Originally Posted by Loomis

It looks to me like Neil Godfrey is begging the question.

His conclusion (that John 21 is not the original ending) is based on the premise that Mark is anti-Petrine. But that position is based on Mark without the proposed ending.

Originally Posted by Solo

But that's the point I made to Ben. You can't argue for a hypothetical ending of Mark on the basis of what was deemed desirable in a later church theology and what arrived to our time as approved resurrectional scenarios. I read Mark and he seems as much anti-Petrine as Galatians. And then I read the 16:8 and it appears to be a full stop.

Originally Posted by Loomis

But if Mark 14:28 was not original then that might help explain why the disciples didn’t recognize him in John 21:4.

Originally Posted by JoeWallack

Bonus material for Solo. Note that "Matthew" and "Luke" both retain "Mark's" disbelief that Jesus was resurrected. Now the characters believe the angels (which they considered more believable) and the disbelief is transferred to what mere humans say.

Originally Posted by James Snapp Jr

Welcome, readers.

I am defending the view that Mark 16:9-20 was part of the Gospel of Mark when the Gospel of Mark was initially disseminated for church-use.


The current academic consensus that Mark 16:9-20 is a scribal accretion has been caused mainly by three things. First, it is due to widespread dependence upon the late Bruce Metzger’s Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. Numerous commentators on this subject either repeat Metzger’s comments, or distort them, or simply tell their readers to read Metzger. However, Metzger omitted important details, and some of his statements are so imprecise as to be misleading. When modern-day commentators write, “Clement of Alexandria and Origen show no knowledge of these verses,” we are hearing Metzger’s echo. Where professors state that Mark ends at the end of 16:8 in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, without stating that both of these manuscripts possess features indicating that their producers were aware of copies in which Mark did not end at the end of 16:8, we hear Metzger’s echo. When commentators claim that a number of manuscripts have scribal notes stating that older Greek copies lack Mark 16:9-20, we are, again, listening to Metzger’s echo. In light of this phenomenon, I invite each of you to adapt a familiar text-critical principle: commentators and scholars should be weighed, not counted.

If we could somehow force scholars not to begin and end their research by consulting Metzger, the current consensus about Mark 16:9-20 might dissolve. In 2007, J.K. Elliott, Dan Wallace, David Alan Black, and Maurice Robinson discussed this question at a conference moderated by Darrell Bock in 2007. Two of the four textual critics at that meeting – Black and Robinson – supported the authenticity of Mark 16:9-20. We should not allow a bracketed “A” in the UBS Greek New Testament (signifying that the text is “virtually certain”) to convince us that there is nothing to learn from a fresh investigation of the evidence.

Unfortunately, the second main contributor to the academic consensus that Mark 16:9-20 was absent from the Gospel of Mark when the text began its transmission-history is what I just mentioned: the casual conviction that there is nothing to learn by re-examining the evidence. To the independent researcher William Farmer, the “virtually certain” conclusion against 16:9-20 did not seem certain at all. Even in cases where independent researchers such as Michael Holmes have concluded that Mark 16:9-20 is non-original, they have affirmed the passage’s antiquity, popularity, and, often, its canonicity. But relatively few scholars have independently surveyed the evidence. As a result, errors have been allowed to spread, contributing to a cardboard consensus. Errors about patristic evidence, Ethiopic evidence, Georgian evidence, Arabic evidence, Sahidic evidence, lectionary-evidence, and Greek manuscript-evidence have been multiplied and magnified, in the service of the view that Mark 16:9-20 is inauthentic.

Consider one example: Dr. Norman Geisler wrote that Mark 16:9-20 is lacking in many of the oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts, and in important Ethiopic manuscripts, and that Eusebius reveals no knowledge of these verses, and that many manuscripts mark the passage to indicate that it is spurious. Won’t everyone who believes him conclude that Mark 16:9-20 is inauthentic? But evidence-investigators will discover that only two early Greek manuscripts conclude Mark at the end of 16:8, and that each has an abnormal feature there. They will discover that no Ethiopic manuscripts of Mark end with 16:8. They will discover that Eusebius knew the passage. And they will discover that less than 2% of all Greek copies of Mark are known to have special marks by the passage, and that in several of these marked copies, annotations defend the passage, stating that although in some copies the Gospel end with verse 8, the rest is found in most copies, or in the ancient copies.

The third main factor driving the view that Mark 16:9-20 is a scribal accretion is a false assumption about the authorship of the Gospel of Mark. This is where the analysis by Metzger falls farthest short. Metzger’s comments indicate that he assumed that the Gospel of Mark had a single author, and that anything not written by that individual must not be original. However, such an assumption is not in play in textual criticism. As Kurt and Barbara Aland have written, “The competence of New Testament textual criticism is restricted to the state of the New Testament from the moment it began its literary history through transcription for distribution. All events prior to this are beyond its scope.” What that means, for our present subject, is that if Mark 16:9-20 was present in the autograph from which the first copies of the Gospel of Mark were made, then the question of the authorship of these 12 verses is superfluous. What matters is simply the presence or absence of these 12 verses.

Production-criticism, or “higher criticism,” may show or suggest that different book-components -- in Genesis or Zechariah or John or Second Corinthians – were written by different authors or added by different editors. But this information pertains to the text’s production-stage. Only after the production-stage is over can the text validly be the subject of textual criticism. And if the production-stage of the Gospel of Mark did not end (and the transmission-stage begin) until after 16:9-20 was attached, then 16:9-20 qualifies as part of the original text.

The theory which I hope you will accept as the theory which best accounts for the external and internal evidence may be summarized as follows: Mark never finished his Gospel-account. The production of Mark’s Gospel was continued by colleagues of Mark in Rome after his departure; instead of adding words of their own, they attached a short, already-existing Marcan composition about Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. This material, now known as Mark 16:9-20, was rejected by an overly meticulous second-century copyist, who may have preferred instead to use John 21 as the continuation and conclusion of Mark’s narrative.

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.

Originally Posted by JoeWallack

JW:
James Snapp, Jr. Introductory post at CARM