The case of the missing verses in Mark

For those of you following along in our two-year Bible-reading plan, well done! You’re almost there! In only six more months, you will have read through the entire Bible – what a profound gift from God. I’m so thankful to God that many of you are still reading and that as a church we’ve come this far in reading all of God’s Word together. Reading the Bible individually is great. Reading the Bible together as a community of believers is even better. I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had in the last year and a half with other people who are reading along.

Now, a couple days ago in our Bible reading plan, you may have thought you found a mistake. The reading for that morning was Mark 16.1-8. ‘Wait,’ you may have thought, ‘this is clearly a mistake. Whoever wrote up this plan forgot the last few verses of Mark. They forgot Mark 16.9-20.’

Well, no, I didn’t forget. But I should explain. The reason I didn’t include Mark 16.9-20 in the Bible-reading plan is that those verses probably weren’t in the original manuscript of Mark’s gospel.

This may surprise you, but we don’t have any original manuscripts of any of the books of the New Testament. They’ve all been lost or destroyed by the ravages of time. We only have copies. But we have many, many copies and many of these copies are old and reliable. The thing is, these copies sometimes have differences (‘variants’). In the days when these copies were made, there was no printing press. All the copying was done by hand. So, many unintentional errors (and some intentional scribal changes) crept into the copied manuscripts over time. This reality should not shake our confidence in the Bible. The vast majority of the differences are inconsequential and the proper reading is easily identifiable. Of the more consequential differences, no major Christian doctrine is at stake.

All this background is necessary in order to understand the case of the missing verses in our Bible-reading plan. The earliest and best manuscripts of Mark (such as Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) do not contain vv 9-20. These verses are also missing in early translations of the Greek New Testament into other languages like Latin, Syriac, and Armenian.

Vv 9-20 are found in some manuscripts, but most of these are later. Moreover, a number of Greek words and expressions in these verses are not typical in the rest of Mark’s gospel, which indicates they are not original to it.

The most likely conclusion is that Mark 16.9-20 was not in the original manuscript of Mark’s gospel, but that it was written and added quite early. In most modern Bibles, these verses will appear in brackets with a note that they do not appear in some ancient manuscripts. That’s why they didn’t make it into our Bible-reading plan.

By the way, some of the information in this blog I took from the ESV Study Bible. As always, it has proven very helpful to me. If you don’t already have a good study Bible, I highly recommend this one. Put it on your Christmas or birthday wish list. And read the article in the back of the ESV Study Bible entitled ‘The Reliability of Bible Manuscripts.’

Posted by Stephen Witmer on Jun 19, 10:51 AM