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Hello and welcome to Word Magazine.
This is Pastor Jeff Riddle from Christ Reform Baptist Church
in Louisa, Virginia. Today is Saturday, October 15
of 2016. In this episode of Word Magazine,
we're going to be offering a review of a recent sermon that was preached
on the ending of Mark. The sermon was preached by Pastor
Kerry Hardy. It was titled The Added Ending
and it was preached on October the 17th of 2012, so just about
four years ago. Pastor Hardy is the pastor of
Twin City Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. According to
the church website, he's been there since 2006. He's a graduate
of the Master's Seminary and a former staff member of Grace
Community Church, John MacArthur's church out in California. And
knowing that makes sense, given the message, because his views
on the ending of Mark are very much like those of John MacArthur.
And there's a previous Word magazine that I did on MacArthur when
he handled this same text, the ending of Mark, several years
ago. So if you're interested, you
can listen to that as well. This message was called to my
attention because a member of my church, someone had shared
it with him, and then he shared it with me and asked me, If I
would respond to it. And so that is what prompted
me doing this word magazine. My purpose is not simply to offer
some kind of gratuitous criticism of Pastor Hardy. I don't personally
know him. But you know the sermon is on
sermon audio. It's there for people to listen
to it's a public domain sermon and Pastorally, you know have
one of my members asking for my view on it, and I thought
that other people might profit from it I plan to send pastor
Hardy an email just to let him know that I'm posting this and
he won't be blindsided by it and can feel free to respond
if he'd like to and Again, I've addressed the ending of Mark
a number of times on Word magazine. I've probably addressed it more
than any other particular passage in the New Testament. So it's
just something that continues to come up again and again and
again. And anyways, the sermon is about 64 minutes long, I think. So, I'm probably not going to
be able to cover the entire sermon, certainly in one episode, probably
not even in two. I'm thinking maybe three, if
I can get about 20 minutes of it in each time. And as I listen
to it, it seems like it maybe breaks into three parts. Part
of it is on some preliminary issues, then he talks about the
external evidence, and then the internal evidence. So I'm hoping
maybe I'll get through the first 20 minutes, which will be some
of the preliminary info and then maybe beginning some of the external
evidence. So anyways, we'll just see how
far we can get. So what I plan to do is just play the sermon
and I'll just stop from time to time and offer some commentary. as we work through it. So, with
no further ado, let's go ahead and listen to Pastor Kerry Hardy
in his sermon, The Added Ending, from October 17th of 2012. Here
we go. Relative to the whole of Scripture,
the entire Word of God, there are only a small number of verses
that are controversial. And I'm emphasizing that relative
idea there, relative to the whole, because there's a lot of verses,
obviously, in the Bible. But there are a small number of verses
that are controversial. I'll make just pause and say
that I find it's typical of evangelicals, especially conservative evangelicals,
who have embraced modern text criticism, the modern critical
text and modern translations, that there is a tendency to minimize,
particularly for the layout audience, the number of textual issues
there are in the New Testament. And I would say there are not
actually a small number. There are, in fact, lots of textual
issues. I mean, all you have to do is
take a modern critical Greek New Testament, like the most
recent Nessala Land, and look in the critical apparatus, and
there are notes about differences. in every verse, multiple ones
in most verses. So, although we might say there
are certainly major variants and minor variants, I don't think
that it is accurate simply to minimize this issue by saying
that there are only a small number of controversial issues with
regard to the text. I think there are actually quite
a few, but there seems to be this tendency to want to minimize,
I think for apologetic reasons, because they don't want the people
in the pew to feel that the Bible's not authoritative or not reliable.
But anyway, let's continue. Let me see, yeah. The reason
is they are debated over such things as the fact that they're
just plain hard to figure out sometimes, a few, a handful.
Or the debate is over seemingly a contradiction between one verse
and another verse. Or the reason they are debated
is because it's just questionable as to whether or not they are
actually part of the original writings. On that last issue,
whether something in our Bibles was actually in the original
manuscripts, we are talking about usually a particular word that
might show up here and there that has to be evaluated from
that standpoint. We might normally be talking
even about a phrase, perhaps even a verse. It's usually something
small like that, with one notable exception. And that is the section
consisting of 12 verses in Mark at the end of what we call the
Gospel of Mark, Mark chapter 16, verses 9 to 20. Let's pause here for a moment. He says that the issues in the
New Testament are all small. With what he says, one notable
exception, and that is the 12 verses at the ending of Mark,
Mark 16, 9 through 20. And although I agree that there
is a significant issue with the ending of Mark, It certainly is true that there
is at least one other notable exception, if you were granting
that there were only a small number of textual issues, and
that is the woman caught in adultery passage, John 7.53 through 8.11. It also is 12 verses in length.
So just factually, the ending of Mark is significant, but it's
not the only textual issue that involves a larger number of verses,
because certainly the woman caught in adultery passage would also
be a dispute of a passage of about the same length. So anyway,
with that correction stated, let's go on as he turns now to
talk about the issue of the ending of Mark. concerning these verses,
Mark 16, 9 to 20, is over whether or not Mark actually did write
these verses. Now the King James Version, or
what is sometimes also called the Authorized Version, as you
know, does contain these verses. Other translations, however,
as you probably know as well, all indicate in one way or another
that there is doubt about their authenticity. Let me just pause
here for a moment. Now, he mentions that the King
James Version contains these verses, that it contains Mark
16, 9 through 20. And my observation here is that
this, I think, is a little bit confusing probably for the audience
because it's confusing the issue with relation to the ending of
Mark as being merely a translation
issue rather than being a textual issue. The issue with the ending
of Mark is not that the King James Version includes Mark 16,
9 through 20 as part of the authentic text of the Bible. The issue
is the fact that the King James Version includes those verses
because it's based on the Greek Texas Receptus and modern translations
either bracket that material or put it in the footnotes or
add Vesperia's shorter ending or even what's called the Freer
Logion after verse 14 because they are based on an eclectic
modern text attempting to reconstruct what they believe The original
text was or try to be so inclusive that they try to include all
early Christian traditions Which is more in the postmodern vein.
So the issue is not this is not a KJV issue This is not a translation
issue. This is a textual issue. Those are two Related but distinct
matters. What is the proper text of the
Bible? And then what is the proper way to go about translating the
Bible? So again, I think it can be confusing
for people to sort of pose it in terms of this is about the
King James Version. It's really not about the King
James Version. It's about the text, the inspired text of the
Bible. But let's continue. For example,
the revised standard version, RSV, relegates them to just a
fine print footnote at the end. The Phillips translation calls
them, quote, an ancient appendix. And others, such as the New American
Standard or the ESV, which we're very familiar with both of those
around here, translations like those put this section in brackets,
beginning brackets and ending brackets. Or sometimes you'll
find a note to the effect that something like this, the earliest
manuscripts or the oldest and best manuscripts do not contain
this verse. In this case, the translation
might say those oldest and best manuscripts do not contain these
verses, verses 9 through 20. So it is obvious that everyone
is not in agreement over this issue since there is at least
one major translation that includes them as being authentic, the
King James. There are other translations
that include them, but put notes or brackets. So everyone's not
in agreement over this issue. But when I say everyone, I am
talking about everyone even within the conservative camp. So again, he's rightly saying
there is a question about the proper text, the proper translation
of the ending of Mark. In some ways he makes it sound
as though there are some translations that include this and some translations
that don't, but the background of that is in truth that all
the early translations of the Bible in various languages that
began to be done in the Reformation era all use the Textus Receptus. So this is not an anomaly of
the King James Version. If you look at all the early
English translations, whether it's the Bishop's Bible, or the
Great Bible, or the Geneva Bible, if you go back to Tyndale, his
first English New Testament, translated from Greek, 1525,
it includes Mark 16, 9-20, because they were based on the Textus
Receptus. It's only modern translations, based on the modern critical
text, that began to question the authenticity of the ending
of Mark. And so, unsurprisingly, it's
the modern translations that are the ones that have chosen
to bracket Mark 16, 9 through 20, or to put notes saying some
early manuscripts do not include this passage or even more boldly
some are now inserting within the text what is called the shorter
ending or putting it in the footnotes. So there is a big, there's a
major issue here. We're trying to establish what
is the text of the New Testament? It's a very important question.
And I do commend Pastor Hardy for taking this issue on head
on, addressing it head on. I mean, many people don't, they
sort of put their head in the sand or they haven't thought about
it. And I do appreciate the fact that he's going through, he's
preaching through a series through Mark, and he gets to this passage,
and he's going to deal with it. He's going to talk to his people
about it. I don't agree with the conclusions that he comes
to, but I do appreciate the fact that he at least is attempting
to address this. But what he's wanting to say
here sort of defensively is, hey, this is an issue even for
conservatives. Even conservative men question
this. That might be true, otherwise
conservative evangelical men and Calvinistic men like a John
MacArthur or a John Piper, other evangelicals who have embraced
the modern critical text do question this ending, but that's a relatively
recent phenomenon. I mean, it's only been since
the late 19th century that conservative men have asked questions about
the proper text of the New Testament. And this has happened largely
as they have embraced the modern critical text. And what I'm asking
is, has that been wise? Has that been wise for Orthodox
believers? to jettison the traditional text
of the Bible and to embrace a text that has been reconstructed by
scholars, the modern critical text. So he, I think, is a little
defensive about this. Maybe he's caught some criticism
from some people about this, and he's going to explain a little
bit more. So let's listen. In other words,
there have been some folks who try to make the case that those
who doubt the veracity of a passage like this are obviously liberals,
and that's not true. Or New Agers, I've heard that
as well. They try to make the case that
people who don't affirm a section like this or affirm some of the
modern translations are people who really don't even believe
in the inspiration and inerrancy and authority of Scripture. Some
even say that Christian orthodoxy itself depends on whether or
not you believe these disputed verses are part of God's Word.
Those are the same types of people who insist, as well, that the
New American Standard Bible or the ESV translation and anything
like those are nothing more than demon-inspired translations. I read things about that from
time to time, especially in our area. Again, apparently, maybe
he's had some personal contact with KJV-onlyists who have been
critical of him or his church for adopting the use of modern
translations. And indeed, there are a lot of
scurrilous attacks that people who are committed to the KJV-onlyism
may have made against those who adopt modern translations. I'm
asking, can there be a little bit of a nuanced approach here?
You're saying you don't want people to criticize you as being
liberal because you're asking questions about the text. On
the other hand, I might say, well, can you also not assume,
perhaps, that someone who would want to defend the traditional
text would be a wild-eyed KJV-oneliest who would think that all modern
translations are demon-inspired? Is it possible that there are
some people out there who have raised questions about the evangelical
church's embrace of the modern critical text and modern translation?
There might be people who are doing so for sound reasons and
for thoughtful reasons, and that their opinions and views ought
to be taken seriously as well. So you're right, let's not demonize
anyone who is passionate about seeking the truth and seeking
to understand what is the proper text of the Bible for Christians
to embrace. Let's have a conversation about
that among conservative Bible-believing Christians, but let's not discount
any criticism against our position as being KJV-oneliest or people
having sort of outlandish views. Let's look at it seriously and
soberly. Let's continue. But all that
is just not true. Many who doubt the legitimacy
of this passage are conservatives who love Christ, who believe
the gospel, people who affirm the inspiration of Scripture,
the inerrancy of Scripture, the authority of Scripture, and the
sufficiency of the Bible. So as we discuss this Again,
I hear what you're saying and he seems pretty defensive about
not wanting to be criticized for challenging the authenticity
of Mark 16, 9-20. He's going to challenge, he's
going to say in the end that he does not think that Mark 16,
9-20 is inspired scripture. Now, I mean, if you can understand,
If we're to defend the authority and the infallibility of Scripture,
if someone challenges a part of the Bible that we believe
to be part of the inspired Word, you can understand how people
will be defensive about that and will challenge that. Hopefully
they will do so charitably, but it is a serious doctrinal issue.
I mean, we can't say this is a non-controversial issue or
that it doesn't have to do with doctrine. It very much has to
do with doctrine. And I would say, you know, he
listed a number of things that people can hold this view who
still uphold the inerrancy of Scripture and the sufficiency
of Scripture and so forth. The one word that was left out
was the preservation of Scripture. And as I've said many times on
Word magazine, when you're confessionally reformed, if you hold to one
of the classic reformed confessions like the Westminster Confession
of Faith or the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith,
there in chapter one, it affirms not only the immediate inspiration
of the scriptures in the original languages, but also the fact
that they have been providentially preserved. in all ages. So we've got a basic doctrinal
issue here of how has the Bible been preserved? Has it been preserved
in the way that many modern evangelicals have suggested that it's preserved
in the lost original autographs and we should trust modern scholars
to reconstruct what that original autograph was even though we
don't have it? Or is it the view that I think was held by the
men of the Reformation era, whether it's John Calvin or whether it's
John Owen, and that was that they believed that the Bible
had been immediately inspired of the original languages and
that it had been faithfully preserved in the copies down to the present
age, and those copies contained the word of God accurately reflecting
the divine autographs, and then those could reliably be used
for translations, for study, for preaching, and for teaching.
So we're really talking about two very different views the
preservation of the Bible and that's a theological issue. That's
a key theological issue and it's one that should be talked about.
So he's going to turn I think from this point on and talk a
little bit more now about some of the technical issues related
to the transmission of the Bible and and how some of the scribal
differences and variants arose. So let's resume listening to
the sermon. Tonight, I believe we need to
see this debate mostly as one that is within the family, so
to speak, of what I would call conservatives who affirm Scripture. Now there's something else we
need to understand as we take on this controversy tonight.
And that is something related to the original manuscripts,
the actual Papyri, I think it means papyri.
So papyri, of course, was a writing material made from the papyrus
plant. And so some of the earliest manuscripts that we have of the
New Testament were written on papyri. There have been, you
know, more and more of these are being discovered as time
goes on. The most recent modern critical
text of the New Testament, the Nesolan, I think it lists 127
or 128 papyri and there have been a few more that have been
found since 2012 when that was printed. So anyway, so he mentions
the papyri. He's going to go on to talk about
the fact that we do not possess any of the divine autographs,
the original manuscripts that were written by the scriptural
authors, and he's going to talk more about the transmission process,
so we'll resume. Notebook paper, they didn't have
that, but you know something, whatever they had, the actual
documents that the original writers wrote on, the original manuscripts. The bottom line is this, the
Christian Church does not possess the original manuscripts. Not
any of them. And of course that shouldn't
bother us apologetically because we don't possess the original
manuscripts of any works of antiquity. We don't have the original copy
of Caesar's Gaelic Wars or Cicero's On the Good Life or any of them. All we possess of any work of
antiquity are copies. So, anyways, that's not something
that should be at all disconcerting to Christians that we don't have
the autographs of any book in the Bible. And that means we
don't have the original manuscript of the gospel which Mark wrote.
Just like for all other books, we have only copies. And in many cases now, fragments
of copies, of various copies. Sometimes those copies or fragments
of copies contain slight differences from one to another. It may be
a word that is different or occasionally, like I said before, even a phrase
or even an entire verse. But as I've already noted, here
in Mark chapter 16, we encounter this unusual problem that a long
section consisting of 12 verses is considered by many not to
be part of the original manuscripts. Let me just stop and ask the
question, how does that occur? The fact that there can be copies
of manuscripts that don't agree with one another. There can be
some variation between them. Why do these differences occur?
Well, just remember something. That the Gospels, and we'll just
use that as an example tonight as we're talking about the Gospel
of Mark, the Gospels were written long before the invention of
the printing press. Well, let me say yes. So obviously,
something I've said many times in various Word magazines in
the past, yes, the admonition in the printing press was a very
providential point. And it resulted in the ability
to have a standard printed form, a uniform standard text of the
Greek New Testament, for example, when Erasmus printed the first
Greek New Testament in 1516 it was the beginning of a standard
printed text for the New Testament and before that there were the
handwritten manuscripts. Sometimes though I think what
is overlooked is the fact that the early Christians, I think,
would have been very careful in transcribing and copying those
various manuscripts of the New Testament. They would have been
very careful in doing so. I mean, first of all, many of
the early Christians were Jews and they had a tradition for
careful copying and careful handling of the New Testament manuscripts.
From what we read in some of the church fathers, it seems
that although we don't have the autographs any longer, that many
of those autographs were set up in various churches. People could come, they could
look at them, they could make copies from them. They would
also, if there was an error that was made in some of the copying,
it could be compared. with more authoritative copies,
or perhaps in some cases in the beginning with the original.
Certainly, I know John Owen makes this point in his writings on
the transmission of the Greek New Testament. He says, you know,
if the ancient scribes were very careful in making the copies
of Aristotle or Plato, Don't you think that the early Christians
would have been very careful in how they copied the New Testament? So I think we should be careful
about playing up sort of how the the copying of the New Testament
was done how it was approached because I Think a good argument
could be made that it was it was done very carefully early
on obviously there were there were transmissional difficulties
and there were variants that arose that But I believe an argument
can be made for the careful, meticulous transmission of the
New Testament as well, because the early Christians valued the
New Testament, and that just didn't happen when the printing
press was invented. Now, there may have been, again,
We'll talk about this more in just a moment as he gets to this.
There could have been human unintentional mistakes in transmission. There
also could have been intentional efforts to alter the text by
persons who had a sort of a theological axe to grind. But anyways, I
get what he's saying that it's not until the printing press
that we get the standard form, but I don't think that means
that we have to necessarily downplay how serious and how carefully,
how seriously and how carefully the early Christians would have
handled their copying of the New Testament. Mark was not able
to take this document he had been writing and take it to the
local printer and ask them to typeset it and then, you know,
get the proofs back from them and kind of read over it and
say, well, you know, my first order, I want a thousand copies.
Exactly the same, printed for distribution. How did somebody
get a copy of Mark's Gospel? Well, if anyone wanted a copy,
they had to sit down with what Mark had written and laboriously
copy it by hand. And if by any chance they copied
a word wrongly or left something out, then that mistake would
likely be repeated when someone else made a copy of their copy.
That's just the way it is. This is what did transpire for
1,500 years until another method became available. People making
copies by hand for 1,500 years. So it's not surprising that if
you think about it, the earliest manuscripts and copies would
stand to be the most accurate and that many small discrepancies
crept into more likely later manuscript copies. That's just
the nature. OK, now he pivots to another
kind of argument here. And his argument is essentially
the superiority of the earliest manuscripts. So the earlier a
manuscript we have of the Greek New Testament or a book or passage
in it, the more likely it is to be reliable. And again, I
think we could have a debated conversation about that. Later
on, though, he's going to say that he's going to base his argument
for Mark 16, 9 through 20 as not being original. He's going
to base that largely on the fact that it's missing in two manuscripts,
in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. Those are actually
not extremely early manuscripts. I mean, they're the earliest
unseals that we have, and they're sometimes dated to the 4th century,
5th century. We're not really sure when, but
I mean, they're on vellum. They're unsealed manuscripts,
but I mean, that's, you know, three, four hundred years after
the original was written. So that's not really at the pure
source. The earlier manuscripts we have
would be the papyri, but we don't have any papyri evidence for
the ending of Mark's gospel. We don't have any papyri evidence
that omits Mark 16, 9 through 20. So I would say actually the
earliest manuscripts that we have of the New Testament, the
papyri, we don't really have any available evidence for the
authenticity of the ending of Mark. We'll talk later in this
series, I don't think we'll get to it today, evidence in some
of the church fathers, but we know that Mark 16, 9 through
20, there's evidence of its use in the church father Irenaeus.
So there's very early evidence for the ending of Mark, the longer
ending of Mark or the traditional ending of Mark. He's basing,
he and others who reject the ending of Mark do so largely
on the basis of its omission in two unsealed manuscripts,
again, that are from the fourth century. And that's not really
at the, that's 400 years removed from the source. So I could kind
of use this argument that is just laid out there. against him and I could say that
those manuscripts maybe corrupted the original by attempting to
remove or suppress the traditional ending of Mark and that the traditional
ending should be affirmed because the actual earliest evidence
of it in say Tertullian shows that it was there and that it
was original and authentic. But I'll maybe say more about
that later on in this series. Let's continue. So how can we
be sure that we have then the genuine text which Mark wrote
or anybody else wrote? Only by trying to trace the copies
back to their originals the best we can and examining these copies
from what in theology we would call a textual standpoint. That is what textual criticism
experts do. There is a whole discipline called
critical or textual criticism. They start by, this is a very
brief overview of that Just pause for a moment. He's going to go
on and talk a little bit more about text criticism. But essentially, what
he's going to be presenting is a particular view of text criticism.
And it's the view that is sometimes called reasoned eclecticism,
the idea that you take the massive manuscripts that exist, you study
them, and you use reasonable, rational arguments to choose
different readings. That's the eclectic choosing.
Choose different readings and then you attempt to reconstruct
what you believe the original text read. That was a way of
doing text criticism that was very popular. in the 19th century
through to the 20th century. It actually is not the sort of
position that is held by many modern academic text critics
today. They have essentially abandoned
any hope of being able to reconstruct the original manuscript they
say we just can't do it there's there's no way logically and
reasonably to be able to reconstruct the original manuscript and they
have sort of a postmodern view all streams are sort of as valuable
as any other heterodox streams are as valuable as orthodox streams
and so forth. But there are still many pastors
who were trained and a handful of evangelical text critics who
still embrace this view of text criticism, this reasoned eclecticism,
and this reconstructionist view. So anyways, this is essentially
the viewpoint that he is going to put forward. So we'll continue
with his analysis on how text criticism is done. I start by
placing copies in families. based upon various characteristics
that are similar. And then they determine which
ones from that are the earliest copies. And finally, through
some very technical evaluations, they work out what the likelihood
of certain mistakes could have been made in the copying, even
determining how Again, some of this is a little bit dated, I
think. If you look at the modern state
of the art, the idea, the view of there being text families,
that was certainly a view that was held. in the 19th century,
even goes back further than that I think to the 18th century. Bengal was one of the first ones
to talk about this and you had people who talked about, you
know, the Byzantine text and the Alexandrian text and the
Caesarean text. And Westcott and Hort certainly
did this. They called the Alexandrian text
the neutral text. They looked at the Byzantine
text, the majority text, as being corrupted. But one of the odd
things is that many modern text critics are beginning to question
the whole idea of the text family divisions. I should have added
also, along with Alexandrian and the Byzantine and the Caesarean,
also the Western texts. But again, the consensus about
the text families has been challenged and is in some ways unraveling
in many circles in academic text study as I read it, as I see
it. So, but let's continue. So overall, all I'm telling you
is, overall, it is best to find the earliest and oldest manuscript
copies. Because the later that manuscript
is dated, the more likely there could be the presence of some
changes. Well, again, I know he's trying
to talk about a lot of very complicated issues and simplify them in a
short span of time. And certainly the earlier a manuscript
is, it certainly could be very valuable. But it's also true
that an early manuscript, if we're talking about an early
unseal, that is coming 300 years after the original was written,
that an early unseal could have been corrupted. And it might
be that a manuscript that we have from the 10th century, some
written in the 900s, may be a copy or may represent a line that
goes back earlier than that unseal, back to an authentic reading. So in that sense, sometimes the
physical date of a copy might not be as valuable as one might
at first think. It has to be evaluated. One of
the things that we found, for example, is Westcott and Hort,
for example, said that if we could get back closer to the
originals, we would find that we would find a pure Alexandrian
text. And what the papyri finds of
the 20th century have revealed is that the papyri is a mixed
text, using the old language of the text families. There are
Byzantine readings. There are Western readings. There
are Alexandrian readings. And so the Byzantine readings
have antiquity. The Western readings have antiquity. The Alexandrian readings have
antiquity. And so, again, I think it's a
bit simplistic to say, well, the Alexandrian readings are
the earliest and all the Byzantine readings are late, and so therefore
we can't give any weight to the Byzantine readings, but we must
give great weight to the Alexandrian readings. That's an old way of
looking at reconstruction of the critical text. It was the
method of Westcott and Hort, but I'm not sure that it's a
method that has been proven to be true and it has been challenged
in modern times. Think about this with me too.
What is the most common kind of change that would occur? This has been proven over and
over and over that no doubt the most common kind of change that
would happen would be additions, additions to the text. OK, this
is another interesting assertion. He's saying that the most common
kinds of changes that scribes would have made to the copies
is that there would have been a tendency to add. There would
have been a tendency to expand. And again, this is another sort
of an assertion that I think could be open to challenge. I
just pulled down off my shelf my copy of Metzger's, Bruce Metzger's
classic work, The Text of the New Testament, and I'm actually
looking at the second edition. There's a third edition that
was edited by Co-edited with Bart Ehrman, but he has a section
in there on See it's a chapter 7 the causes of errors in the
transmission of the text in the New Testament and he goes through
the various scribal Variants and how they came about and he
puts them in two categories first of all he talks about what he
calls unintentional errors and So he talks about errors, first
of all, of sight. And he talks about parablepsis.
Sometimes a scribe would, the word parablepsis means looking
to the side. They would just simply get, their
eye would be distracted and they would skip sometimes a word or
two, sometimes a verse. There's also related to that
a phenomenon that's called homo eotelioton, which is a Greek
word for similar ending. And so you might have one word
that, Greek is an inflected language, so sometimes the endings are
similar, and there might be one word that ends in one way, and
there might be another word in two or three verses down that
ends with the exact same letters, the exact same ending, and the
scribe could glance from the first word down to the second
and resume copying from there and therefore he would skip over
some material and this would be an example of parablepsis. So this would not be an error
of addition, but this would be an error of diminishment, an
error of taking away. And then there's just outright
omissions that are called haplography. There are errors of addition. Metzger talks about dittography,
and that is copying something twice, giving it a ditto, dittography. He also describes errors of hearing.
There is a phenomenon called an idiocysm, which Greek, like
most languages, has some vowels that are similar to each other.
And sometimes, maybe in a scriptorium, there would be someone who would
be a lector or reader who would be reading out the text, and
people would be copying it. and it would be read aloud, and
there'd be an iticism. Somebody writes a word using
one vowel, somebody writes another word using another vowel. The
same thing could happen with consonants. The Greek consonant
kappa, the K sound, would sound a lot like the consonant zi. And so these words could be interchangeable
for each other. He also talks about errors of
mind. substitution of synonyms, sequence of words in a sentence,
transposition of letters in a word, assimilation of wording in one
passage to another. And then he talks about errors
in judgment. That's when perhaps a marginal
note is included or when a lectionary instruction is included in a
manuscript. And those are just the unintentional
changes. And then he has a whole section
as well about intentional changes. where a scribe might want to
alter a passage for theological reasons or he thinks he's trying
to help, he's trying to correct what he sees as a problem. So
there are all types of scribal errors or scribal differences
that lead to variant readings. Only some of those are additions. Many of them are deletions or
diminishings. And so I would just question
his assertion that the main problem with the transmission of the
text in the New Testament is addition. And I would just say
in support of that as well is, how do you prove that? How do
you verify that assertion? I mean, can you actually go through
all the extant copies of the New Testament and do some kind
of count and come up with a conclusion that the major problem with the
scribes was that they had a tendency to add things? Again, I just
don't think that's a verifiable, just logically, it's not a verifiable
assertion. And there are plenty of examples,
once more, of haplography, of parablepsis, of omissions, of
deletions. Then I would just also add, on
a theological level, I think this idea that the best text
is a shorter text and the best text is one that doesn't have
what some believe are pious expansions. I believe it actually comes from
a kind of a queer source for conservatives, because I think
if you trace it back theologically, you have to go back to the Enlightenment,
the post-Enlightenment, go back to the 19th century. You had
a lot of New Testament critics. who had a sort of a doctrinal
axe to grind. Many of them were Arians. They
denied the deity of Christ and they had a theory that primitive
Christianity did not emphasize a high Christology. And therefore,
they like to see sort of what they see are explicit references
to the divinity of Jesus or ascriptions of titles to Jesus like Christ
and Lord. They have a tendency to see those
as not being primitive. Because if they were primitive,
they wouldn't reflect that high Christology. An example of this
is the treatment of 1 Timothy 3.16. The modern critical text
says it should read, He was manifested in the flesh. While the traditional
text reads, God was manifested in the flesh. And some people
have argued against God was manifested in the flesh on the basis of
that. It's just a pious expansion.
That's later scribes wanting to explicitly say that Jesus
is God. Of course, there's a major issue
with that passage related to just the orthography. Was it
omicron, sigma, chas, he, and was that mistaken for one of
the nomina sacra for God, phaos? But anyways, I just think that
some conservative evangelicals are naive when they immediately
embrace some of these canons of text criticism that have been
promoted by men who often were outright liberals, were Aryans,
and they don't take into consideration that maybe they had a theological
axe to grind in some of the assumptions that they have in these canons
that they approve and embrace. Let's go a little bit further. tended to be very prone to adding
things and not deleting things. They would add things, a word,
a phrase, sometimes even a whole verse, to smooth things over
if a statement was difficult for them to understand. I think
we've got another issue here that I mentioned earlier. We've
got another logical problem with this, and that's verifiability.
How do you verify that? How do you know what was going
on in the mind of a scribe? How do you prove and show his
intentions and why he copied something? Maybe he copied it
because it was there in his exemplar. Maybe he wasn't adding or expanding. Maybe other scribes who left
that out were diminishing for their theological reasons. So
it's an assertion that's a conjecture that can't really be verified. And so I just give that as a
challenge to this viewpoint. They would sometimes insert something
like that as an interpretation to kind of help the flow of thought.
Or if they believed a gap was there, or if they believed something
was missing, then they would definitely add something at that
point. For that reason, textual experts
understand that generally, not only are the oldest manuscripts
the most reliable generally, but also the shorter version
of manuscripts or the shorter version of verses tend to be the most accurate,
because copyists were prone. All right, so he stated it very
succinctly. He wants the earliest text. And I've already challenged whether
or not the earliest text of the New Testament manuscripts can
be definitively proven to have omitted the ending of Mark. But
the second thing is that he believes that the shorter versions of
manuscripts are more original. And I pulled down a book from
my shelf, it's a copy of the New Testament, the original Greek,
the Byzantine text form, 2005, compiled and arranged by Maurice
A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont.
And in the back of this volume, there's an appendix. And the
appendix is an article written by Maurice Robinson. And Maurice
Robinson, if you don't know the name, is one of the foremost
defenders of the majority text, or the Byzantine text. He taught at Southeastern Seminary
in Wake Forest, North Carolina, not too far from Winston-Salem.
And I think that he is still a research professor there. But
this article is called The Case for Byzantine Priority. It's
actually online also. And by the way, I will be doing
a post at jeffridl.net, my blog. And I'll put a link to this article
so that you can read it. At one point in the article,
Dr. Robinson lists what he calls
his principles of internal evidence. And in my copy in this book,
it's found on pages 545 to 554. But one of the points that he
makes his principles for internal evidence. The eighth point is exactly the
opposite of what Pastor Hardy says. And this is what Maurice
Robinson writes. Let me just read, if I can find
it here, a little bit of what he has to say. This is beginning
on page 552. Number eight, neither the shorter nor longer reading
is to be preferred. The reasoned eclectic principle
here omitted is the familiar Lectio brevior potior. giving preference to the shorter
reading, assuming all other matters to be equal." So what Pastor
Hardy's put forward is one of the canons of reasoned eclecticism. The shorter reading is to be
preferred. But Maurice Robinson, who has spent a career studying
this, has said no. He believes that is inaccurate.
Neither the shorter nor the longer reading should be preferred.
He goes on to say, that this principle, the preference for
the shorter reading, has come under fire even by modern eclectics. Not only can its legitimacy be
called into question, but its rejection as a working principle
can readily be justified. The net effect of such a principle
is to produce an a priori bias on insufficient internal grounds
which favors the shorter Alexandrian text. The underlying premise
is faulty. It assumes that scribes have
a constant tendency to expand the text, whether in regard to
sacred names, or by a conflationary combination of disparate narratives,
lest anything original be lost. Yet scribal habits, as exemplified
in the extant data, simply do not support such a hypothesis. So here is one scholar, at least,
who studied the material, who says that the shorter reading
is to be preferred is inaccurate and that the scribes do not show
a pronounced tendency to expand. So as we're going to see A lot
of what your opinion comes to on this is who you accept as
an authority. Do you accept the canonical principles of Westcott
and Hort and their approach to text criticism? Or do you accept
the principles put forward by someone like Maurice Robinson,
who supports the Byzantine text? He's going to go on and also
announce his approval for another key canon of modern text criticism,
and that is the idea that the more difficult reading is to
be preferred. So let's listen to that. Also,
if that shorter version is as well the more challenging version
to understand, the more challenging one to accept, it's been proven
over and over That that too, then, lends to the proof that
it likely is the closest to the original. Because those are the
kind of things copies would try to fix. Again, though, I would
challenge this on a theological basis. Sometimes scholars will
have a tendency to think that a passage that is so-called smooth
or that is pious, that it must be late. And so if they find
any evidence of something that where a pious affirmation of
the deity of Jesus has been emphasized or included, they'll have a tendency
to say, oh, that must be a late addition, that must be a late
addition. And so I'm going to accept the more difficult, what
they say is the more difficult or the more primitive reading.
But again, it's a circular argument. Definitive way to verify that,
you know, one reading is better than another often comes down
to a subjective opinion. Who's to say that one reading
is more difficult and another reading is easier? It may depend
on some of the a priori assumptions of the interpreter as to what
is a more difficult reading or what is a smoother reading so-called. Tonight, we're going to tackle
this issue in Mark of whether verses 9 through 20 belong to
the book. There is no way to cover every
position and every subposition held, so we're just going to
talk about the two main ones. Position number one, Mark did
write it. Position number two, Mark did
not write it. Those are the two broad positions. Are we all together then? Mark
did write it or he did not write it. Now under that second position,
Mark did not write it, that second position is broken down into
two branches or two subgroups. We'll go back and talk about
all this. Here are the two subgroups under Mark did not write this.
Branch number one, Mark intended to conclude his gospel with the
words that we studied last time, chapter 16, verse 8. In other
words, he did not write the rest of this because he intended all
along not to write any more. It was his desire to end at verse
8. Or the other sub-branch is Mark
did not write this other section called the longer ending, by
the way, that's its sort of colloquial nickname, the longer ending.
Mark did not intend to conclude his gospel at verse eight. He
did not intend at all to end there, but he did intend to write
more. Okay, so those are two sub-branches. Now, I'm submitting to you tonight
that of the two big positions, Mark did write it or Mark did
not write it. I'm submitting to you, first
of all, that the second position is the correct view. Mark did
not write versus 9 through 20. Let me just pause here, and I
mean, he has laid it out. I do appreciate the fact that
he is tackling this issue. I do appreciate the fact that
he is laying his cards on the table. But it's a pretty astounding
statement, really, to be made by a self-described conservative. He is saying, either on one hand,
Mark did write Mark 16, 9 through 20, or on the other hand, Mark
did not write it. Of course, there are some variations
on this opinion. David Alan Black, for example,
believes that someone else wrote Mark 16, 9 through 20, but that
person was also an inspired author. And so it'd be another question.
One question is authorship. One question would be inspiration.
But I'm taking him to mean and listen to the rest of the sermon.
He believes that Mark 16, 9 through 20, not only was not an authentic
part of the gospel of Mark, was not written by Mark, the author
of the gospel, but also it's not part of inspired scripture. And that is a pretty amazing
claim to make. I mean, it's a very serious claim
to make. If he's right, then there is
a spurious section that has been accepted in most Christian Bibles
throughout Christian history because it's the reading of the
majority text. And there is a spurious passage
that is included in most English Bibles, including the most widely
read and influential English Bible, the King James Version,
but also all the other translations from the Protestant Reformation
era. that this was an error, this matter is spurious, it doesn't
belong in the New Testament. He's going to go on, he mentioned
the sub-branch under Mark didn't write it, either Mark intended
to conclude at 1608 or two, Mark did not intend to end at 1608. And he'll go on later on in the
message and say, give his argument for why he believes that Mark
originally ended at 16, 8. And so again, verses 9 through
20 are spurious and they should not be preached upon. They should
not be taught. So again, that is a very bold
claim. And again, this sort of speaks
to, I think the confusion of our times is, Our self-described
conservative men, even Calvinistic men, are rejecting the traditional
text of the Bible, the traditionally received text of the Bible. Again,
I'm lodging this, I'm trying to speak about it charitably,
I'm not lodging this as a wild-eyed KJV only-ist. But I do challenge
and question that assumption. I believe that Mark 16, 9 through
20 is part of the authentic word of God, and it should be received
not as the words of men, but as the word of God. Well, I was
hoping we would get to 20 minutes. We've only made it through about
12 minutes or so. I think, well, maybe 14 minutes. And so maybe, though, it would
be good to stop here. Actually, we're at the 13 minute, 28 second
mark. Because from this point on, he's
going to turn and talk about the external evidence. And then
finally, he's going to talk about the internal evidence. So maybe
what would work well is if we just stop here with sort of these
sort of preliminary matters. And then I can do a second part
of the review where we just deal with the external evidence. And
then I can do a third part of the review where we deal with
the internal evidence. So anyways, I think I will close
for right now. But God willing, we will have
some future magazines that will continue this review of Pastor
Hardy's sermon. on the ending of Mark. Till then,
take care and God bless. All these things I call to memory
and I ponder in my heart how with throngs I moved rejoicing
to his temple's sacred court. Why my soul be in despair? Why this worry and this care? Open, God, my soul's salvation,
Him I'll praise with jubilation. When my heart despairs within
me, Then will I recall once more As the headwaters of Jordan From
the mount of Herm and Por. Deep to deep roars out its sound,
Waves and rapids surging round, In the day God's love comes freely,
And at night his song is with me. To my God, my rock, I murmur,
How could you forget me? How? All my foes, oppress and
taunt me, Where's your God, they ask me now. Why my soul be in
despair? Why this worry and this care? Open God, my soul's salvation,
Him I'll praise with jubilation.
WM # 60: Review: A Sermon on Mark's Ending. Part One: Preliminary Issues
Series Word Magazine
| Sermon ID | 1015161836470 |
| Duration | 1:05:11 |
| Date | |
| Category | Podcast |
| Bible Text | Mark 16:9-20 |
| Language | English |
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