Bart Ehrman - Missing verses in the Gospel of Mark Chapter 16 Verses 9-20

Extract from Bart Ehrman's book 'Misquoting Jesus'

What Bart Ehrman has to say about the missing verses from the most ancient manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark are as follow:

"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 (15:4247). On the day after Sabbath, Mary Magdalene and two other women come back to the tomb in order properly to anoint the body (16:12). 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" (16:48).

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:

And these are the signs that will accompany those who believe: they will cast out demons in my name; they will speak in new tongues; and they will take up snakes in their hands; and if they drink any poison, it will not harm them; they will place their hands upon the sick and heal them. (vv. 17-18).

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 snakehandlers," 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.

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. 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? "

(Pages 65-68 - Misquoting Jesus)

Bart Ehrman - Was Jesus Violent or Peaceful? Is it clear who the Historical Jesus was?

Extract from Bart Ehrman's book - 'Jesus:Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium'

" I should stress, though, that not every modern scholar has shared this view of Jesus. Quite the contrary, in recent years, in particular, it has come under serious attack. Books about Jesus have proliferated at an alarming rate, with competent scholars (not to mention incompetent ones) setting forth their own understandings of who Jesus must have been. Many of these have tried to deny that Jesus was essentially an apocalypticist—that is, one who thought that the apocalyptic climax of history was soon to appear. And so, just within the past thirty years, we have seen books (many of which you can still find at your local bookstore) arguing, instead, that Jesus was a violent revolutionary who urged his followers to take up the sword against their oppressive Roman overlords; or that he was a kind of proto-Marxist social reformer who urged his followers to adopt a new economic structure of complete equality and community of  goods; or that he was an ancient precursor of the feminist movement, principally concerned with gender issues and the oppression of women; or that he was a magician—not the sleight-of-hand type but the kind that could actually perform stupendous feats of magic; or, most recently, that he was an ancient "Cynic" philosopher who was chiefly concerned with teaching his followers to remove themselves from the concerns and trappings of this life, to give away everything they owned, to beg for a living, and to compel everyone else to do likewise.1 And these are only some of the more serious proposals!

Why is it that scholars who have devoted their entire lives to studying the historical Jesus have come up with such radically different answers? Isn't knowing about Jesus a straightforward matter of reading the New Testament Gospels and seeing what they say? With four such high-quality sources as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, why should
there be any serious disagreements at all? Can't we take these ancient witnesses at face value, and thereby discount all of these scholarly constructs, not to mention the more far-fetched ones (which sometimes sell much better!) ? "

(Pages 20-21- Jesus - Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium)