Sermon Tone Analysis

This morning we arrive at one of the more difficult passages of Scripture to preach through.

It is not impossible, but it is difficult and it will require that we dig into certain concepts of theology in order to come to a complete and solid conclusion about the text.

With that said, this morning will be more in the lines of a teaching type of sermon, so I challenge all of you to do your best to follow along.

Pretend you are back in school (for some of you, that will be harder to do that others- depending on how many years you have to go back in your memory banks to recall your time as a student).

This morning we arrive at what some theologians call the long ending of Mark.

Now if you have a modern English translation in front of you, you may notice that there are brackets around verses 9-20, some of you may even have a footnote stating that “some of the earliest manuscripts do not include vv.

9-20”.

This is because not all of the Greek manuscripts or copies of the NT agree with one another.

There are actually 4 different endings to Mark recorded in various Greek manuscripts that we have available to study. 2 of them have little to no textual support and will not be the topic of our study this morning, but 2 of them do have a good amount of support in the available Greek manuscripts.

Some of the earliest manuscripts end Mark at v. 8, while some of the later manuscripts include vv.

9-20.

So what are we to do about this problem?

Perhaps you are sitting here this morning and have never heard anything about manuscripts or variant readings.

This might be somewhat of a shock to you to hear that there are verses in your Bible that may not be original to the authors of Scripture.

Well, the goal today is to talk about it.

My goals are to help you understand a bit about the ancient Greek manuscripts of the NT that we have available to us today, to uphold and solidify your confidence in the reliability of Scripture, and to discuss the facts about the originality of Mark 16:9-20.

Greek NT Manuscripts

The Reliability of Scripture

The Originality of Mark 16:9-20

I. Greek NT Manuscripts

Before we can understand or even talk about the long ending of Mark we must have a general background understanding of how our NT is preserved in the Greek manuscripts.

A. God has chosen to preserve His Word in the multiple copies of the Greek NT

The first thing you need to understand is that we do not have at our disposal the original Greek manuscripts as penned by Matthew, or Luke, or Paul.

They have been lost to time.

And by the way, God could have preserved the original documents, but He chose not to.

Why? Wouldn’t this all be a lot easier if God has chosen to preserve the originals?

Yes and No. What do you think man would do if the original manuscripts had been preserved?

Listen to what Paul says in the letter to the Romans:

Do you think that human beings would worship the created thing, the originals if they still existed, instead of the Creator?

I think we certainly would have.

Also, even rare copies of the Scriptures today are the cause of wars and violence, imagine if we still had the originals.

And there could be more reasons that we just are not aware of.

I say all that to say this- God knew what He was doing when He chose to preserve His Word in the multiple copies of the Greek NT.

So with that being said- what do we have available to us today in terms of the Greek copies of the NT?

There are 5,656 Greek NT manuscripts available to us today.

We have more than 10,000 copies of the NT in Latin, more that 1,000 copies in other languages, and if you include references to Scripture by the early church fathers that number goes into the millions.

Of the extant Greek manuscripts, 59 have the complete text of the NT, most have a few verses, chapters, or books of the NT.

Manuscripts

The Greek manuscripts come to us in four main forms: papyri, uncials, minuscules, and lectionaries.

Papyri are manuscripts made of the papyrus plant (rather than animal skin, called vellum).

They are in uncial (capital) script.

Because papyrus does not stand up as well as vellum, only about one hundred of these manuscripts have survived, most of them from Egypt.

These manuscripts are early (second to eight centuries A.D.) and most of them have been discovered in the past one hundred years.

Only nine of the papyri were discovered before the year 1900.

Uncials refer to manuscripts made of animal skins and are written in capital letter script.

Of the about three hundred uncials that we have, only one of them has the complete text of the NT.

They date from about the third to the tenth century A.D.

Minuscules are written in a cursive script that has smaller, connected letters.

This script began to be used in the ninth century to save time and because the letters take less space than do uncial letters.

These manuscripts (about 2,850 of them) are primarily from the Majority (or Byzantine) text types.

Lectionaries are service books of Scripture for church meetings.

There are more than 2,400 of them, and they are the least important of the Greek manuscripts.

So how do we get from 5,636 Greek NT manuscripts, that have variant readings, to the Greek NT that we use today (and then to our English translations)?

B. Scholars use a process called textual criticism to determine as closely as is possible the original text.

Textual criticism is often thought of as a negative and destructive thing.

And we can blame many of today’s post modern thinkers for that.

However, textual criticism does not need to be considered as evil.

In fact look at the Bible you are holding in your hands.

Every single one of you is holding a product of textual criticism.

Why?

Because every Greek text is a product of textual criticism and, thus, every English text is also a product of textual criticism.

So what exactly is textual criticism?

Textual criticism is the study of the copies and translations of any written composition of which the autograph (the original) is unknown, for the purpose of determining as closely as possible the original text.

Do we have the autograph (the original) manuscripts of the NT?

No

What do we have?

We have 5,636 copies of the originals.

Do all 5,636 copies agree with each other in content?

No, there are differences, minimal differences, but still there are differences.

Then how do we know what the originals said?

We use textual criticism.

So textual criticism is the process where scholars take the 5,656 copies and study them and compare them in order to determine to the best of their abilities the original text.

This is a difficult and complex process as you can imagine, but praise God, over the years there have been many brilliant scholars who have diligently, carefully, and tirelessly studied the Greek NT manuscripts that are available to us today.

II.

The Reliability of Scripture

Now, the last thing that I want to happen if for any of you to lose confidence in the reliability of your Bibles.

So let me say up front- we have the very Words of God.

Our Bibles are reliable and trustworthy and dependable.

Let me give you a few facts to support that claim.

A. Our Bible is the most remarkably preserved book in the ancient world.

God has given us 5,656 manuscripts containing all or parts of the Greek NT.

Not only do we have a great number of manuscripts, but some of them are also very close in time to the originals that they represent.

Some partial manuscripts of the NT are from the second century A.D., and many of them are within four centuries of the originals.

Let me put this information into a bit of context for you.

No one questions the authenticity of other books of historical antiquity just because we do not posses the originals.

Even though other ancient books have far fewer manuscripts than we posses of the NT.

Compares to the NT look at the poverty of some other ancient documents.

10 manuscripts of Caesar's Gallic Wars (58 - 50 B.C.)

8 manuscripts of Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War (460 - 400 B.C.)

8 manuscripts of Herodotus’s History (ca.

480-425 B.C.)

2 manuscripts of Tacitus’s Histories and Annals (ca.

A.D. 100)

The oldest manuscript of Caesar’s Gallic Wars is dated nine hundred years after Caesar.

The oldest manuscripts of Thucydides and Herodotus date to A.D. 900.

The two manuscripts of Tacitus's work are from the ninth and eleventh centuries.

Again, the NT evidence is far superior to these; our earliest manuscripts of the NT is only one generation after the originals were written.

Therefore, the number and early date of the NT manuscripts gives us great confidence that God’s Word has been preserved in those documents.

No other ancient document in the history of the world has been preserved like our NT.

God knew what He was doing when He preserved and protected His precious Word.

B. Less than 2% of the Greek manuscripts that we have today are significantly affected by the variations.

Of the variations that exist in the Greek NT manuscripts 98% of them are insignificant matters such as spelling, word order, differences in style, or confusion concerning synonyms.