Please open your Bibles to Mark chapter 16. We are officially wrapping up our series through the gospel of Mark together. I'm going to do something a touch different today. I think it will make sense as we work through it, but I'm going to read verses 1 through 8 and pray like I normally do. And then I'm going to make a few comments before reading 9 through 20. So I encourage you to keep your Bibles open if you want to follow along. We're going to read the whole chapter, but I'll read, pray, talk, read again. Hear now the word of God in Mark 16, starting at verse one. When the Sabbath was passed, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Solomon 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 at 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 is going before you to Galilee, and 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. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. That's the reading of God's holy, inerrant word. May its truth be ever written on our hearts. Let us pray. Dear God, this can be a hard sermon to take in, and a lot of things can lead our hearts other ways. But Lord, guide us into clarity, give me the right words to say, and guide our hearts and minds to Jesus, that we may love him more. O Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be ever pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. If you still have your Bible open, if you have an ESV or pretty much any other translation other than a King James or New King James, you probably have a little space between verse eight and verse nine, and there's probably some sort of statement, some inscription in parentheses or italics. If you have the ESV Bible, the Pew Bible, or some other ESV that you brought along, I want you to read that statement with me real quick. Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16, 9 through 20. If you don't know what that means, let me explain. Manuscripts is a fancy way of saying copies, like the copies of the Gospel of Mark we have from throughout history. And so some of the earliest copies of Mark's Gospel that we have do not include these last 11 verses. And this has led to a rather significant debate. Are these 11 verses in 9 through 20 originally a part of Mark's gospel, or are they not? And if they're not what Mark wrote, are they really scripture? This has been a big debate that goes back for over 1,800 years. We can see this debate in writings going back to 250 or 150, 180, So just a couple hundred years after this was written. And I'm just going to put my cards on the table. I am currently persuaded, I'm willing to have my mind changed, I'm willing to have new evidence presented, but to the best of my knowledge, these verses, 9 through 20, does not seem to be original to Mark's text. Which likely means it is not God-given scripture. And that can be hard to take in. You might hear that and you might say, does Ben not believe the Bible? You might think, is Ben going soft? I hope by now you know that I love you and I love the Bible and I want us to know the Bible well. But this is a difficult thing for some of us to take in. And so today's message is going to be in two parts. The first part is going to be on the debated ending of Mark in nine through 20. And I'm hesitant to call this first part a sermon. It's going to be a little more like a lecture, because we got to get into some technical things just a little bit. So if you're someone that's going to take a nap during the sermon, I suggest falling asleep in the first half, because that's going to be the more boring part. But hopefully, once we get through that, we can come back around and see what the real ending of Mark is teaching us. and how that applies to our life. And we'll turn into a preaching moment towards the end as we look at the real ending of Mark. With that, let's look at these verses that are likely added later and just quickly read them as we jump in together. Starting at verse nine. Now, when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went and told those who had been with him as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. After these things, he appeared in another form to two of them as they were walking into the country. And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them. Afterward, he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of hearts, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe. In my name they will cast out demons, they will speak in new tongues, they will pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them. They will lay their hands on the sick and they will recover. So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. They went out and preached everywhere while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs. These 11 verses likely were not original in the Mark's Gospel, but if you're familiar with the New Testament, these stories should sound familiar. We have Mary coming and telling Peter and John and the other apostles, just like we see in John's gospel. We see these two men in the country, like the men on the road to Emmaus in Luke's gospel. We have a Great Commission style statement from Jesus, go and tell others, like we have at the end of Matthew's gospel. And many of these weird things that we don't really know what to do with, having to do with serpents and poison and all these things, parallel things we see in the Book of Acts. So it seems like all of this is in line with other things we see in Scripture. But the oldest manuscripts do not include these. The oldest copy is the Mark's Gospel. I think many people think of Bible being passed down in generations like a game of telephone. Like one person wrote it, and then someone else copied it, and someone else copied that, and someone else copied that, and every time it gets copied, you have little changes. So how can we know the original? But I don't think that's a very valid way of looking at it. Rather, God used someone to write each book of the Bible, and then a lot of people would copy that book, and they would double-check one another. And they'd confirm it with one another. And people had it memorized. And so they would learn it and double check other people's work. And then you would have people who would copy their work. But because there's like 15, 20 copies, they would have three or four copies to be able to get as close as they can to the original. And very quickly, you would have hundreds of copies of each book of the Bible in circulation. And so it was really hard to make changes to things. What do we do? Well, nowadays, scholars come together and they look at as many copies as we can find to try to get as close as we can to the original. Because remember what we read in Chicago's statement, number 10, is that we believe only the original autographic text or the original text that the author wrote is what was inspired by God. And so if this was not part of what Mark wrote, we have difficulty calling it scripture. And the earliest manuscripts don't have it. Now, I could get into a long lecture on the manuscript tradition, but I frankly don't think it will be that helpful. And I don't think it's that persuasive unless you're really nerdy and understand the details. Rather, I think it's important to note that these verses are not in the oldest manuscripts, but I think the internal evidence of the passage itself actually shows us that it doesn't fit with the rest of Mark. Let me say that again. I think when you read verses 9 through 20, if you really look at the details, you see it doesn't fit with the rest of Mark, which makes it more likely that this was added later. And this is why I'm persuaded this is different. So we see that it's not in the oldest manuscripts, but in the text itself, we see different words and themes than elsewhere in Mark. There are something like 16 words that are not used anywhere else in Mark's gospel. On top of that, there are a couple of words or phrases that are really common in Mark's Gospel that are used entirely differently, like they have a whole different meaning when you translate it from Greek in these passages than you would earlier in Mark, which is really weird. So we have different words and themes, and if we were reading through, you would expect the end of a book to kind of put a bow on the motifs and ideas and things that have been running through the whole book, instead of starting some new things. But here, what's supposed to be the last 11 verses, starts a few new ideas about signs and confirming the message that we don't see anywhere else in Mark's gospel. These ideas seem to be closer to what we see in Luke and Acts than what we see anywhere in Mark. So we have different words and themes. We also see a completely distinct structure. This is hard to see in English, because we're talking about a book written originally in Greek, but it's written very different than the rest of Mark's gospel. An easy way to see this is just go back to chapter 15, the page before. And if you look, starting at verse 16, let me just read some of these sentences. and the soldier led him away, and they clothed him in a purple cloak, and they began to salute him, and they were striking his head, and when they mocked him, and they let him out to crucify, and they compelled the pastor by, everything starts with and. It's this really constant phrase, and we see this throughout Mark's gospel for the most part. This is bad writing for us in English, and it's bad writing for Greco-Roman people to write that way. But it's very common in Hebrew. In Hebrew, like in the Old Testament, sentences are strung together with the word and. It's almost like a kid coming home from school telling you what they did that day, and they're like, I did this, and I did this, and I did this, and I did this. That's how Hebrew is written. And to Greco-Roman readers, that sounds really weird. It sounds like a child. But to Hebrew writers, that's a really normal thing. And so Mark, likely growing up a Hebrew speaker, writing in Greek, brought in that Hebraism, that Hebrew way of writing, and it was normal. But we don't really see that in these 11 verses. The word and appears a few places, but it's where you would expect an and to be, this and this kind of thing. It's a normal conjunction. Instead of this stream of thought, and, and, and, and, that we have throughout the rest of Mark's gospel. Now, there is a chance that Mark wrote the rest, and many, many years later, developed as a writer, became much better at Greek, and went back and added this ending that didn't happen. But the likelihood of that is relatively slim. It seems weird that Mark, writing in what would be his second language, Greek, would write in a way that was so sophisticated after writing in such a less sophisticated way early on. I'm not trying to condemn Mark. He's writing as someone who's writing in another language. But we see a big, distinct structure change. And third, we see a disconnected transition. I think if you just look at verse 9, it seems very disconnected to everything else before it, and therefore leads us to think that 9 through 20 is written somewhere else and then added on later. Just look at verse 9 real quick. It says, Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. Notice this timestamp. He rose early on the first day of the week. Well, if you go back to 16 verse 2, it has a very similar timestamp. And very early on the first day of the week. Now if Mark had written all of 16 straight through, why would he give you the same timestamp all over again that he just gave you like five verses earlier? Why wouldn't he just keep going? It's the same time, it's the same thing. There's a different timestamp because it's likely disconnected from what happened earlier. It was written elsewhere and added in. Similarly, we have this introduction in verse nine of Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. Now, this phrase we also see in Luke, so we know that it happened, but it doesn't fit because it's almost like he's reintroducing Mary Magdalene, like a new character. This is how you would expect a new character to be portrayed. But Mary Magdalene has already been in the narrative in the last scene. She watched Jesus die, she watched Jesus get buried, and she came to the tomb. If he was going to reintroduce Mary Magdalene here in verse nine, why would he not say something like, Mary Magdalene, who came to the tomb six verses earlier? Like, it's not connected to what's before it. And similarly, we see this second person masculine singular he, the pronoun he. He rose early, he appeared, he had cast them out, it's speaking of Jesus. And normally, when you see the word he, you would expect to go back in the last few verses and see who that person is that it's referring to as a he. But if you go back in the prior verse, it's not using a second person pronoun. It's using a third person plural feminine, they. Speaking of a group of women, they went out, they said nothing, and they were afraid. And then it switches from they to he kind of jarringly between verse eight and verse nine. And if you go back, the last he that would naturally make sense here is not actually Jesus. It's the young man in the tomb, the angel in the tomb in verse five. And so it seems like verse nine and what comes after it is completely disconnected from what happens before. So all of this adds up to kind of say, it seems that this was not originally a part of Mark's gospel. There's disconnected transitions, there's distinct structures, there's different words and themes, and it's not found in the earliest copies. So, does this mean this is scripture? Well, I don't think so. We believe, or at least I would say, that only those original verses written by Mark are scripture. And you might hear this and you might think, can I really then trust the rest of the Bible? If this was added in, how do we know that all this other stuff wasn't made up and added in later? But I think the fact that we have this debate actually helps us have certainty about everything else. There's actually only two passages that we have a debate like this around. There's a few words and a few verses here and there, but there's really two passages. Mark 16 and a section in John 8 where the woman caught in adultery is dragged before Jesus. These two are debated by the best scholars for a lot of church history. Like we're talking going back 1,800 years, these have been big debates that people have had. And the fact that we're not debating the other passages actually means we have an awful lot of evidence that those are there. No one's debating if Mark 14 is in the Bible, or if Mark 6 is in the Bible, or if John 3 is in the Bible. There's two passages, and as I said earlier, these two passages do not change any doctrine. If we take 9 through 20 out, it doesn't change anything about what we believe about Jesus or what we believe about God. It doesn't change anything about the ending. In fact, I think 9 through 20 actually affirms or teaches us the same thing that we have if we end at verse 8. You see, you might be wondering then, why would someone add an ending to Mark's gospel? In the book of Revelation, it says anyone who adds or takes away from this book, from the scriptures, will be judged and cursed because of it. So we're not saying it's a good thing to add here. But why would someone? And this is the point where if you kind of fall asleep, it might be worth waking up. Because if you end at verse 8, which is where I think it is, 1 through 8 is probably the proper ending of Mark's Gospel. But if you end there, it's really weird. It ends with these women who came to the tomb and saw that the tomb was empty, and they were told Jesus is resurrected, being told, go and tell others. And they went out and fled from the tomb. This is verse eight. For trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. That's how Mark ends. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. And that's a weird way to end a book, especially if you are a Greco-Roman reader. But Mark is not a Greco-Roman writer. He is a Jewish writer. And there's a common thing in Jewish writing to leave a story incomplete. in order to force you as the reader to ponder what happens and to kind of fill in the blank on what comes next. We see this at the very end of Jonah. I don't have time to flip here and show you, but at the end of Jonah, after he's spit up from the fish and he goes to Nineveh and preaches to Nineveh, he goes up on a hillside to watch to see if Nineveh is actually destroyed. And God sends a plant that gives him shade. And then the next day, God sends a worm that eats the plant, and it shrivels up and dies. And Jonah gets really angry with God. You took away the plant that was giving me shade. And God ends Jonah with a question. He pretty much says, you're upset about this plant that I gave you and took away in a day. But what about this city of 120,000 people and lots of animals? And that's how Jonah ends. It ends with a question. There's no answer. Jonah doesn't go back. We don't see what happens to Nineveh. Jonah just ends with a question. And you're meant to sit there and think about it and figure out what's next. That's what I think Mark is doing here. I think verse eight is supposed to be the ending in a way where you're meant to sit there and figure it out. And I think some scribe later on was like, that's really hard for people to understand. Why don't we give a little more evidence that we see somewhere else in the Bible and make it a little more clear what Jesus did and show clearly what Jesus is teaching. But here's what I think we can do. I don't think we should read verses nine through 20 like wholly inerrant scripture. But I do think we should keep it and probably read it like a commentary. When I do my sermon prep throughout the week, I generally spend the first part of the week really diving into the text, the passage, and trying to figure out what it means and what it looks like in the context, what people would have thought. And then generally sometime Wednesday or Thursday, I open up some commentaries. Commentaries are books where pastors or scholars have written in comments about the text and what it means and how it applies and all that. Now, hopefully, I try not to go to the commentaries to get answers. I'm not trying to open up and just be like, well, that's what it says. That's what I'm going to preach. Rather, I've already done the work. And hopefully the commentaries show me that I'm right, that I'm not out in left field somewhere, but I'm actually in line with what Christians have taught for thousands of years. And so I have the commentaries to double check my work. And that's what I think we should do with 9 through 20. This shows us what Christians really, really early on thought of Mark's ending. And I think we can look at it to double check and make sure we're understanding Mark 1 through 8 correctly. So really quickly, let's think about what's happening in this passage. In Mark 1 through 8, or Mark 16, 1 through 8, these women come to the tomb, and they find it empty, right? And they're told, Jesus is risen, and they're told to go tell others about Jesus. But do they do that? No, in verse eight, it says they fled and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid. That's how it is. They said nothing to anyone for they were afraid. And you're meant to read this and start to be like, wait a minute. If they didn't tell them, how's Peter gonna find out? How are the other disciples gonna find out? How are other people gonna find out? Wait a minute. I have to tell them. You're meant to read this and be inclined to do what these women did not do. If this is true, that Jesus rose from the grave, everyone needs to hear this good news. And you're meant to look at this and be like, wait a minute, who's gonna tell them? I have to tell them. So in verses one through eight, we see that we need to believe in the resurrected Jesus and tell others. And I think that's the very same thing we see in verse nine through 20. In verse 9 through 11, Mary goes and tells people what they saw, and they would not believe her. Verse 12 and 13, the people who saw him on the way to the country come back and tell the others, and they did not believe them. In verse 14, Jesus appeared to the 11, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. The first section of Mark 16, 9-14 is all about the need to believe in the resurrected Jesus. And then 15-18, Jesus gives a great commission style thing. Go tell other people about this. And in 19-20, they do. So in verse 9 through 20, we are to believe in the resurrected Jesus and tell others. That's the same exact thing we see if we understand verses 1 through 8 correctly. It's trying to make the same point. So we can know that when we're reading verse 1 through 8, which is Holy Scripture, which is given by God, we can know that we need to believe in the resurrected Jesus. That is the heartbeat of Christianity. We talked about this a couple weeks ago. The resurrection is the core claim of Christianity. But Mark doesn't just want us to believe the resurrection, he wants us to tell others. You see, the real ending of Mark's gospel is not verse 8. And the real ending of Mark's gospel is not verse 20. The real ending of Mark's gospel is still happening. when you and I go and take this message of Jesus's resurrection out to others. The ending of Mark's gospel is continuing with us taking the story of who Jesus is and what Jesus did to our friends and our family and our loved ones till the whole earth comes to know this message. The real ending of Mark is that we are to believe in the resurrected Jesus. You go tell others. That's what it's calling us to. That's what Mark wants us to take away from his gospel as we end it. But perhaps you are like the women in verse 8. You see this, you know it, you believe it, and you're afraid. How are you going to tell people? Would anyone believe you? Wouldn't it make you look silly? What if you say it wrong? You see, it's hard to know how to take this message to others. And you might be looking for someone to just step in and tell you. And, well, I'm going to try my best. I think now that we have worked through the gospel of Mark together, all our sermons, this sermon will also be online as of tomorrow, all these sermons are online, you can go through our website to get to them, and you can constantly go back to these as a resource. Chances are, unless I'm here for the next 40 or 50 years, I'm not gonna preach straight through Mark's gospel like this again, because we have 65 other books of the Bible to look at. But we don't wanna put this on a shelf and just forget about it. Hopefully Mark's gospel can be a tool that we can use to continue learning about Jesus and telling other people about Jesus for years to come. And we're actually going to do something to do that here at Baxter Congregation. There's a program out there. I did not create this program. We're just going to do it. It's called Christianity Explored. And it is a seven week Bible study through the book of Mark. Basically what we just did in 63 sermons, it's gonna get jammed into seven weeks. And we're gonna do this as our Lenten series this year. So next year, starting in February, we're gonna go through the Gospel of Mark again, and it's ideally an opportunity for you to invite your unbelieving friends and your unbelieving neighbors so that they can interact with these truths and ask questions, and we can help guide them into the truth of who Jesus is. This is just one way to take this message out to others. So as we wrap up, we're going to actually watch a quick video. It's about two minutes long on Christianity Explored, and then I'll come up and say just a couple more comments before we pray. I'm going to ask Diane to turn on the video now for us to watch. You might be a convinced atheist, a committed Christian, or somewhere in between. Perhaps you've lots of questions to ask, or perhaps you're happy just sitting and listening. Maybe you get a church, or maybe you've never been. Whoever you are, Christianity Explored is a place for you to explore what life is all about. The Christianity Explored course is free, it's relaxed and informal, and it's run by ordinary people local to you. Some courses are held in churches with lots of people. Some are held in people's houses with just a few friends getting together. Wherever you meet, in each session, there's a chance to look at the life of Jesus for yourself and ask any questions you have. There's a short video to watch and then a chance to chat about what you've just heard. You'll meet great people. You won't be asked to sing or pray or read out loud and you don't need to know anything about the Bible to enjoy it. So whoever you are, come and explore. There's almost certainly a Christianity Explored course starting near you soon. So ask a Christian friend or check out the website to find out more. you might just discover that the Christian message really is the best news you've ever heard. So we will be hosting this seven-week series during our Linton dinner suppers next year. So starting February 25th, the week after Ash Wednesday, running through April 6th, which is actually the week after Easter. Wednesday nights we'll have a dinner at 5 30 and then 6 to 7 we'll run through this course. There will be a video and a brief teaching and a time of discussion which leads us all the way through Mark's gospel. As we go home and go through the book and come back and talk together, it will lead people all the way through Mark's Gospel, focusing on three main things. Who is Jesus? What did Jesus do? And what does it mean to follow him? His identity, his purpose, and his call. And it's going to use this to help us reflect on Mark's gospel and help others re-approach it. So if you have already gone through Mark's gospel, this is a great thing to come to to kind of recap. We're going to keep advertising this over the next few months, and it's a good way to recap what we've gone through over the last couple years. But it's primarily for you to bring someone else along. So I want to encourage you to think about someone, maybe someone who doesn't know much about Jesus, who didn't grow up in church, and encourage them to come. Maybe pick them up and bring them. We'll have food and a brief discussion. They'll be able to participate. And hopefully, it also becomes a tool that after you've gone through it, if you're interested, I can give you the videos and the booklets, and you can take it home and do it with friends in your living room, or do it in the coffee shop. It can become a tool to keep using the gospel of Mark to tell others about who Jesus is. And so, as we pray, let's pray that we continue to do the work that Mark is calling us to do, to tell others about Jesus. Let's pray that this resource, going through Mark's gospel, will actually be a helpful way to do that. So let's pray. Dear God, we thank you for your Word. We thank you that Mark reveals the truth to us. We are sorry if I am wrong that this is not part of Scripture, and we are sorry if this is part of Scripture and someone added it. We ask, give us wisdom, though. wisdom to do what Mark is calling us to do, to believe in the resurrection and to tell others about the resurrected Jesus. And may that change our culture as a church and our community. As we work through Christianity Explored next year, may it be a great time to reflect on these truths again and help others to see Jesus more clearly. We pray, use us to take this message all around Baxter and all around the world. In Jesus' name, amen.