100+ hours of research. Is the longer ending of Mark authentic?: The Mark Series pt 69 (16:9-20)

all right here is the big big question that i've spent way more time than i thought i would trying to figure out the answer to which is do the last 12 verses in the gospel of mark that's mark 16 verses 9 through 20. do they actually belong in our bible and this breaks down into multiple questions that each need to be examined and we're going to do it thoroughly today did mark write these words in verses 9 through 20 that's that's one question some people say yes some people say no also we want to ask were they originally part of mark's gospel when it started circulating and then we're going to also want to ask do we want it in our bibles today and i'm going to give you my conclusions towards the beginning of this study because it's going to be a very long study warning and we're going to have time stamps down below so you can find different places where i deal with different things i've spent i mean at least 150 hours preparing today's study reading all kinds of content from everywhere because i just was having a really hard time wrapping my head around it so here's my best understanding as it stands now do do we think mark wrote the gospel of mark chapter 9 chapter 16 verses 9 through 20. and the answer to this is going to be for most christians a big yes most christians are going to simply say hey look it's in my bible he wrote it right like it belongs there most scholars will say no and i don't just mean like unbelieving scholars i mean most christian evangelical scholars will actually say they don't think that he wrote it these verses i actually covered verse by verse last week on the mark series and there's a link to that down below with a lot of other links down below or we'll have time stamps later as well and these verses include three post-resurrection appearances of jesus he appears to to marry he appears to two people then he appears to the eleven it's narrated very briefly and then it summarizes about 20 years of church history with one verse at the end jesus giving the great commission and then them going out now i talked about the whole snake handling stuff and all that last week but i've spent a lot of time trying to dig deep on this debate and i'm going to walk you guys through everything i learned because hear me now most people have a pretty shallow understanding of this topic even if they have spent some time studying it um that speaks even of me myself before launching into the study that i'm about to share with you guys now i've gone a lot deeper on the topic especially on the internal evidence anyway we'll get there time stamps down below and all that um let me just explain the lay of the land for us to start out with mark chapter 16 verses 9 through 20 has been in most bibles through for for most christians throughout time not just recently throughout time the vast majority of christians had this in their copy of mark whether it was a community copy or it was their own personal copy or whatever and most scholars however would say it's probably not original and there are two major big reasons for this one is the external evidence that is the various copies of mark we have in history in greek and in other languages and then other stuff like the church fathers and quotes from them and lectionaries i'll explain that when we get there and the second reason not just the external evidence is the internal evidence now this can be pretty challenging to dig into especially if you don't have a really good grasp of greek right which which i don't pretend to have this wonderful grasp of greek i'm i dabble in some greek but um but i really lean on others for their understanding a lot of this stuff and the basic claim is the vocabulary and the style that are in these last 12 verses that they don't match the rest of what's in mark and i spent days just trying to work through this and i'll share everything with you and try to make it as accessible as possible but without dumbing it down let me admit my bias and then tell you what my conclusions are going to be and then i'll walk through how i get there so my own bias either answer is okay with me i really am honestly genuinely okay with concluding that mark 16 9-20 belongs in the bible or that it doesn't with concluding that mark wrote it or concluding that he didn't i'm okay with either one i don't feel committed at the outset to one of one option or the other um my faith and my beliefs are not impacted in any significant way by this and i point you to last week's verse by verse study through this passage to show you why but yeah i'm not i'm not worried about it but that doesn't mean i don't care about it like i do care about it and while i'm okay with either one i prefer and here's my bias my preference is to say it's authentic i want to tell you that mark 16 9-20 is written by mark was originally part of the gospel and belongs in your bible excuse me for coughing in your faces or ears or whatever that was i promise germs cannot pass through microphones yet they're working on it um so i do prefer to say it's authentic um and the main reason for this is not because of any fear about my faith or worse it's actually just pastoral concerns i'm like worried that those who listen to this will will hear questions reasons to doubt whether it's authentic and that they'll overreact let me let me give an illustration for this some people will say that if if i can't trust that mark wrote and then it's authentic and everything the last 12 verses of mark then i cannot trust anything in my whole bible and they'll just say that's it the whole tower comes crumbling down and they they irrationally overreact and spaz out and there's probably someone doing it in the comments right now as i'm speaking so what i'm gonna recommend is if that's you please don't watch my video um this isn't like a weird you know reverse psychology thing i'm quite serious more important to me than what you think about these last 12 verses is you're just your faith and trust in christ and in god's word and so if you from the outset you can't handle hearing someone who's going to have some negative things to say please honestly like don't feel any there's no reason you don't have to listen to me there's no need to listen to what i have to say about this go look up um nicholas lund or robinson or one of those other scholars people who've actually defended exactly the position that you find very precious and learn those arguments and go for it that's it and i'll have a link down below to nicholas len's book you could check it out so the reason why i say this is because pastorally i'm worried that people overreact because it's just like with car accidents here's an illustration that might help um a lot of car accidents are not caused by what you'd expect it's caused by the overreaction so someone sees like a stick in the road and they overreact and they hit the center divider trying to avoid the stick or they crash into the car next to them when it actually would have been safer to just run over the stick this is the kind of thing sometimes people do when it comes to questions about their faith they overreact they flip out they they go too far and they say things like well if i can't trust the last 12 verses i can't trust anything everything my whole world is destroyed and you're like oh maybe we shouldn't talk about this um so pastorally i just want to say i'd like to be able to conclude it's authentic but even more than that i want truth so if you think you can't trust god if this is not authentic please don't watch my video um there are different issues there's different issues here and and some people don't talk about the different issues they muddle it all together right one issue is did the author of mark who wrote the rest of mark did you write the longer ending a separate issue is was it originally part of mark's gospel even if someone else wrote it whatever and the third issue is should i treat it as scripture um three very different issues let me give you um before i tell you my conclusions and then i start working through how how i would suggest you should arrive at the same conclusions i think let me tell you why this research was really hard because if you've already read scholars on this topic i think you might be confused and you might not know it because i was and i didn't know it the majority of scholars they seemed super solid in their arguments here and i'm talking about guys like dan wallace bruce metzger keith elliott um these guys seem really solid in their argumentation that the longer ending of mark does not belong but the minority of scholars which i focused on primarily in my research this time around guys like james snap nicholas lund robinson bergen farmer those guys maybe it's pronounced burgeon i don't know i don't care um but anyway the um the minority they tore apart these majorities case the majority scholars case and i started feeling a sense of distrust towards the majority thinking like boy you misstated that you misstated that but as i continued to study more deeply and i started thinking i have to just fact check every single thing i hear from everybody i found that a the minority of scholars and i do mean james snapp and nicholas lund who i respect and appreciate but i care about you and that you think clearly on this topic that that minority who push very hard against the majority that they tend to be overly critical of the majority as in they'll take a statement and read it in the most uncharitable way and then proceed to critique it as if it was inaccurate and if you're not really paying attention sometimes they're right sometimes the right criticisms other times they're blowing things out of proportion but here's the more important part when it came to building their own case they had very uneven standards that is to say and i have to put this right in the front because if you've been reading the scholars on this you might be confused like i was for i don't know two weeks as i just kept studying and studying is that on what i found among the minority was some good critiques of the majority but uneven standards uneven standards that is super high sometimes too high standards for those who present the position against the longer ending and really low standards for confirming their own position so i'll give you some examples as we go on through but this just caused confusion it turned out in the end when i've kind of finished my study of all this stuff that both sides were kind of overstating their case i think in places and muddling through that was hard work let me give you then my basic conclusions my basic conclusions and and i want you to consider me not as the guy who figured it all out for you i'm a resource for you to consider among others as you work through this topic my basic conclusions are as follows probably the got probably not for sure most likely it seems that this was not originally part of mark it was not originally part of mark and the person who second issue the person who wrote the longer ending didn't write mark probably different authors right not not the same author at all and on the other hand while that might sound pretty negative i do think we should include it in our bibles i i think we should include it in our bibles and i'll build a case for this later on at the very end and you can find a timestamp for it down below if you want to get there right now but i think it should be included in the bible in our bibles with footnotes and hopefully a careful and helpful explanation for why there is some question about it i think that that's probably the way to go and that's the way a lot of translations have been going i want it in my bible still i don't just want to get rid of it which is what i used to think why is it even there if it's not authentic and i think i hadn't thought it through carefully enough anyway i'll talk more about that later so here we go we're launching into the evidential analysis i'll give you guys lots of links lots of examples lots of pictures to look at as well the external evidence is where we're going to start the greek manuscripts the early translations the church fathers and the lectionaries these are like the four categories we're going to walk through i'm going to walk through the evidence and then after i explain what the physical external evidence looks like we'll say what do we do with that like how does that apply to the debate this is not a short summary video this can be long video i hope i can make it i hope i need more coffee i need more coffee i need to look at my cat and look at my look at my cat oh i want to trade places make her teach and i'll sleep all right so forgive me if i if i muddle up my words a little bit today i woke up at 3am for absolutely no reason whatsoever after falling asleep at like midnight it's one of those days you know you know you get those days so i got more work done though might make you happy but uh bags under my eyes are extra extra baggy [Music] so so i can learn learn humility and lack of vanity today at any rate here's the external evidence there are again two sides the majority they're going to say the external evidence the the manuscripts ancient copies of mark that we have in in greek other translations the church fathers and the lectionaries which i'll explain they're going to say this tells a story that at the very beginning mark's gospel didn't have these last 12 verses and then it was added and then slowly as people were copying and copying that extra 12 versus kind of mingled its way around and eventually became part of the story of mark so late copies all have it early copies they're less likely to have it that's the story that they're going to tell guys like say dr james snap or dr nicholas lund they want to say a different story their version of the story goes like this it was specifically in egypt that the 12 verses were lost or removed depending they offer multiple explanations for this we'll get there later but they'll say in egypt that's where you can isolate all of the missing the last 12 verses type stuff it all comes back to egypt and that influence of egypt spread and affected other people but then it was overcome by the original authentic you know ending of mark and um this is the first picture i'll show you these are what's called text types um this is a little difficult to talk about because it's not super cut and dry like it looks like in this picture but these are just you know when we have manuscripts of the bible of the new testament in particular from back in the day they tend to be like showing evidence that they sort of were gathered around certain areas so the alexandrian which is down in egypt right in in that area of egypt there what we call lower egypt um that area has like when we have manuscripts that are influenced by that area that have certain readings in the text right that is a caesarean have certain readings byzantine have certain readings western have certain readings when this debate comes up the alexandrian ones in egypt they're the most prominent location missing the 12 verses the byzantine up north there they're the most prominent location having the 12 verses although even that i say most prominent it's not like it's 50 50 right it's not like that at all not like half haven't have to i'll explain more here so text types that's a text type the western text type the accessory and text type when we read you know mark 15 2 in the alexandrian text it tends to read with this way of spelling the words or that kind of thing all right so summaries because they tend to oversimplify let me backtrack slightly on what i just said and say this in the greek manuscripts we have we have like i think over 1600 manuscripts that have mark i'm not sure how many of those have the ending of mark i just don't know the number off the top of my head but here's the thing like almost every greek manuscript manuscript has the ending of mark almost everyone it it's like the percentages are so high like some say well it's like 99 um it's ridiculous the number of manuscripts that have the longer ending the ones that don't are a very small number but when it comes to this stuff what we do have to answer is the question how do i explain the few that don't have it and when i add in other evidence does it start to look like a trend that suggests it's not authentic so age matters not just quantity some just want to count manuscripts if 99 have it and one doesn't then it must be authentic because 99 had it others would say well wait a minute what if the one that doesn't is the oldest and most reliable one oh well i guess that might change how we evaluate it so that's kind of the the thing is they want to say let's weigh the manuscripts let's consider how valuable it is how reliable it is how early it is and that itself is complicated but that's basically the idea that we're looking at um so and even though i showed you this text types picture just know this that the trend of modern scholarship is to think that these text types are more like they cross pollinate a little more than they used to think in the past and that it's a little bit of an oversimplification not that that helps you yes a lot of the stuff i'm going to tell you will annoy you today it'll get better as we go but there's a lot of let me make you a little confused about this so you can understand that it's the oversimplifications that we often hear are a little bit oversimplified let's talk now about the two oldest greek manuscripts of mark the two oldest and in both of them the longer ending is missing so kodak's sinaiticus is the first one we're going to deal with this is a 4th century codex um codex just means book right so like this is effectively a codex whereas other stuff would be like a scroll you know early on mark was probably written on a scroll right nicholas len argues i think i think he's the one that i used differently maybe it was hester i don't remember anymore but it was probably written on a scroll but shortly thereafter christians were very used to using codexes they started popularizing books effectively because they just wanted to make so many copies and this was an easy cheap way to do it at any rate codex sinaticus is a 4th century that is in the 300s it is a codex book it's one of the principal witnesses to the alexandrian text type remember them so this one is like egypt area okay remember that that will be important because of those who will argue about how to explain the evidence here this is important for showing us what mark 16 looked like pretty early on especially near egypt okay pretty early on you might be like three hundreds that's not no that that's actually pretty early on that's pretty great that we have that kind of evidence this one ends at verse eight and here is a picture of how it ends and there's a debate about how it ends and what what you see in this picture so in sinaiticus it ends right there at the end of mark what you see on this picture is you've got like the lines those are kind of important let me zoom in on those and let me talk about them a little bit more um everybody agrees sinaiticus does not have mark after verse eight it just ends with verse eight it's like epibantagar right it just ends right there um and then that's the end of verse eight just like it is in your bible you know for they were afraid we'll talk about that next week that'll be our last study in the mark series um but what the what the the people who push back what they'll say is hey notice these endings these ending marks okay so he wrote at the at the bottom of your page there he writes like you know this is you know that's the end of the gospel of mark that's what that writing is implying there and then above it you have this artistic stuff these little flourishes and after the lettering the scribe he wrote little flourishes to finish off the last line then he wrote a whole line of more flourishes all the way across the line and he has stuff along the side column as well what nicholas lunn and james snapper going to suggest on this is that perhaps this is the scribe actually telling us that he knows about the longer ending and what he's doing here is he's adding extra artwork at the end because he's basically saying don't you dare try and add more to this manuscript after this ending it's like his way of weighing in on the topic is is there a suggestion which implies two things one he knows about the longer ending okay so then you could try to suggest that it was present where this manuscript was copied in the fourth century but also that he's opposed to the longer ending um let's talk about that a little bit you don't get too much of the debate back and forth on this when you're reading on it but here is oh by the way so this scribe who wrote this he only wrote the ending of four books in sinaiticus four of the places in sinaiticus where a book ends this is describe who wrote it when you compare the handwriting stuff and this is one of them he writes at the end of tobit um tobit's there doesn't mean they thought it was it was scripture that's a whole other debate but at the end of tobit you see he puts flourishes but there's less of them and that's that is noticeable right there's a lot less he only goes half halfway across the page at the end of judith the same scribe also you know right here in front of you he wrote some flourishes at the end of judith it ends a lot like mark a lot like toby but but it's there's less flourishes there aren't very many flourishes the only other place was first thessalonians and again the scribe he does actually show a pattern he tends to have like this little cutesy line going down along the margin and then underneath he goes part way through the line but if we go back to mark we see that the scribe drew a lot more than that okay this is just guesswork at this point but i will acknowledge right with snap and london are saying here is look we've got four examples of the same guy how he ends a book and he does something different in mark perhaps he's aware of the longer ending that seems plausible to me and it seems reasonable but the only pushback i would offer is do we have other examples of scribes doing this of using artistic flourishes to signal that they don't want anyone to add to this a variant that they're aware of um also it could be a response to the intermediate ending we haven't discussed this yet but we will but there are more than there's more than one ending in mark there aren't like eight of them like some people claim but there's more than one ending of mark in the manuscripts and the one that matters to us that should matter test is what's what i'm going to call the intermediate ending some people call it the shorter ending we're going to call it the intermediate ending i'm going to call verse 8 the shorter ending i'm going to call verse 20 the longer ending that's my terminology for this and um it's possible that this scribe was aware of the intermediate ending that is entirely possible and so even if he is weighing in against an ending it may not show knowledge of the longer ending so i think that this is a little bit uh it's a little bit of a stretch to say he knows about the longer ending and doesn't think it's authentic um he might be thinking about the intermediate ending even if they're interpreting these symbols correctly other scholars will say like uh keith elliott says hey it's really not a good idea to try to read into scribal doodles i mean that's his response to this argument is like this is not smart um at any rate let's not miss the force through the trees we have a very early manuscript that the earliest two manuscripts of mark that show that it's not there in these manuscripts that's pretty interesting codex sinaiticus is the first one the next is codex vaticanus codex vaticanus is also a fourth century codex a book right of copy of a bunch of books of the bible but it actually is a little older than the previous one so this is our oldest copy of mark as far as greek manuscripts go not our oldest information about mark though we'll get there later it has mark ending at verse 8 also so let me take you to the picture of that this is vaticanus and you can you can see this on the vatican's website i've got a link down there in the in the picture as well for you to go and check it out yourself if you'd like that's not that's not in the description but that is in the picture and this um this according to dan wallace is the most important witness to the alexandrian text and i think a lot of people would agree with this statement i don't think this is controversial it's generally thought of very highly vaticanus is seen there's conspiracy theorists look i'm not interested i think you're not being rational okay so i'm not going to talk about that but but vaticanus seems to be a very good witness to the alexandrian text type showing us what it looked like really early on suggesting that really early on at least for the alexandrian for the egypt area mark may have ended at verse 8. that's the implication of this these two manuscripts the pushback though on this from uh london snap is actually super interesting i think you'll you'll get a kick out of this even though my video is going to be 70 000 hours long today the pushback on this is they agree it ends at verse 8 just like sinaticus they're like yeah it ends at verse 8 but they think just like they think with sinaiticus they think that the scribe is showing knowledge of the longer ending and in this case favorable knowledge of the longer ending like he knows about it and he and he wants to like he wants to leave space for it do you notice these columns the end of mark has like you know i don't know a quarter of the page a quarter of the column sorry left in the middle of the page there that's open space but then there's a whole blank column this is not normal in vaticanus there's a giant blank column usually the next book would start there luke would start right there after mark but not in vaticanus there's an open column there and it is sort of asking for an explanation some just dismiss this and i'll explain why they dismiss it okay here is the debate on this topic which i find fascinating and annoying at the same time and you probably will too um so um like i said uh in vaticanus a book would start in the next column not in mark this is what james snap and others would call memorial space they're like hey this is where the scribe is leaving an open space where you could fit the longer ending if you want to he thinks perhaps the scribe is saying you know some later owner of this manuscript he might want to write in the longer ending maybe the scribe writing he this is just guesswork right but maybe describe writing it he knows there's a longer ending he just doesn't have it in front of him in in his exemplars and the ones he's using to copy vaticanus so his older manuscripts don't have it but but he knows about it from other sources so he leaves a space for it that's that's the theory against this they'll say hey but wait a minute guys there's this is this is like wallace and those guys say hey against this there's three other books in vaticanus here's one of them where there's blank columns and they and they basically don't mean anything significant okay so in daniel there's two blank columns and it's an even bigger space than mark before we start the next book of the bible in nehemiah we have another big open space it's almost a whole page that's empty after nehemiah and then tobit same thing we've got this open space bigger than the space in mark in every case there it's bigger than the ending what's there at the end of mark but the debate is not over yet because the pushback to this from guys like snap and lun are going to be saying things like hey all of those spaces in those three examples you gave they're all there for a reason and they have a pretty good argument here so listen this is what they say daniel let's go back to daniel here at the ending of daniel uh james snap says this is caused by the transition from the old testament to the new testament because daniel is the last book going from the old to new in vaticanus right they have a different order of books than what we have in our typical bibles today and so daniel is just going to new testament that actually does make a lot of sense that seems pretty plausible that you would have an open space as you're switching from old testament to new testament nehemiah he explains the space in nehemiah and this is very convincing too that the space is left i think it's just very solid is because nehemiah is three columns like most books in vaticanus but the next book that follows nehemiah is a two column book the book of psalms now when you go to from a three column per page book to a page that a book that's written with two columns per page you have no choice but to leave empty spaces until you can start on a fresh page with two columns that is a perfectly good explanation i have no argument against that i think he's made a point and you're going the point here is that spaces look like they have to have explanations okay well that makes the pro longer ending side sound a little better here when it comes to tobit the reasoning it's is i understand it is a little bit less powerful they say the reason for the space in tobit is because one scribe ended tobit and a different scribe started the next book um that's possible but that doesn't seem necessary i don't see any reason for that i'm not sure what other support can be offered for that do we see this wherever a new scribe takes over right i haven't heard that that's the case um so that's a little softer but at least he's given us reason to think there can be some explanation for the for the mark ending and here it is again i'll show it to you i think i just showed you sciatica i don't want to confuse you here there it is vaticanus mark he's suggesting there's got to be there's some reason for the space that we have here in this manuscript and against this the debate's not over yet against this guys like wallace will say look that's fine even if you feel you can explain all the spaces in those other places in vaticanus none of them are explained by variants in none of these occasions is space being left for missing text and that's actually a powerful point because all of them are explained by features that relate to like the nature of the organization of the text nothing about variance that's a pretty powerful point but it probably has some explanation and the pushback again would be okay fine you want to explain it somehow wallace others will say hey you can't fit the longer ending there anyways this space that's left in mark you can't fit it but james snap who's very thorough and tenacious in his and he's probably commenting on my video or he will be very soon because hi dr snap he always comments on everybody's stuff so you'll get to hear his refutations of me in the comment section i'm not going to remove him you're welcome to leave him there dr snap i'm perfectly happy for people to hear what you have to say i have links to your website too um or at least to your book so the um the pushback to this is from dr snap oh yeah is that what you think and he takes up the challenge and says i will write in the same handwriting as as this scribe uses i will write the longer ending in the space that's provided here so uh let me find it now in my there we go this is james snaps reconstruction where he's like and i'm pretty sure this was james snap who did this particular copy i'm fairly certain it was i got it from him but he's like look this is the longer inning i fit it in there now what the naked eye can't tell very easily is that he does and he admits this he's not hiding anything here he compresses the the letters a bit right he he fits more letters in the column than this scribe typically does he smashes things in a bit that's true but i think the point is made that if a scribe was just off the top of his head going i'll try to leave space for the longer ending but he didn't have the longer ending exactly in front of him this would be approximately the right amount of space okay so that that feels like a that feels like a win no win for james snap there i thought that was pretty but there's more that we go deeper we go deeper into the rabbit hole we go further into wonderland um lots let's talk about oom lots this is textual criticism thing there's a recent discovery about vaticanus in particular and it is that according to dan wallace and he's a very highly respected textual critical scholar and an evangelical christian and he says uh these um lots which are like on your screen you see them it's it's like a colon put sideways two little dots in the text these appear many many times i think it was over 200 times off the top of my head i think in vaticanus they appear there as a way of the scribe indicating that there's some variation in his copies right because not all the copies agree no this shouldn't surprise anybody nor should it worry you we have incredibly high level of reliability about what is in our scriptures but that is because we compare the copies and consider them but yeah these little oom lots what's interesting is these umlauts do not appear in mark 16. the point here is the scribe has a habit and vaticanus has a habit i should say of using these little indicators to say there's variation and they don't put them in the most obvious spot of mark 16. that seems to be important to me um it's true that the pushback is hey that doesn't matter because the um the space the memorial space james snap would say is enough to tell us that he's aware he doesn't need to use zoom lots because he's using that but if memorial space here isn't super obvious and i mean super obvious and the typical way of demonstrating a variant isn't given now i feel like it starts to become a weaker explanation and i also feel like we're paying more attention to the space than we are paying attention to the fact that there's nothing else there after verse eight and that can be a change of subject that confuses people um there's an alternate explanation for the space and the alternate explanation is and this this matters too a competing explanation is that in older arrangements of the gospels mark was the last gospel not luke uh not john excuse me and it's possible that in the exemplars in the stuff that they're using to copy vaticanus this is a possible thing that given mark was the last book of the gospels and you moved to acts you moved to those other books after that that that was why there was an open column left because it was a genre shift which we do see happening in other places in vaticanus so i think that kind of defeats at least for me the persuasiveness of the empty space memorial space argument it's just not strong enough i'm not sure what to make of this space so i withhold judgment the point for vaticanus is the longer ending's not there and it's not there in the early alexandrian text type and this is evidence that at least some trusted copies made by some pretty serious scribes they were missing the longer ending in the fourth century and possibly as early as the second century so something we'll have to explain that data that evidence will have to have explained now we talk about how important these manuscripts are vaticanus and sinaiticus have a certain degree of importance or weight i talked remember there's very few that are missing that only end market versus eight very few manuscripts like you could count them on one hand there's very few in greek um vaticanus sinaiticus how important are they is the real question and they represent like i said the alexandrian text type there's this text type thing up on your screen again for you and they are the two oldest greek copies of mark 16 and they are considered a relatively pure form of the text this part's kind of important this doesn't mean vaticanus and sinaiticus should always be taken as the correct reading in every case automatically but they should be considered as having being kind of heavyweights to in some regard this this is how scholarship has treated them over the past like i don't know certainly longer than i've been alive and let me quote to you what metzger said about them here's the quote uh textual witnesses connected to alexandria attest to high quality of textual transmission from the earliest times it was there that a very ancient line of text was copied and preserved the christian scholars of alexandria worked deciduously to preserve an accurate form of the text meaning they were careful and trying to be doesn't mean they're perfect but they were very careful which implies that this is kind of a big deal right kind of a big deal this is in the book perspectives one of the books i'm going to recommend if you want to dig deeper on this this is a four views book so it's got four chapters with people who have all four different opinions about the long running of mark then it has a summary or analysis of all those opinions by daryl bach at the very end i thought this was pretty good book you you can uh check it out and it at least will introduce you to a deeper deeper level of confusion that may serve you well as you try to wrap your head around this about all these issues wallace in this book in kindle location 300 he argues that the readings in vaticanus and sinaiticus actually go back to the second century that's super early that in the second century we have this going on the implication is that um in the second century in the 100s there were copies of mark ending in verse 8 and scribes who often did a good job still thought this was where the text should end in the fourth century but we shouldn't take that reading without thinking about it let's talk about one other example codex 304 codex 304 which is kind of a strange example this is a byzantine manuscript so back to our text types the byzantine are the ones that usually have the long they always have the long running this is like the exception okay this is a 12th century bible with commentary i'm going to acknowledge here that snap and lun both have mis misleading information on this particular one no offense i just want you guys to be aware of this i have a link down below to a commentary by dr mina moniere who gives an analysis of this text and shows you pictures of it that i think easily demonstrates the confusion that is there with snap and line on it but 304 is byzantine here's 304 ending at mark 16 8. now don't worry for a second about the page being cut off there don't don't get paranoid about that that has nothing to do with it do you see the black dot that's like three quarters of the way up on the inside of the left side of your screen just a solid black dot that's where the text ends and then on the other side uh i would say that way to the um the big like oval o looking thing big omicron there that is where the commentary begins this is the bible with commentary it's like a study bible right well the text in mark ends at verse eight absolutely clearly ends at verse eight this is not the end of the whole thing the next thing is going to go into another book of the bible and it's absolutely clear that this against what snap and len have said in their in their writings that i've read it's absolutely clear that there's no awareness the trade of the longer ending in this text so in the text it ends at verse 8 then in the commentary there's no mention of any information from the longer ending and in matthew in the same text when it gets to the end of matthew there's commentary this is where you'd expect a commentator to like mention parallel passages that commentary doesn't mention anything about the long running either this betrays no knowledge of the longer any which is kind of weird when you think about it but that's the way it is um let me show you the end though now let's talk about that part that was cut off um the very end of this text shows that there was an internal debate by the owners of the manuscripts it's very interesting of this uh of this codex um the red box this is what mina moniere puts in and and i put her a link to her audio commentary on this text down below you can listen to it for free on on the mark 16 project which is a really neat website with great access to information and they keep adding new info i got a link to all that down below so this uh to summarize her points on this the red box shows the original ending of mark where it's the text of market verse 8 the commentary and then it says this is a typical greek scribe thing to do when they're closing a book it says as the travelers rejoice upon reaching their homeland likewise the scribe is upon the end of this book it's just like a cute way for them to end a book in other words mark definitely ends in this scribe's opinion at the end of verse 8. a later owner tried to erase it which is why the one in the red box is all scrubbed out so some later owner like was like i disagree with that then another later owner or later person tried to write it back in in the bottom we don't have the whole inscription there because that's where the page has been cut which who knows maybe someone did that to remove him writing it in i don't know um what we're saying is this debate is not new man this debate has been going on for a while and here it is even in codex 304 very interesting um don't listen to lon and snap on this one i think they're wrong go to the swiss national science foundations mark 16 project and i have a link to it down below mark 16 dot s-i-b dot s-w-i-s-s it's hard to find on google because they are not search engine optimized their website's a little janky but it's really cool stuff um for you researchers okay now here's the objection to everything i've just said so far mike that's three manuscripts you got two alexandrian one byzantine from the 11th or 12th century how is this that important let me just say we're just getting started there are some who think the entire argument against the long running of mark is just two three manuscripts and that's it and that's not true that is a misrepresentation of the data let's talk about other greek manuscripts that cause some trouble for the longer ending not uh here's a quote here from uh metzger and this is a quote that um james snap will say is very misleading um i i don't think it's as misleading as he thinks it is i think it can be overstated though so i'm gonna grant that the quote is this and this is in metzger's textual commentary page 103 he says not a few manuscripts which contain the passage have scribal notes stating that older greek copies lack it and in other witnesses the passage is marked with asterisks or abili the conventional signs used by copyists to indicate a spurious addition to a document james snap's going to you know labor at refuting all of these things but in my opinion and all actually specifically lun and dave hester in their work for giving me you guys if i mention anything you're not familiar with for those who are familiar with them this is information you need you need to double check everything they say about the manuscripts because there's some times where they are just leaving things out whether it's deliberate or not isn't the point maybe they just didn't check carefully enough but they leave out some important things um so it's just under 30 manuscripts that actually suggest there's some problem with the longer ending that kind of matters doesn't it because that means that even if it's present in some manuscripts that might they might be saying it doesn't belong but here's where a lot of my confusion came in in studying this i was thinking that if a manuscript indicates a problem with the longer ending it's like the the scribe is weighing in against the longer ending and then guys like snap and lun are going to say they weren't weighing in against the longer ending in fact we think they were generally weighing in for the longer ending what i realized as i kept studying was i don't really think these scribes were generally weighing in at all i think they're just saying i got some copies with it some copies without it and so they include it because what do you do when you're not sure or if you have copies one copy has a verse another copy doesn't you include it maybe with a note like you're not making a judgment and that's what i think is happening a lot of the time is people in history aren't trying to tell you what side to pick they're just recording what they've got and when you look at it that way it changes the debate a little bit so um they in let me see uh getting lost in my notes it's that the included data that means at least some of the older copies they knew of yeah that's my point um the point is not that these scribes are saying the longer ending doesn't belong the point is and this is actually what metzker's point is i think his main point which stands even if he has some details here that he overstated the main point is that in several greek manuscripts like just under 30 we have um some reason to think that the scribes previous copies the older copies that they're using to make this manuscript that at least some of them don't have the longer ending in other words it's not just three manuscripts there's a lot more going on here each of these is showing there's a history and the further back you go the more there seem to be that lack the longer ending that's a trend we want that we care about there are five manuscripts let me let me get into the weeds a little bit more on the manuscript issues this matters to me a lot because it well you'll see there are five manuscripts from like the 900s to the 1100s manuscript 15 22 110 1192 1210 and you can get my notes on biblethinker.org after this live stream is over give us like an hour two or three or maybe tomorrow you can get my notes for this whole thing you're you're welcome to download this for free i've got all the details there for you but these ones uh and i'll give you a picture now of one of them this is manuscript number 22. they have um well my computer's moving a little slow i'm getting worried about that they have after um menus uh after verse eight it has a note now the way you can look at this manuscript this number 22 is there's this indented portion right there's text above and text below and the stuff in the middle is kind of indented and it looks a little different than the other text that's the note that's what the scribe wrote and he has a little little cross thing on the top there uh to just draw attention to the note so this manuscript after verse 8 of mark right after for the you know for they were afraid after that verse it has the following note in some copies the gospel comes to a close here but in many this also appears in some it comes to a close in many it appears so 900s to 1100s this this this guy knows there's a minority of manuscripts that don't have the longer ending some could be five i don't know how many could be 300 he knows about could be two like in some it's gotta be more than one right and in many in the majority for sure he says it does appear and then he gives the longer ending um manuscript 22 is important because i think you have some misinformation from some others on that one and manuscript four manuscripts from the nine hundreds uh manuscript one number 205 209 and 1582 they have the following note let's talk about the notes they say in some copies some the evangelist is completed to this point but in many these are also present this is implying that after verse 8 that there's some that are ending but many that have it so it's basically the same as what we read earlier this is around the same time period the majority of manuscripts have it for sure at least as far as these scribes are aware this on these manuscripts one manuscript number one uh dave hester in his book on this is truly misleading like he's completely misleading on this point i was irritated because you're looking at these people at least give you the accurate info and it was not it um dave ester i'm not mad at you bro go look at your book um all right in three of the manuscripts from about 1 000 men you ship 20 215 and 300 from it says the following from here to the end does not occur in some of the copies but in the ancient copies it occurs in full that's interesting because here's a manuscript where they're they are in they're carrying off in different data than what you would expect based on what the the people who are against the laundry endings say this many these manuscripts these three are suggesting that the scribe thinks the older copies all have the longer ending in some of his copies it doesn't appear though so that would imply like if all i had was that i would think the longer ending is authentic it was just missing from some later copies but again cyanaticus vaticanus they're telling us that that's not the case there were very old copies that didn't have it ah so you get why this is annoying and confusing so um some of them have symbols that may indicate that the longer inning is not in some of their older copies and that'll be a debated point i'm not going to get more into that but i think that at least some of them do and it's worth noting in some of them and here's a weird part i'm going to throw more confusion into the fire before i give clarity here in some of the copies you have mark 16 up to verse 8 then you have an extra different ending which i call the intermediate ending and then you have the longer ending so it's like what's going on there this is the intermediate ending let me read it to you it really isn't a different ending for mark and we'll ask what would explain its presence and this will help us understand the lay of the land a bit better here's the ending and all that has been commanded them they promptly announced to those around peter and after these things jesus himself appeared to them and from east as far as the west he sent out through them the sacred and incorruptable proclamation of eternal salvation amen that's definitely meant to be an ending of mark there's other varied variants in the passage that aren't supposed to be endings to mark but this one's the one that matters the most because it's like clearly that was an alternate ending now if you had the longer ending in your in your manuscript you would never have written that you would never have added that so every time we see the intermediate ending it seems to mean that some ancestor to that manuscript didn't have the longer ending it had the verse eight ending and somebody felt compelled to include this data wherever they got it from so somewhere down the line the longer ending was missing from the ancestors of the manuscripts that have the intermediate ending it nobody thinks it's original okay it's not in the running it's obviously invented to be an ending to mark and the best explanation for it is that in an ancestor it ended at verse 8. so the presence of the intermediate ending is important here that occurs in some of the copies and i think that lun and snap tend to not not consider the weight of that in their assessments let me uh talk a little bit more about i feel like i feel like kind of a jerk for doing this but i i care about you guys and if you go through what i went through trying to understand these things um you're gonna need some of this data um because you may not have like 150 hours to put into the topic okay so on page 35 of nicholas lund's book this the the original ending of mark and and it's considered very persuasive by some um dr uh craig evans wrote that he thought this might this was like dropping a bomb effectively in the scholarly community and he thought it might shift opinions after really spending a lot of time with it i think that there's there's significant issues enough that i'm not persuaded by it and i i want to warn you about it so on page 35 he says about manuscript 83 manuscript 83 is an example of a problem in lund's book that after verse 8 the intermediate ending is included in manuscript 83 and then it's followed by a note these verses are also present for they were afraid after before they were afraid um his point is this and you can you can check this out on page 35 of his book his point is that the longer ending is not in question in this passage only the intermediate ending is so this this this copy is saying hey this intermediate part that's questionable but the longer reading is solid okay here's the problem um this is manuscript 83 and here's a summary from this from the mark 16 project the swiss mark 16 project website and they're basically saying you can read it on your screen there they're basically saying manuscript 3 does have that but it also has a note lund didn't mention after verse 8 that signifies the ending of the gospel there manuscript 83 has the gospel ending at verse 8 then it has the intermediate ending then it has doubt on those verses then it has the longer ending which obviously if if the gospel ends at verse 8 and some of their copies it's ancestors there's some doubt on the water ending this is why like len will have some good criticisms good criticisms but it's so mixed with other stuff the confirmation bias it feels like that i i um i i grew irritated and i want you to be aware of it because i don't want you to you know what happens is you just pick someone to trust i'm gonna trust that i'm gonna trust that guy but if you're getting some kind of distortion from a lot of different sources it's it becomes hard to do that you just have to do a lot of work so let's not lose focus here though um it's not just sinaiticus and vaticanus is the point there's a number of other manuscripts that show that the the textual history of mark has a significant portion of missing the longer ending let's talk now about translations translations is a whole other deal we just we just talked to all about greek manuscripts now we're going to talk about how um while the bible was new testament was written in greek originally it was translated into other languages and those translations have different readings and we can compare them and we can see like a text history so the syriac is the first one we'll discuss this is an important translation it's it's an important group of texts it exists in multiple ways and i'm just going to throw some info out there for you i'll try to tie it together later the diatessaran is actually syriac and it's sort of a translation i mean it is a translation of syriac but this is not a compilation of the gospels it's a harmony of the gospels which i think is generally a bad idea like the gospels are not meant to be interlaced like that because then you lose some of the emphasis that is meant by the individual authors in those passages but um but anyway this is what a guy named haitian did he he grabbed the four gospels he smashed them together he made a harmony of the gospels and this was very popular for quite a while and the diatestra means through the four this was this was like around 170 a.d okay like 160 175 that's when the diatestron shows up it definitely includes the longer ending of mark we're so second century we have the longer ending of mark in the diatesseron that's pretty good that's significant the longer ending of mark is definitely older than the diatesseron it didn't show up in the fourth century that if anybody thinks that that's not true so the cyanidic syriac though is another syriac translation that's not like the diatesseron it's just a translation and this is like late 4th early 5th century and it is the oldest not harmony but oldest translation by a small margin and it ends at verse eight and now you see why the cereal is confusing where the d test run has it the cyanatic ceriac does not have it what's going on there most later copies do have it most later copies do have it the pashita which becomes the popular syriac translation from the 5th century on it grows in popularity and our copies of the fascita all have the longer ending right but sometimes we get the intermediate ending in the peshita as well and the intermediate ending seems to betray that there are ancestors that had a verse eight ending something has to explain the absence of the longer ending and the presence of the intermediate ending in the syriac tradition and our oldest straight translation lacking it in syriac something's got to explain that armenian translations um armenian translations there's ongoing research on this we have lots of copies dan wallace says there's over 200 that had been examined at least to the point of which he wrote in the perspectives book and of these 200 um armenian you know manuscripts that have been looked at 99 of them lacked the longer ending that's really significant right in the armenian tradition there's a strong lack of the longer ending very present 33 in addition to that indicated that verses 9 through 20 were doubtful and four of them put the longer ending in a different location implying that it was a text they wanted to keep but that they didn't see it as part of mark that's interesting so at least not part of mark's ending now the pushback and you're going to get a lot of this the pushback from the pro le guys on this is hey the armenian like from armenia the armenian not arminian like calvinist arminian that's a different word but the armenian this is because it was being influenced by egypt egypt egypt egypt that is the battle cry of the pro-longer-ending guys they're going to suggest that everything comes back to egypt egypt is where something weird happened and then it spread out and then it was pushed back down um so they're gonna say yes and the armenian was probably influenced by egypt there's good case for that to be made okay so they're not just being conspiracy theorists here there's a good case for that to be made so georgian translations let's skip to the next one in in georgia george is on my mind not that georgia georgian the language the two oldest georgian translations end with verse eight in with verse eight so those who are for the verse eight ending of mark being original they say look there's diversity here especially as we go back we're like how come the oldest in the greek and the oldest in the georgian and the oldest in the armenian and the oldest in the syriac the pushback against this is that's armenian influence the georgian don't show the longer inning because they're influenced by armenian and the armenian are influenced by egypt it's all a result of egyptian influence i don't know how to our be the arbiter of that debate i'm just going to share it with you we'll give we need a lot more data to be able to have a more solid conclusion here the sahitik translations the sahidic sahidic they um we used to have five manuscripts this is like a language that's spoken like uh in in egypt you know back to egypt so um we used to have five manuscripts that were the main samples for like mark's ending in the sahidic language these are from the 8th to 11th centuries one of those has the longer ending looking pretty normal and four of them according to nicholas lund say he says they place the shorter ending before the longer ending or show some other indication of interruption at this point although lun tends to use vague language when it doesn't help his case so i don't i didn't look into all the sahidic stuff i'd like to know more but here's the most important element of the sahidic we found an even older copy there's a 5th century copy that more recently has been discovered and it clearly ends mark at verse 8. so it's like 300 years you know older than what we've found before and it ends at verse 8. everybody here agrees the debate is the debate sides are in agreement the sahidic did not have the longer ending in its earliest form everyone agrees the people who are for the longer ending guess what they say about the sahidic it's from egypt sahidic is spoken in lower egypt and so they're going to try to again suggest this is egyptian influence i'm not weighing in on that i feel like it's a little over my head latin translations let's talk about latin translations um uh latin became the the normal language for people who were reading scripture for for quite a long time um it almost always has the longer ending in it in the latin and some of our latin copies are as old as the fourth and fifth century they go back quite a ways so latin very consistently has the longer ending without the intermediate okay just the longer ending but there's one exception and it's weird okay there's a there's a manuscript called babiensis and its name is also weird it's weird for a number of reasons um it's just got weird readings it's like the guy that wrote the bobby insist manuscript was just not very good at his job right like in it it says jesus is like um oh the oh it has this text that says the uh the gospel went out and was proclaimed from the east to the east it's you get the idea that this guy's not doing very good job but it ends mark with the intermediate ending and no longer ending this is like a real anomaly right it doesn't interverse 8 it ends with the intermediate ending and there's no longer ending this is the only one that does this as far as i'm aware and the implication though is that whoever's making this latin translation is using sources that at one time ended at verse 8 and then took on the intermediate ending and then he ends up copying that now the response to this from the pro le side is a it's a weird manuscript we shouldn't put that much weight on it and b b this and it's our oldest latin though but b they'll say hey you know bobby ensis is from caesarea and caesarea is influenced it's not in but it's influenced by egypt do you see the pattern okay this is all going to come back to egypt so um those who are against the longer inning they'll say the lack of the longer ending in diverse locations in their earliest stages reveals that there was a gradual acceptance of the longer ending not an initial knowledge of it and those who were for their longer endings say it's not diverse it's just egypt just sticking its fingers in everybody's eyes my that's not their terminology that's mine all right so the lectionary system let's move away from translations let's talk about lectionary systems i'll be very brief here lectionary systems are just a schedule for reading scripture it's like a through the bible in a year kind of thing you're like what verses do we read on what days for public reading and lots of lectionaries exist from like the 800s and on and from then on it they'd like all have the longer ending from the 800s on but guess what some older lectionaries evidence not having it the georgian and armenian they don't have the longer ending in their oldest forms in lectionaries and the jerusalem lectionary this is probably the most interesting one does not have the longer ending now the response to this is hey the jerusalem lectionary from the pro ali side will say that was influencing the georgian and armenian lectionaries so we're they're going to try to isolate influence is the idea right um the longer ending is definitely in all the later lectionaries but those are later it's lacking in important early ones there's a whole little debate that goes on about the earliest byzantine ones it's a distraction and it's a waste of time um the things i'm summarizing here i think are the important parts that we can pull from this topic if the longer ending was originally part of mark someone has to explain why it doesn't appear in some of these older lectionaries that's important but it's also a little over my head so i'm just going to put it on the pile of evidence and we'll add it up a bit later so what church fathers have to say let's talk about church fathers this is something that's easier to wrap your head around because they're actually commenting on the text itself um so it's not like translations and all this other stuff things will get a little easier and then i'll make them harder and that'll make them easier again so the church fathers these are guys that quote the bible all the time you can actually reconstruct a lot of the bible just from church father's quotes not that that would be easy to do but it would be possible um there's way too much data here i spend days days and days on this here are some highlights relating to the church fathers the most interesting ones in particular many many many church fathers won't acknowledge they quote from the longer ending they don't necessarily tell you whether they think it's in mark whether they think it's scripture or not but they show knowledge of the longer ending okay so but a lot of them do especially in the late 4th and 5th centuries that's still kind of early but um there's more data to consider so the probably the most interesting one is irenaeus well one of the most interesting irenaeus lives around like 180 a.d okay or at least he's he's writing his against heresy he's writing this in about 180 a.d and he writes the following listen to this because he's going to tell you he's going to quote mark the longer ending and he's going to tell you it's at the end of mark which is pretty significant and very early he says at the end of his gospel mark says and so the lord jesus after he'd spoken to them was received into heaven and sits at the right hand of the father that's from you know the very end of mark but it's also according to irenaeus it's at the end of his gospel that mark says this so he's like a really strong witness we can conclude very easily from this and you can see the logic i don't see any good pushback against this that irenaeus had had a copy of mark that to him it probably wasn't written five days ago right so like that was older than him so probably early second century or earlier he's got a copy mark that has the longer ending and he thinks it belongs to mark he's got no doubt about it but we shouldn't act like the church fathers are these like divine sources of knowledge because that's not what they are they're historical sources of information irenaeus also thought jesus was 50 years old when he was crucified think about that for a second yeah he's a guy okay but he shows evidence that mark was early at least in his opinion tatian in 170 tyson already discussed him but i'll mention him again he was a heretic that's not relevant for today's discussion but taishan wrote the diatestron it includes the longer ending he wrote this around about 170 a.d it basically means that it was in copies that he had earlier than that if it was accepted by these guys it probably wasn't invented in their time that's reasonable isn't it that means it could be original or it could just be early it could be early second century it could be late first century or it could be originally a mark um all those things would would fit with the data from irenaecentation now eusebius let's go to the 300s and the mid 300s a guy named eusibius who actually wrote um uh oh i thought i had it i probably do have it over here i just can't scan all my books right now but you see this word is church histories right like everybody knows he's the earliest church history guy around and he says the following let me give you the quote in short and how sometimes it can be a little misleading this is going to be annoying um but i'm in a misery love company so welcome uh he said the following and this is how the quote is sometimes characterized in different people who are against the longer ending they'll say that eusebius says that it's not contained the longer ending not contained in all copies of the gospel according to mark indeed the accurate copies conclude the story according to mark in the words they were afraid for the end is here in nearly all the copies of mark that seems like a very very informed guy who's making a very strong statement hey maybe in the 900s and the thousands the majority of copies had mark but in the 300s eusibius is saying the accurate copies don't well i'm more inclined to respect the earlier accounts but there's pushback here's the pushback on eusibius and as an apologist a guy who does apologetics i really understand this pushback okay i'm going to read it to you now it's on your screen um eusebius is writing to somebody it's it's not a church history letter it's a letter to somebody answering questions about objections to the faith supposed contradictions in the bible i have videos dealing with this stuff too right so the supposed contradiction is that matthew and mark disagree about the timing of the resurrection they don't um it's kind of a weird objection that he has but apparently came up a lot around the third and fourth and fifth centuries so he says i'm now proceeding to the next question that are always being raised by everyone at the end of the same texts i do so without much delay since the will of god spurs us on onto this through your commands marinus my most honored and most industrious son you asked first how is it that in matthew the savior after having been raised appears late on the sabbath matthew 28 1 but in mark early on the first day of the week mark 16 verses 2 and 9. the solution to this might be two-fold and now here's me talking now eusebius is going to offer two options for how you might answer this objection one option will be to say that it's not authentic that the longer inning doesn't belong let's read how he writes this and i'll give you some thoughts on it because some would say eusebius is being hypothetical here he doesn't actually believe that the ancient copies the accurate ones don't have the longer ending he doesn't believe that he's being hypothetical i think there's i in the end i disagree with that but let's walk through it um the solution to this might be twofold i'm quoting you sibius now four on the one hand the one who rejects the passage itself namely the pericope which says that says this might say that it does not appear in all the copies of the gospel according to mark at any rate the accurate ones of the copies define the end of the history according to mark with the words of the young man who appeared to the woman and said to them women and said to them do not fear you are seeking jesus the nazarene and the words that follow in addition to these it says and having heard this they fled and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid eusebius then continues for in this way the ending of the gospel according to mark is defined in nearly all the copies the things that appear next seldom and in some but not in all the copies may be spurious especially since it implies a contradiction to the testimony of the rest of the evangelists this then is what someone might say to avoid and completely do away with the superfluous question okay so eusebius does offer it as an option as an okay i get this as a guy does apologetics you can say to people i'm not sure here's one option here's another option i do this sometimes right that is not not to be squirrelly but because i don't you don't know everything so you lay out some options but then he gives another option he goes on the other hand someone else who dares to set aside nothing whatsoever of the things which appear by whatever means in the text of the gospels says that the reading is double and as also in many other cases and that each of the two readings must be accepted in that they both are approved in the opinion of the faithful and pious nor not this reading rather than that or that reading rather than this he's saying hey you may not like this question or this this idea um but let me okay then he gives a different option a different way of interpreting it i won't get into that that's his number two option let me now offer some thoughts on eusebius eusibius seems to not just be saying here's a possibility he seems to be granting it's possible because of certain facts of reality he does seem to think that in the accurate copies it does not appear but eusebius also thinks that it may be hasty to say let's just say it doesn't belong because it does appear in some of the copies and maybe god's providence is involved in that and so we don't want to cast out something that might be intended by god to be part of scripture so eusebius it seems thinks that a decent option is accepting that mark ends at verse 8 and mark ends at verse 20 and there's multiple readings of mark and that was just how god saw fit to give it to the church but the most important part eusebius does seem to say and i think that this is his opinion that in the most accurate copies in the majority of the copies he has it ends at verse 8. that's eusybius's opinion doesn't mean it's true about all the copies it means that's what he thinks so the um the pushback that you might get on the pro longer ending side is okay fine fine fine but eusibius was influenced can you guess who influenced him by egypt right because eusebius he was educated his mentor came from egypt he had associations with egypt and so maybe he's been influenced by egypt okay this is let's just acknowledge this is just guesswork at this point though right um we're filling in gaps of what we don't know with what maybe we want it to be at that point and it's just i'm a little hesitant the next one who says almost the same quote is a guy named jerome in the 400s jerome and this make becomes even more complicated he's in like there's gonna be three of these okay this is the second one he's in the exact same situation he's asked in his letter to hedibia a christian woman he's asked about this supposed contradiction between matthew and mark about the timing of the resurrection um he responds with two possible answers just like eusebius here's what it looks like just a second to load up all right and it sounds so much like eusebius but it's not the same and we need to acknowledge that okay i'll read to you what jerome says to answer this question is twofold either we do not accept the testimony of mark which appears in only a few copies of the gospel almost all the greek books not having this passage at the end especially since it seems to relate different and contrary things to the other evangelists or else the answer may be given that what both say is true that's kind of what eusebius said they're both both are true right that's the second answer and then he goes on and explains how that works jerome's quote the part that's towards the top of the page on your screen right now um he is quoting eusebius but not quote it's not a quote he's not just copying the sibius's words and using them he is saying the same thing eusebius said but it's different jerome and here's why the those who want to push this aside and go jerome doesn't count he's just echoing eusebius he's not a second witness that there are many greek copies uh lacking the longer ending in the in his time in the fourth century or 5th century early 400s i push back against that and i think rightly so because jerome changes what eusebius writes jerome says that this testimony only appears in a few copies of the gospel almost all the greek books not having this passage now jerome had a special interest in greek readings not just latin or other translations jerome was very interested in what does the greek say what does the greek say he talks about this jerome adds his own information here suggesting that he's aware of greek manuscripts a significant amount that lack the longer ending so while we may only have three you know two that are predate jerome we've got jerome saying there's a lot more that are older so perhaps he knows of more latin manuscripts that have have the longer ending but he also knows that in the greek in particular which he respects very highly it's very often not there so i think that jerome seems to know what he's talking about here there's other reasons to think jerome knows what he's talking about in history little side note here jerome's the only guy to mention another variant called the freer logion this weird strange admittedly variant that nobody nobody their grandma their uncle or their nephew thinks belongs in the gospel of mark but it's a variant that exists that jerome acknowledges he's like there's this one reading that says this this this we never found a manuscript without reading until very recently codex w i think was washingtonius this manuscript which has the freer logging on what it confirms to us is even though we've been digging and digging we just finally found a copy jerome's knowledge of the variance in the gospel of mark was very accurate and is recently been confirmed as being very accurate so it implies that we should consider what he's saying here with more weight so eusebius and jerome i think should not be set aside as being hypothetical i don't think that works um but and you might be like oh it's settled eusebius and jerome and jerome especially this guy translated the vulgate this guy like studied the greek he was like you could look at him as a really reliable guy right well here's where it gets more complicated and slightly more annoying jerob jarob i don't know who that is jerome translated the vulgate and when he did guess what in his latin translation of the bible which became like the standard for the for especially the roman catholic church um uh kind of enshrined by them later on at the council of trent the the um the ending of mark includes verses 9-20 in his translation in the vulgate and there's no note there's nothing saying that it doesn't belong jerome doesn't cast doubt on it he doesn't put there's nothing there to recommend that it doesn't belong so here in one quote he's like yeah it doesn't appear in hardly any of the greek manuscripts i got but then he includes it um initially i was very confused by this because i kept looking at history trying to find people who were going to tell me it belonged or didn't belong but i think we see something else we see a third option which is people who think hey it's not in most of the manuscripts but it is in some so i'm going to include it i think that's what jerome probably did that's my theory on jerome and i'm not a scholar on jerome but is what i think probably happened he included it for some reason some say he was just scared to not include it they would riot and attack him or something others would suggest that um and this is what i think mark 16 the longer ending it doesn't actually provide a true contradiction with anything it exists in some of his manuscripts the fear would be losing something that god wanted us to have because look it's there in some of the manuscripts so jerome includes it and i think for the same reason we should include it today well for another reason i'll explain later as well okay that's jerome and eusebius um they suggest that the very early copies don't have it at least many that they're aware of victor of antioch he offers now this is super interesting he quotes the same thing to the same question matthew mark they disagree victor of antioch says hey here's two possible solutions it's like the exact same thing but he changes the quote a little bit too jerome changed it to fit his thinking victor of antioch changes it to fit his thinking too he says not that the longer ending's missing in the majority of copies he says there's very many copies that end at verse 8 there's very many copies that have the longer ending so here in the 5th or 6th century he says it's a tie between the numbers of manuscripts but he adds this that the most accurate copies include the longer ending specifically what he calls the palestinian gospel of mark victor of antioch says there's a special accurate copy that he really trusts called the palestinian gospel of mark guess what that is where can you can read it you can't like we're clueless where's the palestinian gospel of mark what is he talking about we don't know there you go history you see has a debate going on the same one that we're having today um now let me those are the most interesting ones now let me point to some that are commonly used as silent witnesses against the longer ending and this may be an overreach as i think james snap and nicholas lund and others try to point out clement of alexandria um in 150 to 215 that's when he's alive he he never quotes from the longer ending so some suggest he didn't know the longer ending but what we have to do is create expectation right like i've got a reason to think that clement of alexandria is going to quote mark before i make a big deal about the fact that he doesn't he rarely quotes from the gospel of mark at all there's massive chunks of mark most of it he doesn't quote so i don't really see a reason to have strong expectation for clement of alexandria to quote from mark so using him as a witness as a guy who didn't know the longer ending i don't think is significant and if he and if he is they'll just say he's from he's alexandria reigns so he's egypt um but i'm gonna set him aside origin is another one origin 185 to 253 that's his his his life span he seems like he had good reason to quote in this second book against celsius and i did read chapters 56-70 follow his argumentation this gets kind of complicated but when you read through the text you go it would really help your argument if you had another verse from mark to quote in here about the more faith thing and all that we talked about last week so okay i think origen does have reason to quote from the longer ending in this particular passage he often doesn't quote mark but here there's there's a place where it would have helped him um but that's not super strong evidence this is i wouldn't put a lot of weight on this origin may be soft evidence that there's um an important guy in church history who is not familiar with the long running of mark that may be the case i wouldn't put too much on that it does seem reasonable though other people don't quote it and it doesn't really matter tertullian and cyprian in north africa but you need to create expectation origins the only guy is the expectation for now let me talk about first clement because i spent pretty much almost a whole day on first clement um and here's why first clement is like crazy early this is a document that was written around like 95 a.d like right around that time so we're talking late first century and it was written from rome which is where mark was probably written nicholas lund in his book he thinks that and i've got a link to his book down below as well he thinks that this book this letter first clement it actually betrays knowledge of the longer ending of mark that would be massive evidence because that would mean it had to have been known in rome in the first century and accepted as scripture that's i mean this i could this would like almost close the deal this one piece of evidence so i spent a lot of time on it trying to check each detail look at all the evidence i have lots of notes on this i'm not going to share them with you here's my conclusion lun compares first clement little little phrases and words and he and he tries to source them and the assumption he makes that he doesn't tell you he's making i think is that he's trying to figure out which one of the gospels these words came from that's a big assumption to make that first clement is sourcing these words in one of the gospels that's a big assumption um he doesn't mention that so when he compares clement first clement to the um the letter to the corinthians when he compares this to the other gospels and mark he's like hey of the four options we've got mark uses these words more than those other guys so i'm going to suggest that he has knowledge of the longer ending what i did though was i compared these greek words throughout their use in the entire new testament and the long story short is this first clement is far more closely connected in those very words to the book of acts or to like the letters of paul than it is to the longer ending of mark it's only when you ignore the rest of the new testament and you assume first clement is using one of the four gospels for his sources on these they're not even quotes they're just words then you make that assumption then you can build your case i think this is like a trixie hobbit moment for lon i'm not saying it on purpose but it it's like wow that's really well i guess you're right you know but no it it's not here i think when trying to build connections between the longer ending of mark and church fathers and old writings i think that um nicholas lund in particular i think james snap seems to do this too a bit i'm sorry if i'm insulting to anybody i don't mean it that way we care about the data these just happen to be people who are presenting data i think that they tend to have questionable methods very low standards for confirming something connects to mark and um i saw that happen a lot so that's here's my thoughts on nicholas lund and james snap is um they everybody makes mistakes on this stuff right dan wallace has made some mistakes i'm sure i've probably made some mistakes i hope not i don't want to but i'm sure i have but their general approach is to be hyper critical of the mistakes of those who are against the longer ending and to have what seem like pretty low standards for confirming their theories about why it should be included and that is not helpful and you'll it will be confusion so here's my conclusion on the church fathers before we move on to the next thing in today's epic epic study isn't it is it it's sort of a bible study i mean it's it's it's it's necessary is what it is but um the church fathers here's my conclusion that the longer ending based on the church fathers is extremely early it seems reasonable to say that it's early second century or earlier like these are the options we have when we read the church fathers like early 2nd century or earlier because especially of irenaeus like really strong evidence there wallace says the following in the perspectives book on the ending perspective on leaning of mark kindlelocation424 he says the patristic testimony thus reveals a very interesting trend here's his interpretation of it from the earliest discussion on the authenticity of this passage the fathers indicate that the that most of the copies of mark ended 16-8 like jerome eusebius yet in later centuries the short ending was increasingly looked on unfavorably and the standard in the standard commentarial mark of the middle ages the short ending was rejected putting this on a trajectory it takes a little imagination to realize that what became the majority reading in the middle ages started out as a minority reading this is not overstating things here i think this is an accurate summary of the data it was it doesn't say therefore it's not original it's saying it was a more of a minority at a younger age and a majority at a later age that has obvious implications so the larger ending though is very early um we need to ask the following questions why is it lacking in some of the oldest manuscripts why is it lacking in some of the oldest versions why do some ancient sources say it's not in most of their greek manuscripts why do other more recent sources say it is in most of their manuscripts whether they're greek or not there obviously is a trend towards acceptance over time can we really just say that all comes down to egypt and i'm a little skeptical of that though i don't truly know and that's why i had to launch into the second branch of study which is the internal evidence that's what we're going to do right now the internal evidence is not about manuscripts it's about taking those 12 verses and looking at the style and the way it's written in the vocabulary and all the grammar and comparing it to the rest of mark and asking was this all part of the same book and did the same author write the last 12 verses that wrote the rest of it so the claim here is that the longer ending and i agree with this claim the longer ending does not match the style and the vocabulary of the rest of mark i think it's i think it's actually seems i was surprised at how strong this evidence is i thought it was going to be weaker but i'm more convinced after spending time on it so i'm going to break it down to you i'm not going to give you the whole thing because sometimes people do overstate the case but my conclusion is going to be that mark didn't write the law the same author that wrote mark didn't write the longer ending not even as part of a separate work most likely but definitely not part of mark initially um nicholas lund's case is that the same author wrote the whole thing um as as you know ultimately the same thing mark wrote all of this stuff and he wrote it all together and james snap has a very different peculiar seems peculiar view to me and it is that um verse 8 was the ending of mark unintentionally because of some urgency for some reason he stopped at verse 8 and so mark had other writings they grabbed another writing of marx that was a nice summary of what happened after the resurrection and they just dropped it into that passage so mark is the author but it wasn't originally part of mark but you can still consider it part of mark because it was the same author and that's kind of snap's view as i understand it okay some have overstayed their case um let me first get this out of the way this is criticized rightly by lun and snap and others what some do is they read the last 12 verses of mark and they gather every unique word every word that occurs in the last 12 verses that doesn't occur in other places in mark and they go we've got like 17 unique words therefore this doesn't match the rest of mark 17 words and 12 verses that doesn't match okay there's proper pushback against this you can't just count unique words without context and thinking about why they're there for instance the word 11 is there the word snake is there the word poison is there there's no reason in the rest of mark for them to use these terms there were 12 until the last part in mark where there's 11. okay that's the only time you're going to use the word 11. um you know when we get in mark the story of john the baptist beheading we have words like birthday and herodias and platter those are unique words but they don't mark didn't write it they're needed for the story so we can't include those i was sort of driven nuts going through this personally let me share some of my frustration with you because i started thinking that the standards felt sketchy on all sides when it came to how they were proving whether mark really wrote this text or not it just didn't feel like this is the right way to analyze it for some of the stuff that i was reading the best source i have found and i've linked it below you can read it for free on academia.edu you just make a free account there and i've linked it down below this is an article by travis williams who i'm very grateful to um who also i was able to interact with on email about this as well his article let me just show you at least what it looks like bringing method to the madness examining the style of the longer ending of mark man when i read this it was like i wanted to hug the man because one of the things he criticizes is that on both sides of the debate there are lacks standards and there isn't consistent methodology for proving that mark did or didn't write the same 12 verses as the other verses in the in the book of mark um this article was a breath of fresh air his complaints like i was like yes yes thank you and that's why i originally wrote him was to be like thank you it's like a drop of clarity in a pool of confusion or something like that i i was really poetic what i wrote to him was really it was a good email um so um both sides have been inaccurate on this though i think that lun did me personally more harm than others because i took a while to undo some confusion that was created by reading his so let me start with um oh where oh hold on hold on hold on i can fix this we can fix this everything's okay all right this is verse 9 in mark 69. let me point out a few of the problems that show there's a disconnect between in the internal evidence between the ending of mark and the rest of mark the at least the longer ending of mark so verse 8 would be the ending i would actually say we're seven and eight right um go tell his disciples and peter he's going ahead of you to galilee there you'll see him just as he told you they went out and fled from the tomb for trembling and astonishment to griptum and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid plenty of people don't like the way that ends we'll get there next week when i try to build a case for why i think that we can accept that ending um but verse 9 has a break like a disconnect with verse eight in other words it feels like whoever wrote verse nine it wasn't originally part of the longer ending it wasn't originally part of verse eight now actually james snap agrees with this agrees very strongly with us so it starts weird in verse eight the subject is the women right they went out and and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid the subject continually is the women in verse eight the subject here in verse nine is jesus now in the english that doesn't seem like such a big deal it's just after he had risen and a lot of times mark doesn't use the name of jesus that's pretty common in mark he uses he'll use like some other term he um but in the greek this is a nominative singular participle anastas anastus the way it's used and the way that mark uses participles like this there should be something in verse 8 that is about jesus and then verse 9 is continuing the discussion about jesus so there's just this doesn't give the whole case this just demonstrates mark doesn't usually write like that that's a little strange another strangety is that a word another strangety or is that a mike ism is when he appears to mary magdalene mark in verse 9 introduces or whoever writes this introduces mary a whole new way from whom he had cast out seven demons now mary has been introduced three times so far mary's in 1541 right her first introduction she's um mary magdalene 1540 excuse me um and then she's witne a witness specifically a witness to seeing um what happens with jesus she witnesses joseph taking his body in 1547 magdalene she's just called mary magdalene no no more details this is what's called disambiguation mark is just telling you who his eyewitnesses are that's how i take this and i've already taught a lot about that in the gospel of mark series so he just wants you to know mary magdalene mary the mother of joseph then uh they see where he's laid then in verse one mary magdalene again she's gonna see the empty tomb and witness the angel that's their function here but all of a sudden in verse nine she's introduced for the fourth time and new data about demon's cast out is just it's just strange let's just acknowledge this is not what you expect her name she's been introduced hasn't been discussed this way the story of the demons being cast out was never recorded in mark she is introduced this way in luke luke introduces her but it makes sense because it's an early introduction not the last mention of her um that seems strange i don't think there's any good explanation for this i've heard explanations on page 140 of his book nicholas lund tries to offer various explanations i think if you carefully analyze his comparisons to the old testament they don't work at all i think that they fail badly and it actually makes me feel more strongly about this there's there's also in verse nine there's no transition this is a softer thing there's no transition from the many women to just mary right he first appeared to mary but what about these other women they're not discussed mark has tracked with them and all of a sudden they're not discussed it also restates a time already mentioned just a few verses earlier so jesus rose early on the first day of the week that's when they go to the tomb very early on the first day of the week verse 9 it just it's almost like it starts fresh now after he had risen early on the first day of the week the way he already gave that time indicator it seems a little odd all this is to say the way verse nine sits in the text it doesn't feel like it flows from verse eight that's the implication there's a lot more data we need though i wouldn't cast it out based on just that i'm not going to cast it out at all actually but i wouldn't make my decision on that there's then examples of internal evidences that are like the way that mark writes so in the longer ending mark uses terminology and uses certain like style of greek that reflect that perhaps it wasn't mark right because mark is a peculiar writer mark has what some scholars call marxisms mark isms are things like euthus the word immediately you've read this when you read the gospel mark in english you're like why is he keeping immediately does he mean it happened right away is that is this a time thing and immediately and immediately and i mean now actually mark just has a peculiar way of using immediately sometimes he's just like he's just saying like another thing that happened like he's not even using it like that it's just a marxism it's just the way he is 41 times he does this now this is usually on lists of words that are in the longer ending that don't belong or that should belong excuse me that are not in the long reading that should be there because mark uses them but i'm going to agree with like nicholas lund and james snap here euthyphus is not as far as i can tell a good example of something we expect in the longer ending of mark so it's on all the lists as far as i can tell but it doesn't seem like a good example because you can't just say mark uses this word a lot he doesn't use it here therefore it doesn't belong like you're going to start cutting all sorts of stuff out of the bible if you think that that's a very reckless way to do things it's not accurate you need to prove there's expectation another one that i think is a bad example is the word palin palin and i spent a lot of time too much time on everything but palin is a very common example it's used 28 times in mark mark uses the word palin to say um again the word again basically and he's okay there's actually a paper written by dr randall booth on mark's use of palin i'll show you the picture of it here i was able to contact dr booth and i'll show you what he said it's in notes on translation 61. very difficult to get a hold of but if you if you message sill.org they may provide you with a copy i was able to get one that way um very hard to get that copy but this is a true marxism okay what we can acknowledge is mark uses palin in a very specific way it's very much a markism but and and travis williams in his article suggest this is evidence against mark having written the longer ending because it doesn't show up in these 12 verses but the big question is this just because mark uses it a lot doesn't mean i expect him to use it here so i actually messaged randall booth i got a hold of him it was easier to get hold of him than it was to get all of the paper but i asked him the following i said here's my question to him i said do you think mark's typical use of palin gives us reason to expect it to appear on the longer ending not just because it's a 12 verse section since there are many 12 verse sections in mark that don't use the term palin but because the longer ending has context which creates expectation for its use if the same author penned it here's dr booth's answer he says i don't see a natural place for palette 1612 is the closest but it already has a time marker and a different topicalized group of two people that would make palin less likely i conclude that two words that are on everybody's list maybe shouldn't be euthus and palin immediately and again don't seem like there are marxisms but they don't seem like they belong in the longer ending enough for us to think that it matters there are a bunch of other ones that do matter though so let's walk through those kai okay mark has a marxism a thing he does where he likes to use the word kai in a way that's more like a hebrew thing like the way the hebrews talk and not so much greek in greek they tend authors tend to use the word day and mark tends to use the word kai now they are interchangeable but tendency is what we're highlighting here not possibility okay it's not impossible for mark to use day that way generally he uses kai it's the it's the and word now this is important because this is not a word like 11 or snake where it you expect it in the passage because it's about those issues this is like a building block word travis williams talks about this in his paper which i highly recommend and i've linked down below on the um what i call bringing method to madness paper and a building block word's special because regardless of context mark just keeps doing this like throughout his whole book he just keeps using kai in his particular way no matter what he's talking about meaning that no matter what he's talking about in the longer ending you would expect it to appear here it reflects hebrew influence and it's not just how often mark uses kai he uses it a ton but it's the way he uses it that's special typically the word day is preferred here in other greek sources mark goes with kai possibly like i said due to the hebrew influence the longer ending completely flips this whereas everybody else the other gospels they all use day over chi mark uses chi over day other greek writers use day over kai mark uses chi over day but in the longer ending it suddenly becomes very greek and it doesn't sound like mark lun um tries to offer two passages in his book of examples of sections where kai and day are are used as similar ways as they're on the longer ending but i think these sections when you read them you realize they're not narrative they're not the same kind of thing and so they don't apply i think they're bad examples and so i think they're kind of misleading um now in a messenger conversation with travis williams i i wanted to ask him about this um so here's here's what he says and and he gives some more clarity than even what's in the article he says the striking part is that mark employs kai like a jewish author uses the hebrew conjunction vav he way he places it um at the beginning of sentences to string one idea to another so that multiple statements are in a coordinated coordinate relationship if you were hearing it in greek it would sound like a six-year-old telling you about their day at school and the teacher said this and the teacher said that and this happened this is good hebrew but terrible greek it's not that mark is dumb you guys it's that he's natively hebrew and he's writing now in greek so he has some leftover remnants people who have a second language say english as your second language you have some things that come from your mother language and they influence your way of speaking in english the question then i continue travis williams quote here from the conversation we had he says the question then is that if mark does this so often in 1 1 through 16 8 enough to establish that when mark writes this is how he writes why don't we see the same phenomenon in the longer ending in the longer ending the sentences are more complex there are adverbial participles making up complex sentences and the primary connective conjunction is de which is much more reflective of traditional greek usage why would mark use a distinctive style for 16 chapters and then all of a sudden decide to switch it up this one the kai and day issue seems like really good evidence to me against the longer ending against that mark wrote it right because i think anything mark wrote would probably carry this kind day feature unless mark later learned greek better and changed his style but that seems less likely okay so at least it's a good strike against mark and authorship of this passage and now someone else could have wrote it mark could have used an emanuelensis a secretary and they could have wrote that possible i'm just suggesting mark didn't pin it himself um also another example is in 1619 mark 16 19 and um i have no cat she's gone so i can't even refresh you guys with a little cat cam let's just dig dig deep i can't use that all right going up to the other one and there it is and here's mark 16 19. so then this is towards the end of the longer ending it says so then this is a great chance for the long ending to use the word kai here instead it uses men this is the only occurrence of the not the words the phrase men un or its usage in the way that mark uses kai to occur to my knowledge and it happens in the longer ending of mark so it's just another demonstration of hey that doesn't seem markin you might not notice it in english but a careful analysis of greek reveals there's a problem there another one is and this one gets a bit complicated a couple of these do because that's the nature of syntax and all that mark uses the historic present okay this is a verb form that mark prefers the historic present in greek more he uses it more than any other gospel author and his is his gospel short and he uses it more than what's typical for other greek writers at the time in other words this is like a real marxism like mark writes this way let me show you how much he does this this is in um this is in a book about on the synoptic problem horus a synoptic i think is the name of it i'm trying to remember it is in english even if the title is not um but this author went ahead and lined up 151 times mark uses the historic present verb form and compared it to other gospels to just demonstrate here's my point mark does it and they're less likely to do it um other research has gone into this to show that it's not just mark it's i mean it's not just the other gospels it's just greek writers in general this is like a mark thing here's another page offering a bunch more examples of mark 151 uses of the historic present another page offering the final list of examples there what's interesting is 151 uses very consistently throughout the gospel of mark very much a mark ism never in the longer ending is the historic present used that that's telling that seems important to me that seems worth acknowledging this isn't just a frivolous difference um yeah this is a uniquely markin type thing and it doesn't show up in the longer ending and it seems to appear regardless of context it's a consistent style point of mark let's talk about the demonstrative pronoun the demonstrative pronoun i'm going to read you something here this is from travis williams footnote on the topic um or travis williams comment on the topic i'm going to read it to you then i'm just going to summarize crudely what he's saying for anybody who gets lost in the details here in mark 16 17 the demonstrative pronoun is used as an attributive modifier 41 times in mark's gospel each time it functions in this manner it is placed in either first or second predicate position in verse 17 verse 17 i'm going to put that on your screen real quick and i'll highlight it for you in a second too in verse 17 it's going to be these words these signs the construction would be an an an arthritis second predicate position while this construction does appear elsewhere in mark like 6 4 never does it occur with the demonstrative pronoun which it does in verse 17 i add now quoting him again um furthermore in this predicate position there is never such a great separation between the pronoun and the word it modifies now you know this is me again in the english these signs is together in the greek they're separated with three words between them that's another example so here's what this is saying um in crude terms simple terms the way the phrase these and signs these two words the way they appear in the greek is different than the rest of mark both because of the words chosen and because of the fact that they're separated by three other words appearing between them so their location is weird in another example it's another example of how mark typically constructs sentences differently than something we find in the longer ending you know i would i would just ignore a lot of these anomalies to a point right but they add up let me give you another example that i think is very important mark has 66 times he uses a verb for perception he usually uses orato or harao excuse me or bleppo so harao he uses 50 times bleppo 16 times and that's when he's talking about people seeing things he uses him in important moments when they see jesus walking on the sea when they see jesus laid in the tomb when they see the tomb empty right come and see the place where he laid mark uses harao or blepo but two times in the longer ending verbs for perception are used and it's a different verb that doesn't appear in mark elsewhere theomai we're not saying that mark is ignorant of the word we're saying he doesn't tend to use it i have not seen any good explanation for this from james snap or from nicholas lund i have walked through their explanations but i'm not going to do that today i think the point stands and you're welcome to check it out on your own if you like um that's in um travis williams article which is relatively short and points you to other sources you can look at as well now this is what williams thinks is the strongest piece of internal evidence against the american ending and it's it's the word poor you am i now poor um i is a word for going so and they went and they went out they go out this is poor you are my mark has this word happened a number of times williams again he says this is the strongest piece of lexical evidence internal evidence that mark did not write the passage let me build let me tell you how you built this case number one he says the word poor um i it does not have situational specificity that is it's not like a leaven or poison or snake it's not a word that you expect for a situation this word just describes movement from one place to another and mark does this about 25 times in his gospel when he does it it's not that he doesn't use poor um i it's that he uses what's called a compounded form or poor um i with a prefix like epipen epipormio poor umi right ekporiumi or something like that like these are examples and forgive me for those examples aren't the best ones but those are prefixes i'm just greek prefixes of attaching to the word and so they're gonna add a prefix to describe the way he does this 25 times 16 of those you use this exact same verb poryumi but um when you add 25 together that's that's a lot of examples that's a lot of examples so lund's own analysis of this in his book strengthens this because he's like let me compare how the other gospels use the prefixed form of going compared to the non-prefixed form right mark he likes the prefixed form big time the other gospels they like the unprefixed form big time so matthew has 29 uses without the prefix to seven with luke has 51 without to 16 with john has 16 without to two with acts has 37 without to nine with this is a strong just tendency probably of just greek writing mark has 25 examples 16 of poor um i specifically and they're always prefixed only until you get to the longer ending in the longer ending versus 10 12 and 15 it is no prefix that's weird here's the point that's peculiar mark doesn't usually write that way there's no situation that would change the way he writes this as far as we can tell at least nothing that seems likely lund does offer other defenses on this point because this is a really strong point and solan labor's on it his defenses in my opinion are terrible like if you read them you start to go what's going on here these are not good at all his final defense nicholas lund and he does this in a number of cases is to suggest that the reason the longer ending looks different than the rest of mark is because of maybe mark's sources mark's appealing to certain sources for these eyewitness accounts of the resurrection appearances i have two problems with that for 16 chapters mark uses a variety of sources and they never affect him that way and in chapter 16 certainly peter is one of his sources peter has been a source up until that point and he hasn't affected mark that way so it just doesn't seem reasonable this seems very unmarket snap james snaps defense on the poor umi thing having the prefix or not uh number one he lists example this is important because i think we get lost in the debate right but he'll list examples of other words only used three times in one of the passages of a book but nowhere else in the book okay to me this is like bait and switch the debate here is not mark uses a word three times he never uses elsewhere that's not the issue the issue is mark has a way of doing a certain thing and here he does it differently it's not just a unique word it's a change in style so that's not addressed by snap his second argument is that mark's use of a compounded form with prefix earlier shows that he's aware of the uncompounded form but again this is bait and switch because the problem in the longer ending is not that poor um i um is a word that mark doesn't know about like he's ignorant of the term it's just a word that mark knows about and doesn't use and so i see no good defense against this now let me let me hit this home the internal evidence with the final observation so dudena charles john charles dude who i think has a really awesome last name dude um he wrote the book the greek gospel of mark and it's in the society biblical literature monograph series it was like four bucks like a lot of times this stuff is crazy expensive it's like four bucks to get this now what he does in his book is he compares mark he wants to find out look he wants to find out what's unique in mark that's what he wants to find out several things so one of them is what's unique in mark what's mark's unique writing style okay that's exactly what this longer ending debate is about right so what he does is he compares mark to the greek that came before it attic or classical greek like old greek he compares mark to old greek then he compares mark to the papyri that exists you know contemporaneous with him koine greek and he wants to find out where is mark unique right this is part two in his book is what does mark do that these other sources don't do now these are true mark isms this is like mark's way of writing not just different than the gospels but just different than people okay different people in general okay this is this is unique this is interesting in the conclusion uh lun uh excuse me uh dude has 21 of what he calls mark isms 21 features of mark that are distinct to mark that's how mark writes mark isms what what travis williams did was he took duna's 21 examples and he looked through the longer and because duna never talks about the longer ending he probably didn't think it was authentic he didn't even address it so so he doesn't help us there but travis william took duna's 21 examples and to me this seems like a pretty objective way to approach it he just dropped them on top of the longer ending and asked are any of these in the longer ending and his conclusion is not a single one i confirmed this with him because it wasn't super clear in his paper that he carefully checked everyone so i confirmed this with him i felt like i was being kind of rude but i was like i just want to double check here's what he told me in the greek of the gospel of mark john c duna discusses numerous syntactical constructions in which mark either deviates from or stands in oh no this is from his paper or stands in line with the standards of classical greek and the non-literary papyri while some are more peculiar than others all play a part in making the style of the gospel unique on a brief perusal of duden's work however one will note the absence of any such features in a longer ending so again i was like this is really powerful it's an important argument but i don't know that he was super clear in his paper so i emailed hey i got dudena's book travis williams and i checked every page he never talks about the longer ending where did you do the comparison did you did you check this or did you you know did maybe you make a mistake and not realize duna doesn't even deal with the longer ending of mark that's why he doesn't mention marxism's there and he says no no i want to make sure you understand right i checked every one of these against the longer ending and they didn't appear now i'm happy to hear someone push back i've never heard someone argue against that i think it's a significant piece of the case i'm open to hearing more because i don't know anybody who's pushed back there is however before i move on past the mark isms and we talk about the million dollar question um there are those like lun who try to say there are really mark like terms and snap does some of this in the longer ending i've gone through their argument i think it's pretty weak it's not that no terms are there but again lun often will only show the likelihood of another gospel author using the term compared to the likelihood of mark using it not a wider survey of the likelihood of mark versus just another author and so it it ends up being a trixie hobbit kind of moment if you ask me all right so like for instance uh gallion is is a is a word for preaching the gospel that occurs in mark especially right it's in the beginning of mark in the opening this is the gospel of christ it's it's there in the long running at the ending and they're like hey it's like it's like an inclusion like this is showing is long is authentic and it's rarely used by the other gospel authors but paul uses it constantly it's not like this is just a rare word in authors okay and so then it has less weight finally i'll just add this i'll throw this out there you know this even in english if all you know is english and you read the bible and you read through mark and you really think about it and you're really spending time on it and then you read the longer ending you notice when i notice this just feels different doesn't it it feels radically different the contents of the longer ending just feel very unique like i read the whole gospel mark study it verse by verse i've been teaching it for like two years or something well we took a break for some of that one but this is part 69 in the mark series we're in right now i'm telling you the long range just feels different and i think people acknowledge that on all sides or at least they can't now the million dollar question of scribal motives um this is what it comes down to okay we've got the internal evidence there that's pretty strong that's pretty powerful some people think that's by itself is enough to say that it doesn't it isn't part of mark originally but scribal motives is the million dollar question when it comes to manuscripts and church fathers and lectionaries and translations the the question goes like this which reading would most likely give rise to the other readings this is what these guys text critics always ask they're like we've got two three different readings what originally reading would explain all the rest and here we have to ask would would scribes more likely remove the original ending or would they more likely add the longer ending do people in egypt seem like they're more likely to cut out the original ending or lose it or are others more likely to add a longer ending so here are a couple reasons suggested on the side of those i hope you're still with me man i'm fading over here i'm keeping this video together because i want all the data in one place or i know it'll get confused online so um two reasons are suggested for why they would remove the longer ending especially in egypt right remember they tried to push it all towards egypt and there's some success there i just don't know if it works for all of it so two reasons are suggested um one is because they may have thought verse nine creates a discrepancy with the other gospels well obviously there was a debate about this right eusebius jerome right victor of antioch they all talk about the supposed contradiction between matthew and mark here um and there is not a real issue that we have to worry about but they all talk about it now the pushback on this is from dan wallace he says a couple things one um mark is actually in agreement with luke and john matthew is the one that reads slightly different that the one that you have to go i'm going to reconcile this matthew's the more tough one so if scribes were prone to omit a verse because of this issue they'd more likely omit matthew 28 verse 1. not mark 16 9. it seems as though it was after mark 16 9-20 is missing that this issue of you know bringing apologetics into it shows up not before also the and this makes a lot of sense why would you cut out twelve whole verses from the ending of the gospel of mark when you only have a problem with like one word in verse nine yeah that seems like overkill it seems pretty unlikely we generally don't see scribes doing that right they usually would when they do change a passage which we can tell and we can tell what it originally said but when they do mess with steph we can see it and we can see that they're often harmonizing someone's like oh luke says this here i'm going to add that text in you know it's got more details they're doing some kind of like harmonies um another response so i think that's unlikely another response is verse 17 and 18 about poison drinks and snakes is embarrassing to the church and so they deleted those verses to get rid of that embarrassment now there are some significant problems with this why on earth would you delete 12 verses because two of them are a problem for you that's i mean it just doesn't fit okay so now you could try to combine them versus nine's a problem and 17 and 18 are a problem let's get rid of all 12 but we just don't see this happening much it doesn't seem to work um also it seems unlikely for other reasons okay so scribes did tend to edit small portions on occasion but not remove whole sections they would often harmonize and their tendency when in doubt is to include a passage i'm not sure i'll include it you would do the same thing if you were the scribe is that original or not i'm not sure i'll include it just in case um not only this but the church fathers were not embarrassed by verses 17 and 18. maybe you are i'm not i don't think there's any problem with those verses um i think snake handlers misinterpret and misapply them but our earliest quotes from like 9 through 14 is from the 5th century but our we have 10 fathers that quote from verses 15 through 20 in the second through fourth centuries my point is the embarrassing part they weren't embarrassed about so we don't see the embarrassment that's there and again why would you delete 12 verses to deal with those two problems my conclusion here is this look removal by scribes for those reasons seems very far-fetched and when you try to start to suggest there's a couple other options people will throw out they removed them because they were gnostic heretics that reject the resurrection of christ this is the conspiracy theory version a gnostics don't seem to have that much power in egypt b why would it spread so broadly through the rest of christendom you know at least more broadly than just egypt it's influencing all these other places if that's the case c why didn't they remove other resurrection related stuff in the gospel of mark because it still ends with a bodily resurrection and an empty tomb and predictions of a resurrection and appearances at verse eight why didn't they do that to the other gospels why isn't there a trend to trying to remove resurrection stuff there isn't this is just there's a lot of problems with this view another view is that the longer inning was lost it wasn't removed in purpose it was lost because the scroll was rolled up and the ending was on the outside of the scroll and it broke off and was lost um i'll approach this a little bit more next week but that seems like we just don't have evidence to support it like it's a theory that it works like it would explain the data but there isn't corroborating evidence to support it where's the reconstruction of what people remembered of mark it would have had to have been lost so early like almost the original copy of mark that was lost also the tendency is to roll scrolls so that the ending of a scroll is the most protected portion on the inside of the text because you're reading from the outside so yeah there's no attempt to reconstruct it there's because verses 9 20 is not a reconstruction it's a separate edition is what we see here um so yeah then we have the other solution which is hey the reason why this the laundry inning's missing in some places is because originally it wasn't there so we instead of suggesting why is it missing we're gonna ask why was it added and a few different reasons are suggested for why it was added and i would add to this the intermediate ending is strong evidence in support of this because the intermediate ending is definitely added to a verse 8 ending so we know people had a tendency to want to add to the end of mark um one of the reasons is because they felt like it okay when mark ends in verse eight when you read it you're like that's it that's the end it's understandable i don't think it's a bad ending but i think that it's an ending that has some people scratching their heads and um it ends with women fleeing and fear saying nothing and people wrongly understand that i'll interpret that next week that'll be the last video in the mark series we'll talk about making sense of a verse 8 ending that seems legit though i could see how people would have an impulse to add more to the end of mark because of the way it ends another issue is because it lacks narration of resurrection appearances it does predict the resurrection appearances it talks about them ahead of time but it doesn't narrate them that's true when when the four gospels are looked at mark's the only one that doesn't have that narration it does talk about the resurrection it just doesn't narrate them some people make a really big deal about this and they blow out a proportion we'll deal with that next week as well but that could provide motive for wanting to add more content when the four gospels were first packaged together this is an interesting thing when they're first packaged together in some locations mark is the last of the four which means that in the reading of all four gospels you end with verse 8 and now it feels even more strange because you've ended all four with verse 8 not just one of them that could give people a desire to compile you know a summary of the extra data that wasn't recorded there another thought is that they just wanted to give it and this is perhaps similar to the last one they wanted to give it an ending similar to the other gospels right all the gospels do this now against this i want to say some say verses 9 through 20 are just like a pastiche like a like a cut and paste from other gospels just dropped into mark but that does seem a little bit reckless to say that because it's not just straight quoting all the other gospels it is more of a summary it's not just in the words of luke or in the words of john although there's some connections but i don't i wouldn't say they're all that they're too strong but all the content there can be found almost all of it found in other places in the new testament so what i'm going to say is the scribal the million-dollar question of scribal motives which is a big question a good one it involves some guesswork but it seems to weigh in favor of the short ending the verse 8 ending that is the variety of manuscripts the church fathers quotes you look at the internal evidence the rest of the external evidence and you go i don't think this was originally part of mark and i don't think the guy that wrote mark wrote this i don't think mark wrote it those are two different claims so this is this is my conclusion right i do not think that mark wrote it and i don't think it was originally part of mark but i still want it in my bible and this is the part where i think i'm going to be a little weird compared to what i've read a lot of other people say not i mean there are some people who agree with me but it's they don't talk about this very much one reason why i wanted in my bible what if i'm wrong i do not want to miss out on a single piece of what might be scripture okay but i have another reason and i'm open to new data changing my mind i'd rather have it there and move it from either a footnote or a bracket into into the main you know text or whatever and that's an easy move i don't want to lose it number two depending on how you view canonization that is how we got our scriptures you have to recognize something that even if it wasn't originally part of mark it was part of mark very early and for a lot of people and it gradually became part of mark for everybody pretty much maybe that was god's design maybe while mark was intended to end at verse 8 originally god also intended this other section to be added and we don't even know where it came from for all i know an apostle wrote it or someone who followed one of the apostles maybe as the apostles are dying there's some elder in a church who's considered very reliable and he's known he he knew thomas or something and you know he writes out his summary of what happened at the end you know the resurrection appearances and he's like i just want to have a memory of this and someone goes hey this would fit perfectly at the end of mark where i feel like it needs to be there like we don't actually know where it came from but it's super old and it was accepted and embraced early in the church pretty early at the mid late second probably mid second century at the latest so i'm going to say that that could simply be god's design some of the books of the bible don't come to us like an inspired author writes nobody ever touches it and it comes to us perfectly and unchanged sometimes books of the bible are like an inspired author writes and then somebody else finishes this part and someone adds a section here sometimes that happens and there's nothing uninspired about all that god is in all of the providence of how we get our bibles and i'm okay with that so i kind of want it included because i feel kind of like baby eusebius and maybe this is jerome's opinion and why he included in the vulgate he went yeah it's not the most ancient maybe in the most accurate copies but but it is there and it may well it may well be that god wants it there and it might be apostolic in nature that's also possible i don't know so i don't think it's original i don't think mark wrote it but i want it in my bible and i want a footnote that says things like hey this isn't in some of the earlier manuscripts and there's some of you know there there's there's a a demonstration of gradual acceptance of this passage but it's very early i'm cool with something like that now there are some lingering issues lingering issues at the end of this marathon and thank you guys for joining me like thanks for being there and by the way it's cool that i get to see some of your names that i recognize like um jay hamilton and stuff like that like i i see you guys all the time on my on my stuff validcore i recognize your name um and i'm just miss kitty i've seen you guys so i'm just i'm grateful that you guys are joining me on this journey i've never been able to study so deeply into the text of scripture and spend so much time preparing content i mean it was easily over 150 hours and i um i wouldn't normally say that out loud i wanted to say it because i know it will get more people to watch the video and that's how i get people to be ministered to so there's that balance of that kind of thing um but hopefully this is at least going to give you some better understanding make you feel great but there are some lingering issues and there are like these some people say look look at verse 8 mark cannot in that way they didn't tell anyone because they were scared like it can't in that way um others would say that an you know the last word in verse 8 is the word gar and in greek nobody ends with gar especially a narrative a narrative has never ended with the word gar and i'm going to suggest i'll answer that next week others will say there's no resurrection accounts that threatens the doctrine of the resurrection nicholas lund says this in his book that this is like the very doctrine of the resurrection somehow threatened if you don't think mark wrote verses 9 through 20. and i'm i'm like this is the overcorrection i'm scared of people doing and they crash and die so i'm going to deal with that others will say hey all this stuff is just evidence that the longer ending of mark while it's not the original ending it's revealing something mark's gospel never ended at verse eight the original ending was lost the original ending was just lost i'm going to answer all that stuff next week how do we make sense of a verse 8 ending and that'll be the final study in the marx series i'm going to then be taking just for announcements sakes a break my sunday night service that's located at my church we're on just a break while i do a major study project on women in ministry and i'm going to teach um spend a lot more time than i did on this on that topic read everything i can find and give you guys all the i'm going to tackle every tough question i can think of here whether or not i can fully answer them and all the passages of scripture and a variety of interpretations of them and try to like get clarity on this topic and um and i'm not afraid to stay on what scripture says on it i just want to make sure i understand what scripture says on it and um and then some other stuff i'll be doing then we'll be launching into the book of hebrews probably in two three months from now and we'll start the book of hebrews that's the next big book we're going to be doing so thank you guys for joining me thank you for the mods that stuck for a longer than two hours session this is just what it had to be and i am grateful for you so thank you lord bless you and keep you if if anything else if nothing else you get from this is you should realize that this should not affect your faith at all right at all but i want it in my bible yeah

Channel: Mike Winger

Views: 99,500

Keywords: women at the empty tomb, women witnesses, the mark series, part 66, episode 66, mark 15, mark 16, mary magdalene, salome, mary the mother of James and Joses, apologetics, the resurrection, empty tomb, was Jesus' tomb found

Id: WJilpQsl4vc

Length: 129min 45sec (7785 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 23 2021