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NASB | Mark 16:20 And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them, and confirmed the word by the signs that followed.] ¶ [And they promptly reported all these instructions to Peter and his companions. And after that, Jesus Himself sent out through them from east to west the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. ] |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Mark 16:20 And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord was working with them and confirming the word by the signs that followed.] |
Bible Question: Does anyone know what the "fewer later mss. and versions" contain the last paragraph in italics of Mark 16:20? I see the footnote about this in my NASB, but I cannot find what latter versions the not refers to. |
Bible Answer: Tim, I review the full evidence for that paragraph, which commentators routinely call the "Shorter Ending," or, sometimes, the "Intermediate Ending," in the course of my book, "Authentic: The Case for Mark 16:9-20." Six Greek manuscripts contain this material. In five of them, these sentences are followed by Mark 16:9 (or by a note, and then by 16:9). Those 5 Greek manuscripts are codices L, Psi, 083 (the piece also known as 0112), 099, and 579. In one other manuscript, minuscule 274, the Shorter Ending is written in the lower margin of the page; in the text, 16:9-20 follows 16:8 (with an abbreviated lectionary-note intervening between the end of 16:8 and the beginning of 16:9, all on one line). One early (not late!) Latin manuscript, Codex Bobbiensis (it can also be spelled Bobiensis) has a highly anomalous text of Mark 16. One of its odd features is that after it presents Mark 16:8, in a shortened form, it has the Shorter Ending, but written in a way that shows that the writer was either remarkably inattentive, or was unfamiliar with the story he was copying: instead of "Peter" (Petro) he wrote the Latin word for "child" (puero), and made other mistakes as well (writing "from east to east," for example, instead of "from east to west"). Codex Bobbiensis (produced in about 430) is the only manuscript in any language that displays the Shorter Ending without also displaying at least part of 16:9 to 20. In the Ethiopic version, the Shorter Ending appears between 16:8 and 16:9 in 131 copies. Contrary to what is claimed in some commentaries, there are no Ethiopic manuscripts of Mark in which the text of chapter 16 stops at the end of 16:8. Bruce Metzger investigated this subject thoroughly in 1980 and retracted his previous claim (which was based on some earlier scholars' sloppy work). I repeat: all the Ethiopic manuscripts of Mark either have 16:8 followed by verse 9, or 16:8 followed by the Shorter Ending followed by verse 9. (The Garima Gospels, a major Ethiopic manuscript, have recently been carbon-dated to no later than the 500's; this witness has Mark 16:9-20 after 16:8.) The Bohairic version has fewer copies of Mark, and they are all pretty young, but it too testifies to the existence of the Shorter Ending, between 16:8 and 16:9 (so, one could make a case that the material has served as a sort of "bridge," wrapping up a lection for Easter-time or introducing one for Ascension-Day, much more often than it has been an ending). In the Sahidic version, one manuscript and one amulet support the form of text in which verse 8 is the last verse of chapter 16; in all other Sahidic copies, Mark ends with either the Shorter Ending and verses 9-20, or with verses 9-20 after verse 8. Bohairic MS Huntington 17 (produced in 1174) and British Museum Oriental MS 1315 include 16:9-20 after 16:8; they both feature the Shorter Ending written in their margins. Also, in a medieval Armenian copy of the Gospels (Etchmiadsin MS 303), the Shorter Ending somehow ended up at the end of the Gospel of Luke! In addition, it should be noted that although Codex L is centuries younger that Codex Bobbiensis, the form of the text of the Shorter Ending is probably older than the translated form in Codex Bobbiensis; in Bobbiensis, the Shorter Ending says that Jesus "appeared" (adparuit) to the disciples but this is not stated in the text of the Shorter Ending in L. The significance of the Shorter Ending, by the way, is that it indicates that in an ancestor of all the witnesses that contain it, the Gospel of Mark did not contain verses 9-20. As C. Williams showed in his 1914 essay "Appendices of the Gospel of Mark" (which can be found online, as a free download), it almost certainly originated somewhere in Egypt, where it impacted the text of the versions in and around that area. (Armenia itself is not in that area, of course, but Armenian monks routinely traveled to Egypt in the Middle Ages; there are even Armenian manuscripts in the monastery at St. Catherine's in Sinai.) |