Conceptions and Misconceptions in Studying the Gospels

In this episode, Dr. Gurtner and Tyler tackle Mark chapter 16. This passage ends in a strange way that has confused scholars for a very long time. Does the longer ending of Mark belong in our Bibles? What are we supposed to do with that information? Dr. Gurtner explains how textual criticism, or a discipline of studying the Bible, can be helpful in this situation.

Dr. Gurtner's book recommendation: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169880/to-cast-the-first-stone

Creators & Guests

Host
Dan Gurtner
Professor of New Testament Studies
Host
Tyler Sanders
Director of Communications
Producer
Courtney Robenolt
Digital Media Specialist

What is Conceptions and Misconceptions in Studying the Gospels?

Dr. Dan Gurtner takes on challenging passages and common misconceptions in the Gospels.

Tyler Sanders 0:03
This is Conceptions and Misconceptions in Studying the Gospels with Dr. Dan Gurtner. I'm your host, Tyler Sanders, and today we're looking at the longer ending of Mark. So this is a bit different than previous episodes. But let's just start with the text, and we'll kind of get there, we'll look at it, and we'll see where that takes us. So Dr. Gurtner, could you help us look at the text?

Dan Gurtner 0:24
Yeah, sure. We're looking at Mark chapter 16. And we're used to looking at, let's just say on Good Friday or especially on Easter Sunday, we're used to looking at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, let's just say, and the empty tomb. And we see Jesus rises from the dead, He gives the Great Commission, and we see the completed story. And this passage is confusing. And it's not confusing, just to us. It's been confusing for a very long time. And so we're gonna go to Mark chapter 16, and we're gonna see there's sort of a bit of a roadblock. And we're going to talk about this roadblock today. And how for quite some time, probably 1,500 years, people have tried to get around this roadblock. And what are we supposed to do with it? So Mark 16, verse one. "When the Sabbath was passed," I'm in the ESV, "Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the mother of James and Salome, bought spices so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, 'Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?' And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back, it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, 'Do not be alarmed, you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, He has risen, he is not here, see the place where they laid him. But go tell his disciples and Peter, that he has gone before you to Galilee, there you will see him just as he told you.' And they went out and fled from the tomb for trembling and astonishment had seized them and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

Now, I'm in the ESV Bible, this isn't a study Bible. This is just a normal Bible. And then I have, "Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16:9-20." And then I have a footnote and it says, "Among other things, some manuscripts end the book at 16:8. Others include verses 9-20 immediately after verse 8. A few manuscripts insert additional material after verse 14. One Latin manuscript adds after verse eight;..." and then it gives a small summary, "Other manuscripts includes the same wording after verse 8 then continue with verses 9-20." And then verses 9-20 starts, "Now when he rose early on the first day," and then have what's typically presented in most of our Bibles-and most of our Bibles have it in some kind of bracket or different colored font or different sized font. So what on earth are we supposed to do with that? That's sort of the question that we're looking at today.

Tyler Sanders 4:24
Even the footnote is complicated, because I do have a ESV Study Bible right here with me, and it has a lot to say about it too. But it doesn't look like it has all that information that you just shared about the variety that some have. You know, go to this verse, then go to this verse. And it seems very complicated. And I remember coming across this footnote the first time, I think I was not paying attention in church when I was a kid or something, and I came across it and it was like, a little bit shocking.

Dan Gurtner 4:58
Sure. And you kinda wonder, well, does this belong in our Bibles or doesn't it? And if it doesn't, why did they put it here? And if it does, why is it in brackets like this? And for some people who use a King James Bible, there's probably no brackets or anything at all. So here's what I want to introduce to us; where our Bible comes from. We're talking about the field of...it's a whole discipline of studying the Bible called "textual criticism". We know the New Testament is translated from Greek. Well, where do we get the Greek from? All the New Testament books were written in Greek originally by the original authors. And then, you know, they didn't have photo copiers, and they didn't have emails. So the way they circulated them, were by people copying them by hand.

So if Tyler writes a letter, and somebody wants a copy of that letter, they make a copy of it by hand. Or what often happened is, because so few people knew how to write, they would hire somebody to make a copy for them. So even if Tyler is a wealthy businessman, or something like that, he probably doesn't know how to write, so he pays somebody to do it for him. Well, so inevitably...let's just say if Tyler's a pastor of a church, and he gets a copy of Paul's letter or the gospel of Mark, and he wants to have this circulated to other pastors that he knows of, and he could afford to do that because he's a wealthy businessman. And he wants to have the gospel of Mark circulated to 20 pastors that he knows throughout the Roman Empire, so he's gonna pay to have that done, which is probably pretty expensive, but Tyler's got a lot of money. So he's going to pay one scribe that he happens to know to have those copies made. Who knows how long it's gonna take, but that scribe is a human being. So that scribe might have one copy of the gospel of Mark and he's gonna make mistakes.

So those mistakes, even though he has one copy that he's going to work from, he's going to make 20 copies, those 20 copies are not all gonna be the same, because he's gonna make mistakes. And those 20 copies are gonna go throughout the Roman Empire. And then each one of those 20 pastors is going to have their own copy. So now let's just say we're about 300 AD. And then each one of those copies, people are gonna make copies from those copies. And those copies are going to have mistakes made. And those copies, people are going to make copies from those copies. So what happens is, over the course of 2,000 years, well let's just say 1,500 years, until the invention of the printing press, which is the the first time when there is a static text. When a text can actually be reproduced where errors are not going to be made. Everything's done by hand by human beings. Eventually, they could mass produce manuscripts in monasteries, where somebody could stand up front and read text out loud, and people could copy them. But even then mistakes were made. Because as you know, if you say the word "plain", do you mean plane, p-l-a-n-e or plain, p-l-a-i-n? Well, the same thing happens in Greek. There are different ways that you can spell the same word. And so we have that in the Greek New Testament where there's different ways to spell the same word that have similar meaning but they're very different words. So in that way, the way manuscripts are made and passed along, there are always mistakes made. So there are really no two manuscripts from the ancient world that are identical.

Tyler Sanders 9:37
That are precisely the same.

Dan Gurtner 9:39
Exactly. So, what we have in the New Testament is a translation of what scholars have done to try to recreate what is the original, in textual criticism. So we try to go back and find out what the mistakes are to go back to what was the original. That's the discipline of textual criticism. So that's how we find out what is the original. Well then how does something like this end up in the Gospel of Mark? Well, because maybe this is not just a mistake that somebody put in, but this is something that's actually been added, that it's quite long. This isn't just sort of like a this or that.

Tyler Sanders 10:30
Or a mispelled word or something.

Dan Gurtner 10:31
Yeah. What's likely happened here-there are a few theories. This [passage] is weird. Because for this one in Mark 16:8, it's unusual to end [this way]. Literally in Greek it is, "They said nothing to anyone they were afraid for." It's the Greek word 'gar'. And it's kind of unusual to end a sentence with the word "for" in Greek. It's not impossible, but it's kind of unusual. It also reminds me of...do you remember the movie Pirates of the Caribbean? When they're talking about the Black Pearl, with a crew so wicked that they always kill everybody and leave no survivors. And Jack says, "No survivors? I wonder where the stories come from." So if they told nothing to anyone, how did they know that? They told nothing to anyone? They must have told something to somebody or what they wouldn't have known that they told nothing to anyone. So they must have told something to somebody. So, it doesn't make sense that it ends somewhere. They must have said something to somebody or we wouldn't even know this much.

So ancient readers had a problem with this from very early on. From the earliest and most important manuscripts, it ended at 16:8. So scholars are able to identify which ones are the earliest from a variety of means. And the earliest and the most reliable manuscripts, it ends at 16:8. So there's really no question about it. And also, the earliest church fathers, from Jerome and Eusebius and some of the earliest church's, had some of the best manuscripts available and say that they don't have any more endings, because there was some debate at their time, they say that there was no additional ending. There are some additional endings that start to come into being somewhat later, and those additional endings don't agree with each other. There are some shorter endings, and they all kind of contradict one another. So the point is that very early on, people started to recognize that there was something that seemed incomplete about the gospel of Mark, and they were trying to fill in the gaps. And the way they filled in the gaps were contradictory.

The other thing is that the way this longer ending-the way we have it printed in the Bible-has words and expressions that don't sound anything like the rest of the gospel of Mark.

Tyler Sanders 14:10
So stylistically.

Dan Gurtner 14:10
Yes, stylistically, the kind of words that Mark uses-and he tends to use the same words like all of us do. We have a particular kind of vocabulary. If we asked your wife-if there was a letter that was thought to be written by you-and we asked her. She'd say, "Oh, yeah, that's Tyler. I know what kind of words he uses". And if there was something that wasn't written by you, she'd probably be like, "That's not usually the way he says things."

Tyler Sanders 14:28
Yeah.

Dan Gurtner 14:28
These are words that, abruptly, are not from Mark. And pretty starkly, too. The other thing is it's kind of weird. Meaning; the context of 16:9 doesn't it really make sense. Because if you look carefully, the longer ending doesn't really flow naturally after 16:8. Jesus is presumed to be the subject of verse 9, and the women is the subject of of 16:8. Mary is introduced in verse nine as if she's not been mentioned in verse one.

Tyler Sanders 15:16
That's true. Yeah, it does. It gives that little half sentence describing who she is basically.

Dan Gurtner 15:22
Yeah. Like we don't know her, like she's just kind of dropped in out of nowhere. In verse nine, it says, "When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week," which sounds strange after verse two which says, "Very early on the first day of the week..."

Tyler Sanders 15:40
That's true too, yeah.

Dan Gurtner 15:43
It just doesn't...it sounds like whoever wrote verse nine wasn't really...it sounds like it wasn't the same person or at least wasn't at the same sitting. There are some incongruity. So the majority of interpreters of Mark, recognize that verses 9 through 20 are not original. It's pretty certain that 9 through 20 are not original to Mark. It's a later addition that somebody in the early church, some people in the early church, put on to try to make sense of the fact that Mark 16:8 does not seem to make sense.

Now, that's kind of common in the transmission of manuscripts. When something doesn't seem to make sense, we naturally want to make it make sense. So we try to fill in the gaps. You know, how many times have you thought, 'Gee, I wonder what Jesus was like when he was five.' Some of the early church traditions, some of the apocryphal traditions, have made up some stories about what Jesus was like a child. I remember when my kids were potty training, and I would have thought how wonderful it would have been like, what a sinless three year old would have been like, because my children were not sinless when they were three. That sort of thing, our natural curiosities. But somewhere in the course of transmission, people added to these manuscripts. So why does it end up in places like the King James without question? Because the people responsible for the King James, the 1611, ended up using a collection of manuscripts that were largely late, and largely from a single collection or group of manuscripts that did include it. So now, we have a much larger and much earlier and much more reliable group of manuscripts than they had in 1611, which gives us a better picture of what the original manuscripts included.

Tyler Sanders 18:15
And the logic of that is earlier manuscripts, we assume, are going to be closer to the original. That the tendency will be to add things as time goes on?

Dan Gurtner 18:25
They tend to be. That's not universally the case. They tend to be. Simply because there is less time for errors to be introduced. And the other tendency is-and I say they tend to be because a manuscript...let's just go back to the illustration of your 20 copies that are made. And let's just say the one that is in your hands is an earlier one and the one that is three generations later. So a copy is made from yours, a copy is made from that one, and three copies later; the one that's three copies down from yours might be more reliable than another one that is only one copy down from yours, if the copyist from yours maybe had a bad day when he was making your copy, was really distracted on that day, or you just never know what the mitigating circumstances might be. Whether a scribe just didn't know the language quite as well or something like that. So if there are corruptions that are introduced in the transmission process, it can be very early, but if it's being copied from a corrupted manuscript, it could be an early corruption. So the date doesn't really make much of a difference.

The other principle that scholars use for determining the originality is that the shorter a reading is and the more difficult a reading is, the more likely it is to be original. The shorter it is and the more difficult a reading is, the more likely it is to be original. What do I mean by that? What is the scribe more likely to deliberately do? He is more likely to deliberately expand a reading and to clarify a reading, than he is to shorten a reading and make it either more obscure or more theologically problematic. One of the classic examples in the Gospel of Mark, is Mark 1:41, where Jesus is asked to heal somebody. And the variant is; Jesus is either moved with pity or becomes indignant. So which one is it? Now, we want to say, Of course he's moved with pity. But which is a scribe more likely to do? Is he more likely to see 'moved with pity' and change it to 'became indignant'? Or is he more likely to see 'indignant' and change it to 'moved with pity'? That argues that the 'indignant' is more likely the original reading.

Tyler Sanders 21:59
Yeah. And that's kind of where that idea of the more difficult reading comes in?

Dan Gurtner 22:05
Yes.

Tyler Sanders 22:05
Or more complex? Kind of?

Dan Gurtner 22:07
Sure. Yes. So with this one in particular, with the longer ending, much of the discussion today, among interpreters of Mark, is not whether 16:9-20 was original or not. Because most people recognize that 16:9-20 is not original. There are really three questions. 1. Did Mark intend to write more, but didn't? And was prevented from doing so by his death, by his arrest, or something like that. Somehow, for some reason, the writing process was interrupted. 2. Is it the case that Mark did write more, and somehow it was lost? Which the difficulty is, we just have no evidence for that. So how would you even know? Well, is there some literary feature in the Gospel of Mark that suggests-like a chiasm-that suggests that there should be the other end of the chiasm, or something in a manuscript that shows that there's a trail off at the end of something that shows that there was something more, or a codec, something that shows that there was more somewhere? We just don't have anything. 3. Or [something] that's becoming more popular recently, that Mark intended it to end at 16:8? And he sort of lets the story speak for itself. Almost an enigmatic ending. The reader knows, there is no ambiguity about Jesus raising from dead. In 16:8, Mark explicitly says, "He has risen. He is not here, see the place where they laid him." So it's not like Mark doesn't let us know what happened. So the reader knows. The confusion and the astonishment of the women leaves us wondering about what it all means and what we are going to do with it. And so it's more of a, I don't want to get overly philosophical, but it's more of an existential and experiential kind of encounter with the reader, making us ponder how are we going to handle this? So I'm not sure where I stand on all this, I tend to think that maybe it was deliberate. But I don't know. But those are the [three] questions that interpreters are wrestling with more today.

Tyler Sanders 25:14
Which is an interesting development, I think. You do have this history of it being added into the text. I mean, that's the reason it's in the KJV, right? It's because there are a lot of manuscripts, over probably hundreds of years, that had this additional ending in it. So that is a fascinating thing, but I'm interested that we've moved past that. Now we're trying to figure out why is verse eight such of a particular way to end it? Which there is a terse style, I think, in Mark but that still would be a strong cut off to end the book on.

Dan Gurtner 25:58
It is. It is and I think...I mean, most of the conversations of this nature, are more happening in the academic world. And I think for the purposes of this podcast, I think it's important that in the church, that we put 16:9-20 to one side and recognize that this is not scripture. I mean, I still have friends who still will occasionally cite this as scripture. And it's not. And I think we can be okay with that. And I think we need to deal with, in God's providence for now at least, we recognize that 16:8 is the ending. And we need to deal with that. Whether it is deliberate, or whether it is accidental, or whatever it is, this is what we have. And so let's deal with, how is it that it ends this way? And what does it say to us as readers today, about the the ambiguity and the terseness, as you point out? And how are we going to respond to this news about telling people? Are we going to tell nothing to anybody, or are we going to make it known?

Tyler Sanders 27:26
Sure. Yeah. It reminds me a little bit-I feel like everything I say ends up coming back to the book of Jonah-but it reminds me a bit of the ending of Jonah. It kind of ends on a question almost, it doesn't just explain everything to you, You kind of get this enigmatic ending, and Jonah's faced with this conversation with God. And God's like, "Well, yeah, I didn't destroy Nineveh. But like, what did you expect necessarily?" Like, this is a very important city with all these people, and I think it says, "all these cattle" or "all these animals". And it kind of ends there without tying a bow on it. In the way we sometimes expect it to. That's kind of what this reminds me of a little bit. It kind of leaves it up in the air.

Dan Gurtner 28:19
Yeah, it leaves it up in the air. But I think at the same time, it tells you what you need to know. For these women, and I think for us, it tells us what we need to know. We need to know that Jesus suffered and died as a ransom for many, and that he raised from the dead, according to Scriptures, just as he said he would do. And that's really what we need to know. And just as we've said any number of times, and we've looked in a number of passages in this podcast of; I wonder what they knew about this and let's think about the background of that...some of those things are very fascinating. Dead Sea Scrolls, the Jewish background, the history, the context, I love that stuff. I'm all about that stuff. But at the end of the day, everything we need to know is right here. The gospel authors tell us what we need to know. There's more we could know, but everything we need to know is right here. And I think Mark tells us what we need to know. And that's right here.

But what I'm also try to illustrate for us is that, though the words are God's words, the question here is not, is God's word the inerrant, infallible, trustworthy Word of God? The question here is, with this longer ending-which is the inerrant and inspired Word of God-and I'm saying that the verses 9 through 20 is not part of that. So it's not whether God's word is trustworthy or not. And my students sometimes get tripped up over that. Can I really trust the Bible? Well, of course, we can trust the Bible. I'm just saying that this isn't part of the Bible, because the way the Bible was transmitted, until the invention of the printing press, was a very fallible process. The Bible is not fallible, but the transmission of the Bible is fallible. So we just need to recognize it. And the vast majority of the mistakes that are introduced in this process of transmitting by hand, over the course of 1,400 years, are very insignificant and have nothing to do with doctrinal issues whatsoever.

Tyler Sanders 30:54
Right. Yeah, Dr. Wegner has shown me a little bit about this. We received a Torah scroll recently, and he did an assessment on it. And he has some photos, so he showed me some of the stuff and a lot of it is, just like you said, it's very inconsequential and it's very simple stuff sometimes. Just like, what character exactly is this? Because some of these Hebrew characters look very similar. And the way this guy wrote this, it's just hard to tell. But either way, like, you can come to the same conclusion. A lot of it is very inconsequential. But this is a very big section of scripture. And I think that's why it's an important one to talk about. And a lot of times these notes that are in your Bible, aren't as significant as this one. But this is a big one. This is a footnote in most modern English translations that people are going to come across.

Dan Gurtner 31:53
Sure. And I'm guessing that Crossway, the publisher of the ESV, puts this in because this is such an important passage, historically, for most Christians, especially who have been raised on the King James, who are used to seeing this in their Bibles and wondering, What am I supposed to do with this?

Tyler Sanders 32:16
Yeah, I'm pretty sure-I'm looking at it, I don't see it exactly-but I think in the study Bible, the footnote says something to that, that basically, this has been in for a long time. And so, they wanted to leave it in to kind of represent that historically, this had been in for a very long time.

Dan Gurtner 32:34
Yeah, there's another passage of a similar nature. I just want to mention, and you and I have talked about this before, and you'll see a similar notation on this, and that is the the woman caught in adultery. And that is in John 7:53-8:11. This is something that you and I have talked about, briefly. And that's also been the subject of some academic conversation. And it is sometimes called the most famous biblical story that's not in the Bible. This one gets to be controversial because this is often a favorite Bible story. So, sometimes I'm reluctant to even bring it up. But this is the one where, you know, 'He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.' John 7:53-8:11, which again, in the ESV has "Some manuscripts do not include this passage" and it's discussion is similar to that of Mark 16:9-20. And actually even more problematic in some respects. There are a few passages like that, but these are probably the two largest in terms of, as you say, not just a few words or a couple sentences here and there, but an actual story. It's not to say that-in my opinion, this may very well have happened. But it's just not part of John.

Tyler Sanders 34:19
Right. Which I think gets back to the two questions you brought up. We have an answer to the first one, of whether the Bible is infallible and inerrant and reliable. The bigger question is, what is categorized in the Bible essentially, right?

Dan Gurtner 34:36
Right.

Tyler Sanders 34:37
Well, this has really been very helpful information to go over. Do you have anything else you want to say about how people can...maybe how people can respond to this, if they get questions about it?

Dan Gurtner 34:50
I think just recognizing that, there's often debate in public spheres that can turn into data spinning. Popularly, Bart Ehrman likes to do debates with Dan Wallace from Dallas Seminary. Bart Ehrman is a former evangelical and a text critic who knows all this data. And he spins the data one way and then Dan Wallace, who's a text credit, who is an Evangelical, spins the data the different way. And they're all looking at the same same data. And they can look at the same data and make very different conclusions by it.

I want to affirm that the scriptures are reliable. And that looking at a variation in how a couple of words are placed here and there, and what words may vary, and to extended passages may or may not be part of an original, it does not undermine just the mountainous trustworthiness of God's Word. You can google those debates between Bart Ehrman and David Wallace. And I think you can kind of get an idea of how that data spinning sort of works. But I just think it's important to be aware that in God's providence, the transmission of His Word, He's left to a very human task. He could have done like He did with the stone tablets at Mount Sinai and just dropped them from heaven and given them to us. But in His providence, He's chose to do this in a very human way, and I think we can acknowledge that and honor Him by acknowledging that, and recognizing that there are variations and in His sovereignty He has preserved His word for us.

Tyler Sanders 36:57
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Dr. Gurtner. It's always encouraging to talk about challenging sections of Scripture with you and I'm looking for the next conversation we have.

Dan Gurtner 37:10
My pleasure.