In 2021, Mehrdad Sadigh was found guilty of grand larceny for selling fake artifacts to people from his art gallery in New York City. Sadigh sold numerous counterfeit Egyptian sarcophagus masks for $5,000 that were purportedly dated to the 6th century BC. As it turns out, authenticity matters when it comes to historic artifacts. Authenticity also matters when it comes to Scripture.
The ending of the Gospel of Mark (16:9-20) has been questioned in terms of its originality to Mark. The same questions have been raised about the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8. You may have noticed that in your Bible those passages are bracketed off with the message “Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16:9-20.”
Is the longer ending of Mark original to Mark?
Craig Blomberg points out that some of the earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts don’t have it. It’s also not in numerous early Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian manuscripts. Early church fathers and church historians like Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, and Jerome did not seem to know about these verses.[1]
So, where did they come from?
It’s likely that later scribes copying Mark’s gospel felt that Mark couldn’t have meant to end his gospel so abruptly and so they added these verses to give it a “proper ending.”
The natural question then arises, what happened to the end of Mark’s gospel? Some think it was lost. The end of a scroll was the most vulnerable so it could have gotten ripped off. But because of the fact that Mark’s gospel would have been copied many times immediately after it was written, that’s less likely. It’s most probable that verse 8 is Mark’s original ending, in all of its abruptness.
Some Christians and scholars believe Mark is original to Mark and still hold it to be divinely inspired and inerrant. That’s fair. I don’t think it should be a dividing issue. In either case, no Christian doctrine is effected, unless you inappropriately interpret verse 18 to mean that we should be handling snakes and drinking poison in church. This was likely a reference to Paul surviving a venomous snake bite while shipwrecked, and didn’t suggest a command to handle snakes, but pointed to God’s protection of his children as well as his commitment to lend divine authority to the preaching of the gospel with miraculous signs in the apostolic age.
Mark didn’t forget the Resurrection
As for Mark’s abrupt ending, Mark is notoriously brief. It would be surprising if he wasn’t. Also, though Mark doesn’t narrate a Resurrection appearance, he certainly doesn’t leave the Resurrection out. He quotes the angel in verse 6 as saying, “You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here…he is going before you to Galilee.” I understand wanting to have narrated accounts, but that wasn’t what God divinely inspired for this Gospel. That task would be left to other gospel writers.
We can have a tendency to think Mark should have included all important details in his Gospel. But if we believe that God inspired the authors of each of the four Gospels, then it changes our perspective. The gospels are God telling a story from four perspectives. If he’s going to emphasize something in one gospel why should he need to emphasize it in all of them? John Calvin writes that “God so dictated to the four evangelists what they should write that, while each had his own part, the whole formed one complete body.”[2]
Plus, if it’s true that Mark is writing to Roman Christians who are suffering persecution, he may have wanted to remind them that even the first witnesses to the Resurrection were no heroes of the faith, but struggled with fear.
No matter what the reason, it’s certainly not because Mark didn’t believe the Resurrection or know about it. No one could have believed in Jesus apart from the Resurrection so Mark’s Gospel isn’t meant to exhaustively cover every detail, but recount with brevity the details of Christ’s life, death and Resurrection. The fact that Jesus rose from the dead was presumed.
Can we trust the rest of Scripture?
Some might see this and think we can’t have confidence in the authenticity of any Scripture passage. I think the exact opposite. This shows that if a passage or verse isn’t original, we would know it. Therefore, we can have full confidence that what we read in our Bible is original to the divinely inspired author, and in the very minor instances where it may not be, Scripture indicates that.
Timothy Jones makes an excellent point about the process of God preserving his Word. He points out that many skeptics like Bart Ehrman like to argue that if God divinely inspired his Word it would be perfect and we would have every manuscript, rather than scribes at times making additions and biblical scholars comparing manuscripts to discover the original text.
But Tim Jones powerfully argues that God has worked through more than one imperfect instrument to accomplish his purpose such as Noah, Moses, Esther, Mary Magdalene, Peter and Paul.
Jones writes this:
Ehrman seems to expect God to work around humanity to preserve his words, so that textual criticism wouldn’t even be necessary. The pattern throughout the Hebrew and Christian Scripture reveals a different pattern–the pattern of a God who works through humanity. Given God’s penchant for revealing his glory through failure-prone implements of flesh and blood in the first place, who’s to say that a process such as textual criticism might not be precisely the pathway that God has chosen to preserve and to restore the words of Scripture?[3]
Sir Frederic Kenyon, the former director of the British Museum, once said this about the authenticity of our Bible’s based on the manuscripts we have: “The interval between the dates of the original composition and the earliest extant evidence is so small as to be negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed.”[4]
How should we approach the ending of Mark then? Loosely authoritative. We can trust the text insofar as the information is supported in other biblical texts, but perhaps not lean into each word and phrase with the same level of detail we would another text.
We stand on solid ground when it comes to the authenticity of Scripture. Even if you take out the ending of Mark and John 8 as well as the instances of a verse possibly being added, not one Christian doctrine would be affected. If that isn’t miraculous preservation of God’s Word then I don’t know what to call it.
[1] Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2014). 18-19.
[2] Robert Letham, Systematic Theology (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2019). 191.
[3] Timothy Paul Jones, Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s “Misquoting Jesus” (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Books, 2007).48.
[4] Jones. 50.
Mike McGregor
Mike McGregor (MDiv, Reformed Theological Seminary) is Director of College Ministry at First Baptist Church in Durham, N.C. You can follow him on Twitter at @m5mcgregor.
