20, be aware that there is a typo there!], 209,
and 1582 descend from a common ancestor, and manuscripts 15, 22, 1110, 1192,
and 1210 share the same pedigree; they echo the same note that Ephraim
preserved but without mentioning Eusebius’ cross-reference system (probably
because when and where these copies were made, the Eusebian Canons had already
been expanded to include the verses).
Manuscripts 20, 215, and 300 share
the note ἐντεῦθεν εως το τέλος ἔεν τισι τῶν ἀντιγράφων οὐ κεῖται· ἐν δε τοις ἀρχαίοις
πάντα ἀπαράλειπτα κεῖται,” that is, “From here (i.e., the end of 16:8) to the
end forms no part of the text in some of the copies. But in the ancient ones,
it all appears intact.”
These three
manuscripts also share the Jerusalem Colophon, showing their contact with the
same transmission-line.
So, ten of Hixson’s 23 manuscripts echo the same source, and three of them echo another source. If we are serious about applying the old
axiom, “Manuscripts must be weighed, not
counted,” then the relationships of these manuscripts’ texts, as echoes of
the same voice, should be highlighted.
(4) While the subject of the relationships of witnesses is in view,
Jerome’s dependence, in his Epistle 120,
To Hedibia, upon Eusebius’ earlier comments in Ad Marinum, should be revisited.
Hixson claimed: “Even though Jerome and Severus were
clearly drawing from Eusebius’s work, nothing in their experience with
manuscripts prevented them from repeating Eusebius’s claims that the majority
of manuscripts (Jerome), or at least the most accurate ones (Jerome and Severus),
lacked those verses.”
However,
that is only part of the picture. Jerome’s
use of Eusebius’ much-condensed claim as the basis to reject the passage (and
thus resolve the perceived discrepancy under discussion) should not be
considered without also considering Jerome’s acceptance of the passage:
After
Jerome says:
This
problem has a twofold solution. Either we do not accept the testimony of
Mark, because this final portion is not contained in most of the Gospels that
bear his name – almost all the Greek codices lacking it –
he
proceeds:
or else we must affirm that Matthew and Mark
have both told the truth, that our Lord rose on the evening of the Sabbath, and
that He was seen by Mary Magdalene in the morning of the first day of the
following week.
And he proceeds to take
the second option:
So this is how this
passage of Saint Mark should be read: “Jesus arising,” place a little
pause here, then add, “on the first day of the week in the morning appeared to
Mary Magdalene,” so that, being raised, according to Saint Matthew, in the
evening of the last day of the week, He appeared to Mary Magdalene, according
to Saint Mark, “the morning of the first day of the week,” which is how John
also represents the events, stating that He was seen on the morning of the next
day.
Jerome
could have said, “Since the passage is
absent from most copies of the Gospel of Mark, we should reject it.” But he did just the opposite. He casually left his abridgment of Eusebius’
claim about Greek manuscripts where he dropped it, and did not pick it up
again, because his purpose was to resolve a harmonization between two passages
which both he and Hedibia already accepted.
Also
relevant to the evidence from Jerome are (1) the
possibility that Jerome expected Hedibia to recognize that he was borrowing
from Ad Marinum, and (2)
his statement in his Preface to the Vulgate Gospels (383/384) that he edited
the Vulgate Gospels on the basis of ancient Greek manuscripts, and (3) his statement in 417, in Against
the Pelagians, that after Mark 16:14, there was – “in certain exemplars,
especially in Greek codices” – the interpolation known as the Freer
Logion. Jerome pictured the Freer Logion
as something unusual, while the presence of Mark 16:14 was ordinary. A heavy spotlight has been put on Jerome’s
casual use of Eusebius’ statement about manuscripts in Ad Marinum, while
Jerome’s complete acceptance of Mark 16:9-20 – an acceptance somewhat difficult
to account for, if almost all Greek codices available to him ended Mark’s text
at verse 8 – has tended to be pushed into the shadows.
(5) Hixson stated that the note preserved by Ephraim “probably predates 10th-century Ephraim by a few hundred years.” However, as observed by K.W. Kim in 1950 in his article Codices 1582, 1739, and Origen in the Journal of Biblical Literature, the most recent patristic citations in the margin-notes in 1582 are from Basil of Cappadocia (329-379); a reasonable explanation for the non-use of more recent writings is that Ephraim’s exemplar was made only shortly after Basil’s death. However, 1582 also has a note about the pericope adulterae – which is found in f-1’s flagship members at the end of the Gospel of John – which reads, “The chapter about the adulteress: in the Gospel according to John, this does not appear in the majority of copies; nor is it commented upon by the divine fathers whose interpretations have been preserved – specifically, by John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria; nor is it taken up by Theodore of Mopsuestia and the others. For this reason, it was not kept in the place where it is found in a few copies, at the beginning of the 86th chapter [that is, the 86th Eusebian section], following, ‘Search and see that a prophet does not arise out of Galilee.’”
The names of the authors in this note push the production-date of the exemplar of 1582 forward a bit; it must be later than Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444). But even if we were to posit that Ephraim’s exemplar was produced a full century after Cyril’s death, a production-date in the mid-500s would be a bit more than “a few hundred years” before the mid-900s.
More could be said about some other things that Hixson
mentioned, but for additional details I refer readers to my book,
Authentic: The
Case for Mark 16:9-20, and for some interesting analysis of Jerome’s
letter to Hedibia, see Andrew Cain’s 2003 article
Defending Hedibia and Detecting
Eusebius: Jerome’s Correspondence with Two Gallic Women (Epist. 120-21).
POSTSCRIPT
To shine some light on the testimony of Eusebius, whose words are habitually blurred and misrepresented by commentators, here are three relevant extracts from Eusebius of Caesarea’s
Ad Marinum, where he discussed the
ending of Mark. (Based on Roger Pearse’s 2010
Eusebius of Caesarea – Gospel Problems & Solutions.)
From Q-&-A
#1:
Your first question was:
How is it that the Savior’s resurrection evidently took place, in Matthew, “late on the Sabbath,”
but in Mark “early in the morning on the first day of the week”?
The
answer to this would be twofold. The
actual nub of the matter is the pericope which says this. One who athetises
that pericope would say that it is not found in all copies of the Gospel
according to Mark: accurate copies end
their text of the Marcan account with the words of the young man whom the women
saw, and who said to them, “Do not be afraid; it is Jesus the Nazarene that
you are looking for, etc. …”, after which it adds, “And when they heard
this, they ran away, and said nothing to anyone, because they were frightened.” That is where the text does end, in almost all copies of the gospel according
to Mark. What occasionally follows in
some copies, not all, would be extraneous, most particularly if it contained
something contradictory to the evidence of the other evangelists.
That, then, would be one person’s answer: to reject it,
entirely obviating the question as superfluous.
Another view, from someone diffident about athetising
anything at all in the text of the gospels, however transmitted, is that there
is a twofold reading, as in many other places, and that both are to be
accepted; it is not for the faithful and devout to judge either as acceptable
in preference to the other.
Supposing
the latter point of view to be granted as true, the proper thing to do with the
reading is to interpret its meaning. If we were to divide up the sense of the
wording, we would not find it in conflict with the words in Matthew to the
effect that the Savior’s resurrection was “late on the Sabbath,” because we
shall read the words in Mark: “Having risen again early in the morning” with a
pause, punctuating after “Having risen again,” and making a break in the sense
before the following words. Let us then
refer “having risen again” back to Matthew’s “late on the Sabbath,” because
that was when the resurrection had taken place; but the next part forms part of
a separate idea, so let us connect it with the words that follow: “early in the
morning on the first day of the week he appeared to Mary of Magdala.”
As confirmation, that is what John has told us, as well: he too testifies that Jesus had been seen by
the Magdalene early in the morning on the first day of the week. In this way,
therefore, he appeared to her “early in the morning” in Mark also. It was not that the resurrection took place
early in the morning; it was well before that, “late on the Sabbath,” as
Matthew has it. That was when he appeared to Mary, after his resurrection; the
appearance was not at the time of the resurrection, but “early in the morning.”
Thus two points of time are presented here: that of the resurrection, “late on the Sabbath,”
and that of the Savior’s appearance, “early in the morning,” as written by Mark
in words to be read as including a pause:
“Having risen again.” Then the
next words are to be pronounced after our punctuation-mark: “early in the
morning on the first day of the week he appeared to Mary of Magdala, from whom
he had driven out seven devils.”
FROM
Q-&A #2, Part 9 (Where Eusebius suggests that there were two women known as
Mary Magdalene):
It is perfectly reasonable
to say that two Marys came from the same place, Magdala. There is then no difficulty in saying that one
of them was the Magdalene who, in Matthew, came to the tomb late on the
sabbath; and then again that the other, also a Magdalene, came there early in
the morning, in John, and that she is the one of whom it is stated in Mark
(according to some copies) that “he had cast seven devils” out of her, and also
presumably the one who heard the words “Do not touch me” –but not the one in
Matthew, about whom, even if she too was certainly from Magdala, the divine scripture
makes no such derogatory statement.
FROM
Q-&-A #3, Part 4:
Supposing, however, that it
is conceded that it is not the same one, but that there is one Mary who is there with
the other Mary, according to Matthew, and a different one who, in John, comes
to the tomb alone, early in the morning, while it was still dark; all doubt
would then be resolved. There would be,
late on the sabbath, the women who arrive first, being more fervent and having more
faith; they hear the Savior’s greeting, worship him, and are found fit to clasp
his feet. Then the Mary in John would be a different person, who gets there later
than the others, early in the morning; this would be the same one from whom,
according to Mark, he had cast out seven devils.
Readers are invited to double-check the data in this post.
The
flagship manuscripts of the Alexandrian text, beginning with Papyrus 28, Papyrus
66, Papyrus
75, À (Codex Sinaiticus), and B
(Codex Vaticanus) weigh in for non-inclusion of τοῖς μαθηταῖς, οἱ δὲ
μαθηταὶ. Their allies in this case
include Codex
A (fol. 46r), L, N, W,
Π, and the Curetonian Syriac, the Peshitta, the Gothic version, and
the Armenian version. This is an
interesting array of versional support, because the Peshitta and the Gothic
version tend to favor the Byzantine Text in the Gospels.
