No Worse Than Any Other II: Mark 16:9-20

One of the common complaints that I hear about the King James Version is how poor its textual basis is. That is true. The textual basis of many of the other versions, however, is worse. Consider the ending of Mark. 

The Gospel of Mark has a number of endings in the manuscripts. Many prefer to follow the readings of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, the two earliest complete manuscripts of the New Testament. Both of these manuscripts are missing Mark 16:9-20. They are not, however, the earliest witnesses to the passage. That distinction belongs to Irenaeus. In his Contra Haeresis 3.10.5, Irenaeus quotes the beginning of the gospel and the end of the gospel (Mark 16:20). Elsewhere (Contra Haeresis 2.20.3) he quotes from Mark 16:17-18. Thus the entire long ending was known in the second century, which is much earlier than the fourth century manuscripts that omit it. So what verses of Mark 16:9-20 show up in our selection of translations?

KJV: 9-20

ESV: [[9-20]] (marked in double brackets indicating that it should be deleted)

NRSV: 9-20

NIV: 9-20

NLT: both shorter and longer versions given and marked.

NKJV: 9-20

NIrV: 9-20

 

In this case the English Standard Version uses an inferior text to the King James Version. For this passage, it is a worse translation. Sadly, the BYU New Testament Commentary also follows the inferior text. 

 

Update on the New Mark Manuscript

Earlier, back in January, I reported on initial news stories about a new fragment of Mark that has been discovered. Craig Evans has been visiting BYU the last couple of days and I have both heard presentations that he has given that deal with this fragment and been able to talk with him about it. With his permission I can give the following corrections to the news reports.

• To begin with, I know that Evans is a better scholar than would appear from the news reports. (He did not earn a three star rating on the book list for nothing.) I should have realized that he was not being correctly understood by the news reporters. I am sorry if I misrepresented him based on garbled reports.


• The papyrus with Mark did come from cartonnage but apparently did not come from the mummy mask. (He showed images of the extraction of the papyrus from the mummy mask, which he was not involved with. As an Egyptologist specializing the the Greco-Roman period I found the original mask a lovely object and cringed to see the photographs of the extraction even as I understand why it was done. I value both the object and the texts.)


• The work was not done at Acadia University. Apparently Evans is the only link between Acadia University and the papyrus.


• The texts in the collection include fragments of Septuagint, classical texts and many business documents.


• At least one good papyrologist has looked at the text and has had some input on the dating. The team publishing the papyrus has claimed to Evans that they have good reason for dating the papyrus to the 80s but the dating is not Evans's. Evans was unable to say what the reasons behind the date were (whether that is because he is contractually obligated not to divulge that information before the publication or because he does not know is immaterial to me; he has said what he can and has the integrity not to speak beyond what he can).

Now given this information I would speculate the following:

Paleographic dating of non-literary texts (that is texts in business hands where the date is missing) is  no more accurate than to the nearest half century. Paleographic dating of literary hands closer than the nearest century is dubious. Since this is known by the papyrologist working on the team, either there is good reason for the more narrow date or the papyrologist was not involved in assigning the date. In the latter case the date should be ignored but I will assume that the former is the case. There must be something on the papyrus that indicates a date. The three most reasonable scenarios that suggest themselves involve the reuse of business documents either through (1) a palimpsest, (2) a business document on the back of a literary texts, or (3) a literary text on the back of a business text.

Evans showed photographs of other texts in the collection that were about half a page and implied that the Mark text was like them (but I might just be reading that into what he said). If that is the case, I would expect that there would be no more than ten verses per side. Under scenarios 2 and 3 we would have only about ten verses of Mark, where we might have twice as much if we had both sides.

Scenario 2 provides the best chance of a date that might actually be in the 80s or 90s. But what would it say about the value of Mark if it was already being reused (and thus deemed worthless) in the 90s?

The most exciting scenario would be if the half page of Mark came from the last chapter. In that case the I would expect that the first page would establish that the text actually belonged to Mark but that the verso would contain a very different (and likely correct) version of Mark's resurrection narrative. I think this scenario is highly unlikely (if one were to pick a page at random from the gospel of Mark, the odds that it would be the sixteenth chapter are only about 6%).

Given that early second century quotations of the New Testament tend to be very different from the later established New Testament text, a very early copy of the text should differ significantly from the standard text. The closer the papyrus reads to the standard text, the more it is likely third century or later.

For all of this we await the formal publication which looks like it will be 2017 at the earliest. When it does come out I expect that at least half of my speculation will be based on false assumptions and be wrong.

On Reports of a New Gospel of Mark Fragment

There are reports (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) about a new fragment of the Gospel of Mark dated to AD 90. Sifting through the initial reports, I have a few initial reactions.

1. The dating to AD 90 is far too precise for paleography. Business hands are found on legal documents with precise dates and they are only datable to the nearest half century. Literary hands are harder to date and any date given that is more precise than the nearest century should be viewed with skepticism.


2. The papyrus was found with others in cartonnage. This means that we should expect the fragment to be small. I would not expect that it will have much in the way of textual variants because the size of the piece will probably preclude it from having a lot of text. 


3. On the other hand, if it is really early, I would expect the text not to match the standard text very closely.


4. The style of the cartonnage should provide us with another dating criterion. Unfortunately, the photographs of mummy masks do not seem to be of the mask from which the papyrus was taken.


5. Papyrologists and archaeologists have different views of the objects that contain writing, and different views on issues associated with those objects. One of these issues is the ethical issue of extracting papyrus from cartonnage. Basically, imagine making a paper-mache object out of old newspapers. Hundreds of years later historians and art-historians will have different views about whether or not to destroy the paper-mache object to look at the historical newspapers. The difference in view comes from which object the scholar thinks is important. If you think the texts are more important, you will favor extracting them. If you think the crafted object is more important then you will favor not extracting the texts. There are advantages and disadvantages to both positions and what to do with an archaeological object sometimes involves certain trade-offs. Before they get on their high-horse, archaeologists should remember that archaeology involves systematic destruction.


6. Recently a couple of very good papyrologists assigned new dates to most of the New Testament papyri. Many of them dated much later than New Testament scholars have dated them. The theological dating of papyri tends to assign them much earlier than they should be. This looks like a case of theological dating. Craig Evans is a good and insightful New Testament scholar but he is not a papyrologist.


7. I would be somewhat surprised if the conditions existed in Egypt in the first century for a copy of the New Testament from that time period to be preserved. To make an argument for the existence of such a text also implies an argument for the state of Christianity in Egypt.


8. We will have to wait for the publication to appear before we can comment on more than probabilities. The publication is supposed to come out from Brill, but I cannot locate anything that looks like it on their list of forthcoming publications.

Textual Variants in Mark 6:11

A friend has asked me about why the second half of Mark 6:11 is missing from most modern Bibles:

The last half of Mark 6:11, as found in the King James Version ("Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city") is not found in any modern translation of the Bible. I have, however, been unable to find any commentary on this reading and why it's been excluded from recent translations.

Usually the NET Bible footnotes would have something on this, but there's nothing there. And even Metzger's Textual Commentary ignores it.

The papyri are not extant for this portion of Mark, which is not surprising since Mark is not well attested in papyri from Egypt. So here is the state of the manuscripts with their conventional dates:

Fourth century
Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are both missing this passage, which is no big surprise since they tend to drop things out.

Fifth century
Alexandrinus has the passage but Ephraim, Bezae and the Freer manuscript do not.

The versions are split. Several important families of manuscripts do have the passage, in fact the majority of manuscripts do.

I cannot think of any controversy from the fifth century that would explain the sudden inclusion of this material.

The first half of the verse implies something like the second half of the verse, and in fact the parallel passage Matthew 10:14-15 has the passage. The second half of Mark 6:11 is Matthew 10:15 verbatim with the omission of the word land as in "for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha." Mark does tend to omit material from Matthew.

This looks like one of the better cases where material from the parallel passage has been copied over. I would judge it to be a case where Mark omitted the material from Matthew, and because the situation is implied by the wording, the copyists, starting in the fifth century, added the material from Matthew back into Mark.

So, the bottom line is that Jesus probably said it. Mark left it out of his epitome to soften the implications of rejecting the gospel, but starting in the fifth century, the copyists added it back in from the parallel in Matthew. If you want to cite it, you are safe just to cite Matthew 10:15.