Mark's Resurrection Story

In college I took classical Greek. My goal was to read the New Testament in its original language which I realized my Junior year. My New Testament Greek class was an amazing one. I was the only student. I want to take you back to that class for a brief moment. We had been translating the gospel of Mark for three weeks. As I finished chapter 16 and closed my book, my professor asked: “Did you find those last few verses more difficult to translate?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I responded as I looked over at him.

“Most textual scholars believe that verses 9 through 20 were added to the original gospel by Christian scribes. These verses describing the resurrection do not appear in the oldest manuscripts we have of Mark. The sentence structure is more complex, and the vocabulary is not typical of Mark. One of the reasons we are reading Mark first is because he writes like a journalist with a sentence structure that is both simple and direct. These eleven verses are different.”

“I don’t believe it,” I responded.

“There are two possibilities,” my professor continued. “The first is that the original Mark ends with verse 8 in Chapter 16. If this is the case, the disciples never meet the resurrected Jesus. Before dismissing this possibility out of hand, remember that we noted throughout the gospel that the disciples never understand the true significance of Jesus’ life. Mark may be emphasizing that point, and these last eleven verses are not what the author intended at all. Rather the author intended to conclude his gospel at verse 8. The other possibility is that the last page of a very early manuscript was lost, and the scribes remedied the problem by adding eleven verses from another source.”

My professor went on to explain that there are literally thousands of variant readings among the many different New Testament manuscripts. The term variant reading indicates that other words, different from those found in the text you are reading, appear in other New Testament manuscripts.

For fifteen hundred years, manuscripts were copied by hand until Gutenberg solved the problem with moveable type. In early New Testament manuscripts, all the letters are in small caps, there is no punctuation either within or between sentences, and there is no separation between words. These early manuscripts are nothing but a continuous string of letters with no spaces between words or sentences. Mistakes in copying were easy to make. Once a mistake was made, it was copied again, and again, and again.

Most of the problems are simple errors—misspelled words, words that are omitted, or a line that the copying scribe skipped. And yet there are several significant problems as verses 9-20 in chapter 16 suggest. When an important textual problem exists, it is likely that the copying scribe deliberately made the change.

Mark’s story of the resurrection as found in the disputed verses cited above is a weak one. It is unclear where the event took place, and many details found in other gospels are omitted. It reads like an afterthought, an add-on. The resurrection of Jesus is also not important for Mark’s thinking about who Jesus was. As I pointed out in an earlier blog, the key event was his death on the cross, not the resurrection. With that said, I will leave the discussion of the resurrection in Mark to another time when his account is compared to other gospel treatments, and conclude this blog with three additional examples of significant variant readings.

The lovely story in the gospel of John about casting the first stone (see John 7: 53-8:12) is almost certainly not original. It does not appear in the earliest texts we have of John, and again the vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure are different when compared to the rest of the gospel.

Read 1 Corinthians 14:26-40. Now read it again omitting verses 34 and 35. The passage reads seamlessly. It has been pointed out by many textual scholars that the anti-women verses (34-35) were inserted by a scribe. I will argue when we get to Paul that, like Jesus, he had a very high view of women for a first century man. Many leaders in his early churches were women to cite one piece of evidence that helps make that case. If that is true, verses 34 and 35 are suspect. These verses were probably added by a scribe who wanted to make Paul’s view of women more compatible with the general culture.

Finally, there are several textual problems that relate to a group of early Christians called adoptionists. These first century followers of Jesus argued that Jesus was fully human, not divine. There is only one God. Because Jesus was so righteous, God adopts him as his son. This adoption takes place when Jesus is an adult. There is no virgin birth story. Bart Ehrman in his fascinating book Misquoting Jesus: the Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, cites many examples of changes in early New Testament texts made by scribes to weaken this adoptionist “heresy.”

As an aside before concluding, I should point out that many scholars argue that Mark’s gospel contains adoptionist ideas. Note that there is no virgin birth story. The gospel opens when an adult Jesus is baptized by John, and a voice from heaven proclaims him to be God’s son.

With that said, two conclusions regarding textual problems within the Bible jump out at you. How can one claim that the Bible contains the inerrant word of God when there is confusion as to what those words are? The fact that New Testament manuscripts were copied for fifteen hundred years by flesh and blood human beings with their own opinions and agendas has led to thousands of variant readings among those texts. Untangling these problems so that the original text can be found is not possible.

Second, there is a danger in insisting on a literal reading of a text. Women have been forced to play secondary roles in many Christian churches for centuries, and yet it is likely that the anti-feminist statements in Paul were inserted by scribes and not original to Paul. Finally, reread the last eleven verses in Mark (16:9-20), the disputed ones. I wonder how many fundamentalists were harmed or even killed by picking up dangerous snakes or drinking a deadly poison when testing their faith.