Episode Details

Location and Date: Remsen Bible Fellowship, 07/13/2025

Theme: How will you respond to the news of Jesus’ resurrection?

Subject: The strange ending of Mark’s gospel

Title: A Weird Ending

Introduction ‏

How does the gospel of Mark end? That might seem a strange question to ask, at least considering that a good portion of you have Bibles in your laps and could simply look down for the answer, right?

Or—could you? If you do have a physical or digital Bible in front of you, you will probably notice something weird right before verse 9. In the English Standard Version, which is the translation I preach from, there is a bracketed note written in all capital letters: [SOME OF THE EARLIEST MANUSCRIPTS DO NOT INCLUDE 16:9-20]. The text of 16:9-20 is then included, but set apart by double brackets. Most modern translations have similar features or notes in this place. So—what is going on here?

To answer that question we’re going to have to talk about textual criticism. That is a phrase that might sound a little academic and nerdy—and well, it is. But the basic idea is pretty straightforward. Textual criticism attempts to ascertain the original wording of a given text. When studying ancient documents—for instance, the books of the Bible—one of the problems scholars encounter is the variation between the handwritten copies when it comes to wording or phrasing in particular passages. You can imagine how that might happen—if we each sat down to copy the gospel of Mark word-for-word, how many of us do you think would get every word correct? Probably none of us would.

And that starts to sound a little scary. Well, if all of these errors crept in in the copying process, who can tell which ones are correct? Is biblical transmission just a long game of telephone? Here we have two simple sources of reassurance: 1) most of the people copying the books of the Bible were trained as scribes, and so while they were human and did make errors, they actually made a lot fewer than you might expect. 2) while there are errors in the manuscripts we have received, we have so many copies that it becomes possible for textual critics to determine where the errors are. So it’s not a case of two or three copies which are all different, and the scholars have to gather in a circle and flip a coin trying to determine which one is actually God’s word. Instead, we have over 5,800 whole or partial manuscripts of the NT. For comparison, there are about 10 copies of The Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar. NT textual critics have a lot to work with, and that gives us more confidence in the text, rather than less. One of the greatest NT scholars of the 20th century was FF Bruce, and he put it this way:

If the great number of manuscripts increases the number of scribal errors, it increases proportionately the means of correcting such errors, so that the margin of doubt left in the process of recovering the exact original wording is . . . in truth remarkably small.

Or, to return to our analogy, if two of us make a copy and disagree about a word, that’s a potential problem. If 35 of us make copies, and only two people disagree on a particular word, we can guess that the 33 people who agree were correct in their copying of the original.

All of that to say, the process of textual criticism has actually served to give us a great deal of certainty about the biblical text. You really can have confidence that what you are holding in your hand when you pick up a good English translation of the Bible is a faithful representation of what the Holy Spirit inspired the original authors to write.

Now, having said that, there are two passages that cause a little extra consternation. The first is John 7:53-8:11, which was actually the text of the second sermon we ever had here at