Misquoting Jesus (9 page)

The Last Twelve Verses of Mark

The second example that we will consider may not be as familiar to the casual reader of the Bible, but it has been highly influential in the history of biblical interpretation and poses comparable problems for the scholar of the textual tradition of the New Testament. This example comes from the Gospel of Mark and concerns its ending.

In Mark's account, we are told that Jesus is crucified and then buried by Joseph of Arimathea on the day before the Sabbath (15:42–47). On the day after Sabbath, Mary Magdalene and two other women come back to the tomb in order properly to anoint the body (16:1–2). When they arrive, they find that the stone has been rolled away. Entering the tomb, they see a young man in a white robe, who tells them, “Do not
be startled! You are seeking Jesus the Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has been raised and is not here—see the place where they laid him?” He then instructs the women to tell the disciples that Jesus is preceding them into Galilee and that they will see him there, “just as he told you.” But the women flee the tomb and say nothing to anyone, “for they were afraid” (16:4–8).

Then come the last twelve verses of Mark in many modern English translations, verses that continue the story. Jesus himself is said to appear to Mary Magdalene, who goes and tells the disciples; but they do not believe her (vv. 9–11). He then appears to two others (vv. 12–14), and finally to the eleven disciples (the Twelve, not including Judas Iscariot) who are gathered together at table. Jesus upbraids them for failing to believe, and then commissions them to go forth and proclaim his gospel “to the whole creation.” Those who believe and are baptized “will be saved,” but those who do not “will be condemned.” And then come two of the most intriguing verses of the passage:

Jesus is then taken up into heaven, and seated at the right hand of God. And the disciples go forth into the world proclaiming the gospel, their words being confirmed by the signs that accompany them (vv. 19–20).

It is a terrific passage, mysterious, moving, and powerful. It is one of the passages used by Pentecostal Christians to show that Jesus's followers will be able to speak in unknown “tongues,” as happens in their own services of worship; and it is the principal passage used by groups of “Appalachian snake-handlers,” who till this day take poisonous snakes in their hands in order to demonstrate their faith in the words of Jesus, that when doing so they will come to no harm.

But there's one problem. Once again, this passage was not originally in the Gospel of Mark. It was added by a later scribe.

In some ways this textual problem is more disputed than the passage about the woman taken in adultery, because
without
these final verses Mark has a very different, and hard to understand, ending. That doesn't mean that scholars are inclined to accept the verses, as we'll see momentarily. The reasons for taking them to be an addition are solid, almost indisputable. But scholars debate what the genuine ending of Mark actually was, given the circumstance that this ending found in many English translations (though usually marked as inauthentic) and in later Greek manuscripts is not the original.

The evidence that these verses were not original to Mark is similar in kind to that for the passage about the woman taken in adultery, and again I don't need to go into all the details here. The verses are absent from our two oldest and best manuscripts of Mark's Gospel, along with other important witnesses; the writing style varies from what we find elsewhere in Mark; the transition between this passage and the one preceding it is hard to understand (e.g., Mary Magdalene is introduced in verse 9 as if she hadn't been mentioned yet, even though she is discussed in the preceding verses; there is another problem with the Greek that makes the transition even more awkward); and there are a large number of words and phrases in the passage that are not found elsewhere in Mark. In short, the evidence is sufficient to convince nearly all textual scholars that these verses are an addition to Mark.

Without them, though, the story ends rather abruptly. Notice what happens when these verses are taken away. The women are told to inform the disciples that Jesus will precede them to Galilee and meet them there; but they, the women, flee the tomb and say nothing to anyone, “for they were afraid.” And that's where the Gospel ends.

Obviously, scribes thought the ending was too abrupt. The women told no one? Then, did the disciples never learn of the resurrection? And didn't Jesus himself ever appear to them? How could
that
be the ending! To resolve the problem, scribes added an ending.
¹⁹

Some scholars agree with the scribes in thinking that 16:8 is too abrupt an ending for a Gospel. As I have indicated, it is not that these scholars believe the final twelve verses in our later manuscripts were the original ending—they know that's not the case—but they think
that, possibly, the last page of Mark's Gospel, one in which Jesus actually did meet the disciples in Galilee, was somehow lost, and that all our copies of the Gospel go back to this one truncated manuscript, without the last page.

That explanation is entirely possible. It is also possible, in the opinion of yet other scholars, that Mark did indeed mean to end his Gospel with 16:8.
²⁰
It certainly is a shocker of an ending. The disciples never learn the truth of Jesus's resurrection because the women never tell them. One reason for thinking that this could be how Mark ended his Gospel is that some such ending coincides so well with other motifs throughout his Gospel. As students of Mark have long noticed, the disciples never do seem to “get it” in this Gospel (unlike in some of the other Gospels). They are repeatedly said not to understand Jesus (6:51–52; 8:21), and when Jesus tells them on several occasions that he must suffer and die, they manifestly fail to comprehend his words (8:31–33; 9:30–32; 10:33–40). Maybe, in fact, they never did come to understand (unlike Mark's readers, who can understand who Jesus really is from the very beginning). Also, it is interesting to note that throughout Mark, when someone comes to understand something about Jesus, Jesus orders that person to silence—and yet often the person ignores the order and spreads the news (e.g., 1:43–45). How ironic that when the women at the tomb are told not to be silent but to speak, they also ignore the order—and are silent!

In short, Mark may well have intended to bring his reader up short with this abrupt ending—a clever way to make the reader stop, take a faltering breath, and ask:
What?

C
ONCLUSION

The passages discussed above represent just two out of thousands of places in which the manuscripts of the New Testament came to be changed by scribes. In both of the examples, we are dealing with additions that scribes made to the text, additions of sizable length. Al
though most of the changes are not of this magnitude, there are lots of significant changes (and lots more insignificant ones) in our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. In the chapters that follow we will want to see how scholars began to discover these changes and how they developed methods for figuring out what the oldest form of the text (or the “original” text) is; we will especially like to see more examples of where this text has been changed—and how these changes affected our English translations of the Bible.

I would like to end this chapter simply with an observation about a particularly acute irony that we seem to have discovered. As we saw in chapter 1, Christianity from the outset was a bookish religion that stressed certain texts as authoritative scripture. As we have seen in this chapter, however, we don't actually have these authoritative texts. This is a textually oriented religion whose texts have been changed, surviving only in copies that vary from one another, sometimes in highly significant ways. The task of the textual critic is to try to recover the oldest form of these texts.

This is obviously a crucial task, since we can't interpret the words of the New Testament if we don't know what the words were. Moreover, as I hope should be clear by now, knowing the words is important not just for those who consider the words divinely inspired. It is important for anyone who thinks of the New Testament as a significant book. And surely everyone interested in the history, society, and culture of Western civilization thinks so, because the New Testament, if nothing else, is an enormous cultural artifact, a book that is revered by millions and that lies at the foundation of the largest religion of the world today.

Editions, Manuscripts, and Differences

T
he copying practices we have considered thus far have been principally those of the first three centuries of Christianity, when most of the copyists of the Christian texts were not professionals trained for the job but simply literate Christians of this or that congregation, able to read and write and so called upon to reproduce the texts of the community in their spare time.
¹
Because they were not highly trained to perform this kind of work, they were more prone to make mistakes than professional scribes would have been. This explains why our
earliest
copies of the early Christian writings tend to vary more frequently from one another and from later copies than do the later copies (say, of the high Middle Ages) from one another. Eventually a kind of professional scribal class came to be a part of the Christian intellectual landscape, and with the advent of professional scribes came more controlled copying practices, in which mistakes were made much less frequently.

Before that happened, during the early centuries of the church, Christian texts were copied in whatever location they were written or taken to. Since texts were copied
locally,
it is no surprise that different localities developed different kinds of textual tradition. That is to say, the manuscripts in Rome had many of the same errors, because they were for the most part “in-house” documents, copied from one another; they were not influenced much by manuscripts being copied in Palestine; and those in Palestine took on their own characteristics, which were not the same as those found in a place like Alexandria, Egypt. Moreover, in the early centuries of the church, some locales had better scribes than others. Modern scholars have come to recognize that the scribes in Alexandria—which was a major intellectual center in the ancient world—were particularly scrupulous, even in these early centuries, and that there, in Alexandria, a very pure form of the text of the early Christian writings was preserved, decade after decade, by dedicated and relatively skilled Christian scribes.

P
ROFESSIONAL
C
HRISTIAN
S
CRIBES

When did the church begin to use professional scribes to copy its texts? There are good reasons for thinking that this happened sometime near the beginning of the fourth century. Until then, Christianity was a small, minority religion in the Roman Empire, often opposed, sometimes persecuted. But a cataclysmic change occurred when the emperor of Rome, Constantine, converted to the faith about 312
C
.
E
. Suddenly Christianity shifted from being a religion of social outcasts, persecuted by local mobs and imperial authorities alike, to being a major player in the religious scene of the empire. Not only were persecutions halted, but favors began to pour out upon the church from the greatest power in the Western world. Massive conversions resulted, as it became a popular thing to be a follower of Christ in an age in which the emperor himself publicly proclaimed his allegiance to Christianity.

More and more highly educated and trained persons converted to
the faith. They, naturally, were the ones most suited to copy the texts of the Christian tradition. There are reasons to suppose that about this time Christian scriptoria arose in major urban areas.
²
A scriptorium is a place for the professional copying of manuscripts. We have hints of Christian scriptoria functioning by the early part of the fourth century. In 331
C
.
E
. the emperor Constantine, wanting magnificent Bibles to be made available to major churches he was having built, wrote a request to the bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius,
³
to have fifty Bibles produced at imperial expense. Eusebius treated this request with all the pomp and respect it deserved, and saw that it was carried out. Obviously, an accomplishment of this magnitude required a professional scriptorium, not to mention the materials needed for making lavish copies of the Christian scriptures. We are clearly in a different age from just a century or two earlier when local churches would simply request that one of their members cobble together enough free time to make a copy of a text.

Starting in the fourth century, then, copies of scripture began to be made by professionals; this naturally curtailed significantly the number of errors that crept into the text. Eventually, as the decades grew into centuries, the copying of the Greek scriptures became the charge of monks working out of monasteries, who spent their days copying the sacred texts carefully and conscientiously. This practice continued on down through the Middle Ages, right up to the time of the invention of printing with moveable type in the fifteenth century. The great mass of our surviving Greek manuscripts come from the pens of these medieval Christian scribes who lived and worked in the East (for example, in areas that are now Turkey and Greece), known as the Byzantine Empire. For this reason, Greek manuscripts from the seventh century onward are sometimes labeled “Byzantine” manuscripts.

As I have pointed out, anyone familiar with the manuscript tradition of the New Testament knows that these Byzantine copies of the text tend to be very similar to one another, whereas the earliest copies vary significantly both among themselves and from the form of text found in these later copies. The reason for this should now be clear: it
had to do with who was copying the texts (professionals) and where they were working (in a relatively constricted area). It would be a grave mistake, though, to think that because later manuscripts agree so extensively with one another, they are therefore our superior witnesses to the “original” text of the New Testament. For one must always ask: where did these medieval scribes
get
the texts they copied in so professional a manner? They got them from earlier texts, which were copies of yet earlier texts, which were themselves copies of still earlier texts. Therefore, the texts that are closest in form to the originals are, perhaps unexpectedly, the more variable and amateurish copies of early times, not the more standardized professional copies of later times.

T
HE
L
ATIN
V
ULGATE

The copying practices I have been summarizing principally involve the
eastern
part of the Roman Empire, where Greek was, and continued to be, the principal language. It was not long, however, before Christians in non-Greek-speaking regions wanted the Christian sacred texts in their own, local languages. Latin, of course, was the language of much of the western part of the empire; Syriac was spoken in Syria; Coptic in Egypt. In each of these areas, the books of the New Testament came to be translated into the indigenous languages, probably sometime in the mid to late second century. And then these translated texts were themselves copied by scribes in their locales.
⁴

Particularly important for the history of the text were the translations into Latin, because a very large number of Christians in the West had this as their principal language. Problems emerged very soon, however, with the Latin translations of scripture, because there were so many of them and these translations differed broadly from one another. The problem came to a head near the end of the fourth Christian century, when Pope Damasus commissioned the greatest scholar of his day, Jerome, to produce an “official” Latin translation
that could be accepted by all Latin-speaking Christians, in Rome and elsewhere, as an authoritative text. Jerome himself speaks of the plethora of available translations, and set himself to resolving the problem. Choosing one of the best Latin translations available, and comparing its text with the superior Greek manuscripts at his disposal, Jerome created a new edition of the Gospels in Latin. It may be that he, or one of his followers, was also responsible for the new edition of the other books of the New Testament in Latin.
⁵

This form of the Bible in Latin—Jerome's translation—came to be known as the Vulgate (= Common) Bible of Latin-speaking Christendom. This was the Bible for the Western church, itself copied and recopied many times over. It was the book that Christians read, scholars studied, and theologians used for centuries, down to the modern period. Today there are nearly twice as many copies of the Latin Vulgate as there are Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.

T
HE
F
IRST
P
RINTED
E
DITION OF THE
G
REEK
N
EW
T
ESTAMENT

As I have indicated, the text of the New Testament was copied in a fairly standardized form throughout the centuries of the Middle Ages, both in the East (the Byzantine text) and in the West (the Latin Vulgate). It was the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century by Johannes Gutenberg (1400–1468) that changed everything for the reproduction of books in general and the books of the Bible in particular. By printing books with moveable type, one could guarantee that every page looked exactly like every other page, with no variations of any kind in the wording. Gone were the days when transcribers would each produce different copies of the same text by means of accidental and intentional alterations. What was set in print was set in stone. Moreover, books could be made far more rapidly: no longer did they need to be copied one letter at a time. And, as a result, they could be made much more cheaply. Scarcely anything has made a more
revolutionary impact on the modern world than the printing press; the next closest thing (which may, eventually, surpass it in significance) is the advent of the personal computer.

The first major work to be printed on Gutenberg's press was a magnificent edition of the Latin (Vulgate) Bible, which took all of 1450–56 to produce.
⁶
In the half century that followed, some fifty editions of the Vulgate were produced at various printing houses in Europe. It may seem odd that there was no impulse to produce a copy of the
Greek
New Testament in those early years of printing. But the reason is not hard to find: it is the one already alluded to. Scholars throughout Europe—including biblical scholars—had been accustomed for nearly a thousand years to thinking that Jerome's Vulgate was
the
Bible of the church (somewhat like some modern churches assume that the King James Version is the “true” Bible). The Greek Bible was thought of as foreign to theology and learning; in the Latin West, it was thought of as belonging to the Greek Orthodox Christians, who were considered to be schismatics who had branched off from the true church. Few scholars in Western Europe could even read Greek. And so, at first, no one felt compelled to put the Greek Bible in print.

The first Western scholar to conceive the idea of producing a version of the Greek New Testament was a Spanish cardinal named Ximenes de Cisneros (1437–1517). Under his leadership, a group of scholars, including one named Diego Lopezde Zuñiga (Stunica), undertook a multivolume edition of the Bible. This was a
polyglot
edition; that is, it reproduced the text of the Bible in a variety of languages. And so, the Old Testament was represented by the original Hebrew, the Latin Vulgate, and the Greek Septuagint, side by side in columns. (What these editors thought of the superiority of the Vulgate can be seen in their comments on this arrangement in their preface: they likened it to Christ—represented by the Vulgate—being crucified between two criminals, the false Jews represented by the Hebrew and the schismatic Greeks represented by the Septuagint.)

The work was printed in a town called Alcalá, whose Latin name is Complutum. For this reason, Ximenes's edition is known as the
Complutensian Polyglot. The New Testament volume was the first to be printed (volume 5, completed in 1514); it contained the Greek text and included a Greek dictionary with Latin equivalents. But there was no plan to publish this volume separately—all six volumes (the sixth included a Hebrew grammar and dictionary, to assist in the reading of volumes 1–4) were to be published together, and this took considerable time. The entire work was finished, evidently, by 1517; but as this was a Catholic production, it needed the sanction of the pope, Leo X, before it could appear. This was finally obtained in 1520, but because of other complications, the book did not come to be distributed until 1522, some five years after Ximenes himself had died.

As we have seen, by this time there were many hundreds of Greek
manuscripts
(i.e., handwritten copies) available to Christian churches and scholars in the East. How did Stunica and his fellow editors decide which of these manuscripts to use, and which manuscripts were actually available to them? Unfortunately, these are questions that scholars have never been able to answer with confidence. In the Dedication of the work, Ximenes expresses his gratitude to Pope Leo X for Greek copies lent “from the Apostolical Library.” And so the manuscripts for the edition may have come from the Vatican's holdings. Some scholars, however, have suspected that manuscripts available locally were used. About 250 years after the production of the Complutum, a Danish scholar named Moldenhawer visited Alcalá to survey their library resources in order to answer the question, but he could find no manuscripts of the Greek New Testament at all. Suspecting that the library must have had some such manuscripts at some point, he made persistent inquiries until he was finally told by the librarian that the library had indeed previously contained ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, but that in 1749 all of them had been sold to a rocket maker named Toryo “as useless parchments” (but suitable for making fireworks).

Later scholars have tried to discredit this account.
⁷
At the very least, though, it shows that the study of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament is not rocket science.

T
HE
F
IRST
P
UBLISHED
E
DITION OF THE
G
REEK
N
EW
T
ESTAMENT