Weighing a Variant

Every decision about a variant weighs two kinds of evidence, and a student who learns to keep them apart will avoid most of the errors made in popular argument. The first is external evidence: which manuscripts, translations and early quotations support each reading, how old they are, where they come from, and how they are related to one another. The second is internal evidence: what scribes were likely to do, and what the author was likely to write. Neither is enough alone. A reading with splendid manuscripts behind it can still be an obvious slip, and a reading that makes perfect sense can still have no ancient support at all.

External evidence starts with age, but age is not everything. An early manuscript may be carelessly copied, and a late manuscript may be a careful copy of a very early one. So critics look also at geographical spread, on the reasoning that a reading found in Egypt, in the Latin West and in Syria at an early date is unlikely to be the invention of one local scribe. And they look at families: manuscripts copied from one another, or from a common ancestor, share each other's errors, so that a hundred members of one family may count as one witness. The phrase usually used is that manuscripts are weighed, not counted. Not everyone accepts that principle. Defenders of the majority text argue that the number of manuscripts supporting a reading is itself evidence, and the Hermeneutics lesson Which Bible Are You Reading sets out that debate fairly; go back to it if you need to. This lesson works mainly with the method of the critical editions, because that is what produced the SBLGNT, the THGNT and the base text of the BSB, but it will show you the majority-text case where it bears on the examples.

Internal evidence has two parts. Transcriptional probability asks what a scribe was likely to do. Scribes made accidental mistakes in recognisable ways: the eye jumping from one ending to a similar one, a word written twice, a letter misread. They also made deliberate changes, usually in good faith: smoothing grammar, harmonising one Gospel to another, clarifying an ambiguous phrase, or adding a pious title. From this come two well-known rules of thumb. The harder reading is usually to be preferred, because scribes made texts easier rather than harder. And the shorter reading was long preferred too, because scribes tended to add. That second rule has been seriously qualified. James Royse's large study, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri (2008), found that the scribes of the earliest papyri omitted more often than they added, mostly by accident, so the shorter reading cannot be assumed to be original. Intrinsic probability, the second part, asks what the author was likely to write, given his vocabulary, his style and the flow of his argument.

Over all these rules stands one master question, and if you remember nothing else, remember this one: which reading best explains how the other readings came to exist? A good decision is not the reading that scores best on a checklist but the one that tells the most believable story of the whole set of variants. Bruce Metzger's A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (first edition 1971, second 1994) gives the reasoning of the committee behind the United Bible Societies' edition for a great many variants, and rates its confidence with the letters A to D, from virtually certain to great difficulty in deciding. That book is not free, but the NET Bible's tc notes, which are, often summarise the same arguments in plain English, and you should get into the habit of reading them.

The question is whether Mark began Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ (Archē tou euangeliou Iēsou Christou, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ) or went on υἱοῦ θεοῦ (huiou theou, Son of God). Ἀρχή (archē, beginning) is nominative feminine singular, the head of a sentence that has no main verb at all; the BSB supplies 'This is'. Every noun after it is genitive singular. The SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) prints the shorter text, following Westcott and Hort. The Tyndale House Greek New Testament (THGNT) prints the longer, as do Tregelles and the BSB; the Nestle-Aland edition prints it too, but inside square brackets, its sign that the editors are unsure. A Robinson-Pierpont reader will find the longer reading with the article, υἱοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ (huiou tou theou, the Son of God). So this is a place where careful critical editors, using the same evidence and broadly the same method, have come down on different sides. That alone should make you slow to call either view careless.

The case for the shorter text runs like this. The witnesses that lack the words are few but weighty: the original hand of Codex Sinaiticus (א*), one of the two most important early Greek Bibles; the ninth-century manuscript marked Θ; a handful of others; and quotations of the verse by Origen, the great third-century scholar, who seems to have known the opening without the title. Scribes are known to have expanded the names of Jesus as they copied, adding Lord or Christ to a bare Jesus, and Son of God at the head of a Gospel is exactly the kind of title a devout copyist would supply. It is very hard to think of a reason why anyone would remove these words on purpose. And the first line of a book is the line a scribe is most likely to copy with care, which makes an accidental omission at this point less likely than it would be in the middle of a column. Peter M. Head set out this case in a careful article in New Testament Studies in 1991, and Bart Ehrman, in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993), argued that the words were added by scribes eager to block any suggestion that Jesus only became the Son of God at his baptism. On this view the intrinsic argument, that Son of God is Mark's great theme, cuts the other way: of course a scribe who knew the Gospel would give its first line the title the Gospel proves.

The case for the longer text runs like this. The words are present in Codex Vaticanus (B), the other great fourth-century Bible, in Codex Bezae (D), whose text has deep roots in the Western church, in the Freer manuscript (W), in L, and in the great mass of later manuscripts, together with the early translations into Latin and Coptic. That is early and widely spread support across the families. A corrector of Sinaiticus added the words, so the manuscript itself does not stand firmly on the other side. And the accidental omission is easier to explain than it first appears. In early Christian manuscripts the words Jesus, Christ and God, and less consistently Son, belonged to a small group of sacred names written as abbreviations, the nomina sacra: in the genitive they would typically appear as ΙΥ ΧΥ ΥΥ ΘΥ, each with a line above it. Four two-letter abbreviations in a row, all ending in the same letter, are precisely the setting in which an eye leaps from one to the next and drops a pair. Intrinsically, the title fits Mark's design: the Gospel opens with the narrator naming Jesus as Son of God, the Father says it at the baptism (1:11), and a Gentile soldier says it at the cross, 'Truly this man was the Son of God!' (15:39). Tommy Wasserman made this case at length in the Journal of Theological Studies in 2011, and the THGNT, published six years later, prints the words.

Each side has a reply to the other's strongest point, and you should know them both. Defenders of the longer text answer the expansion argument by saying that the few witnesses lacking the words may well be related to one another, so that their combined weight is less than it looks, and that the omission therefore probably happened once and was copied. Defenders of the shorter text answer the abbreviation argument by saying that an accident at the opening line of a book, the most carefully written line on the page, remains surprising, and that a scribe's wish to honour Christ is a motive we know was at work. Neither reply is decisive, which is why the editions differ.

What is at stake, and what is not? Not Mark's view of Jesus. Whether or not the narrator says Son of God in verse 1, the Father says it in 1:11, the unclean spirits say it in 3:11, the centurion says it in 15:39, and the high priest asks Jesus whether he is the Son of the Blessed One and is answered 'I am' (14:61-62). What is at stake is the shape of Mark's opening: whether the reader is told the answer in the first line and then watches the characters fail to see it, or is given the gospel of Jesus the Christ and left to learn, with the centurion, who he is. Both are powerful openings. A preacher can preach either honestly. What he cannot honestly do is preach a sermon on the first line of Mark as though there were no question at all, when the free Greek text on his own phone prints it the other way.

The Hermeneutics lesson Which Bible Are You Reading has already given the outline of this case, and this lesson will not repeat it. What it adds is what the Greek editions show you and how the method handles the evidence.

Open Mark 16 in the SBLGNT and you will find something unusual: after ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ (ephobounto gar, for they were afraid) the editor prints the short ending, two sentences about the women reporting to Peter's companions and Jesus sending out the proclamation of eternal salvation, inside double brackets, and then 16:9-20, also inside double brackets. Ἐφοβοῦντο is imperfect middle indicative, third person plural, of φοβέομαι (phobeomai, I fear): they were afraid, a continuing state, and γάρ (gar, for) is the last word on the page. Open the same chapter in the THGNT and you will find 16:9-20 printed as text, preceded by an old scribal note in Greek, a scholion, which the THGNT's footnote says is found in the medieval minuscule 1 and translates: in some of the copies the evangelist finishes here, which is as far as Eusebius of Pamphilus made his canon sections, but in many the following is also found. The two editions are not saying different things about the evidence. They are presenting the same uncertainty in two ways.

The external evidence against the passage is early and specific. Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus both end at 16:8; Vaticanus, unusually for that manuscript, then leaves a column blank, which some read as a scribe who knew there was more and others as nothing in particular. An Old Latin manuscript, Codex Bobiensis, has only the short ending. Several manuscripts have both endings, the short and then the long, which shows scribes who knew the Gospel circulated in more than one form. Eusebius in the fourth century says the accurate copies ended at verse 8, Jerome after him repeats that almost all the Greek copies lacked the rest, and the system of cross-references Eusebius devised for the Gospels, his canons, stops at 16:8. Clement of Alexandria and Origen show no knowledge of the longer ending.

The external evidence for the passage is also early, and it should be heard at the same strength. Irenaeus, writing around AD 180, quotes Mark 16:19, 'He was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God', and attributes it explicitly to the end of Mark's Gospel. Tatian's harmony of the four Gospels, the Diatessaron, from about the same time, included it. It stands in Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Ephraemi, Codex Bezae and the Freer manuscript, and in the overwhelming majority of later Greek manuscripts and of the ancient translations, and the church read it in worship for most of its history. Jerome himself, whatever he reported of the Greek copies, kept it in the Latin Vulgate. Defenders of the passage, from John Burgon's The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark (1871) to William Farmer's The Last Twelve Verses of Mark (1974), Maurice Robinson's contribution to Perspectives on the Ending of Mark (2008) and Nicholas Lunn's The Original Ending of Mark (2014), argue that the omission belongs to a narrow stream of copying, chiefly in Egypt, while the passage itself is as old as the earliest quotations allow us to see.

The internal evidence is where the critical majority finds its decisive argument. The style and vocabulary of 16:9-20 differ noticeably from the rest of Mark. The join at verse 9 is awkward in Greek: Ἀναστὰς δέ (Anastas de, and having risen) is an aorist active participle, nominative masculine singular, whose subject, Jesus, is not named, though the subject of the previous sentence was the women; and Mary Magdalene, named in 16:1, is introduced again as though for the first time. The passage reads like a summary of resurrection appearances known from the other Gospels. Defenders reply that vocabulary arguments over twelve verses are statistically weak, that Lunn finds many of the supposedly un-Markan features elsewhere in Mark, and that a book ending on the word γάρ, while not impossible in Greek, as Pieter van der Horst showed in a short article in 1972, would be very strange.

Then there is the question that sits underneath: if 16:9-20 is not Mark's, did Mark mean to end at verse 8? Many scholars think he did, and that an ending on fear and silence, with the promise of 14:28 and 16:7 that the risen Jesus would go ahead of them into Galilee still hanging in the air, is a deliberate challenge to the reader. Others think an ending so abrupt is unlikely and that Mark's last page was lost, or that he never finished. Perspectives on the Ending of Mark, edited by David Alan Black, sets four views side by side, including Robinson's defence of the longer ending and Daniel Wallace's case for an ending at verse 8, and is the best single place to see the debate conducted by its own advocates.

Say plainly what is settled. The resurrection does not hang on these verses; every Gospel and Paul attest it. No serious defender of 16:9-20 builds a practice of handling snakes or drinking poison on 16:18. And every modern edition and translation, whatever it decides, tells the reader that the question exists. What is open is whether Mark himself wrote these words, and on that point a student may weigh the evidence and come out where the critical majority comes out, or where Burgon, Farmer and Robinson come out, and remain an honest reader of the evidence either way.

The THGNT treats John 7:53-8:11 more severely than the ending of Mark: it leaves it out of the running text and prints it only in its note at 7:52. The note at John 7:52 lists the manuscripts that lack it, among them P66 and P75, the two great early papyri of John, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, the Freer manuscript and several others, two of which leave a blank space at this point as if the scribe knew something was missing. It notes that a family of medieval manuscripts, represented by 69, puts the passage after Luke 21:38 instead. And it names D and K among those that include it here. The SBLGNT as Bible Gateway shows it does the same, printing the passage in its note as the reading of RP, though the updated SBLGNT files of 2023 restore it to the text inside double brackets. Bible Hub's Texts page will show you that the Byzantine and Textus Receptus editions print it as ordinary text.

The case that it was not originally part of John is strong and the critical editions agree on it. It is absent from the earliest Greek manuscripts and from the earliest Greek commentators on John. Where it appears it floats: after John 7:52 in most manuscripts that have it, but elsewhere in John in some, and after Luke 21:38 in others, which is what a free-standing story looking for a home would do. Some of its vocabulary sounds more like Luke than John. And John 8:12 follows 7:52 naturally: once again Jesus spoke to the people, picking up the debate of chapter 7.

The case for its place in John deserves its full weight too. Codex Bezae, the earliest Greek manuscript to have it, is from around AD 400, and Jerome included it in the Latin Vulgate and said he found it in many Greek and Latin copies. Augustine suggested that some readers of weak faith had removed it from their copies, afraid that it would seem to license adultery, which would explain an early omission from a motive any pastor can understand. Zane Hodges and Maurice Robinson, among others, have argued that the church's reading for Pentecost, which ran from John 7:37 straight to 8:12 and skipped these verses, could have encouraged the omission in manuscripts used for public reading. And the story fits the chapter that follows, where Jesus says 'I judge no one' (8:15).

What almost everyone agrees on, including many who think it was not first written by John at this point, is that the story itself is very old. Eusebius reports that Papias, early in the second century, told a story about a woman accused of many sins before the Lord, which may be this one. The Didascalia Apostolorum, a third-century church order, appears to know it. Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman's To Cast the First Stone (2019) traces its whole history in the church. The usual critical conclusion is that this is an early and probably true account of Jesus that entered the Gospel manuscripts later. That is a narrower claim than 'it did not happen', and you should never let it be reported as if it were the same.

Whatever you conclude, two pastoral obligations follow. If you read or preach the passage, tell the congregation briefly and calmly what the evidence is, as their own Bibles already do in a note. And do not rest a teaching on these verses alone. The grace of Jesus to sinners and his refusal of self-righteous judgment are taught throughout the Gospels in texts whose wording is not in question, so nothing the church believes is lost if the critical majority is right, and nothing is gained by hiding the question if it is wrong.

Here is the method of this lesson reduced to six lines you can copy onto one page and use for the rest of your ministry. Each line has a question and a place to look.

One: state the variant. Write the Greek as each edition prints it and say in plain English what the difference is. Use the SBLGNT note on Bible Gateway and Bible Hub's Texts page.

Two: external evidence. Which manuscripts, roughly how old, from where, stand on each side? Use the THGNT note on Bible Gateway, STEP Bible's variant apparatus, and the NET tc note. Write the earliest witness on each side, and note whether the support for each reading is spread across regions or concentrated in one.

Three: transcriptional probability. Tell the two stories, as you did in the inquiry: how might each reading have produced the other? Is one an easy accident of the eye? Is one the kind of improvement a devout scribe would make? Which reading is harder, and does that matter here?

Four: intrinsic probability. Which reading sounds like this author, in this book, at this point in his argument? Use what you know of the book, and be honest when this argument cuts both ways, as it does at Mark 1:1.

Five: the editions and translations. What do the SBLGNT, the THGNT and the BSB print, and do they agree? Where they disagree you have found a live question, and you should say so whenever you teach the passage.

Six: verdict and stakes. Write your conclusion with a confidence word: certain, probable or open. Then write one sentence on what is at stake for the meaning of the passage and one sentence on what is not at stake. Your confidence word is the most important thing on the page. A student who writes 'probable' honestly has learned more than one who writes 'certain' because he likes the answer.

Go back to the Text page you made for your capstone passage in the last lesson. From the notes you gathered there, choose the one variant that most affects the English. If your passage has no variant that changes the English at all, work Mark 1:1 instead, and add a line to your Text page saying that you checked and found none.

On a fresh page, head it Weighing, and work the six lines of section 5 for that variant, using only your phone and your notebook. Copy the Greek of each reading by hand. When you reach line two, write down every manuscript the THGNT names, and look up any siglum you do not know in the key at the back of your notebook. When you reach line three, actually write both stories, two or three sentences each; do not skip to the one you prefer.

Then, if your variant is one the NET Bible discusses, read its tc note and compare its reasoning with yours. Mark in the margin any point it makes that you missed. Do not change your verdict merely because the NET came out differently, but if you change it, write down which piece of evidence changed your mind.

Finally, write the two or three sentences you would say to your congregation if this variant came up while you preached the passage. Keep it plain, calm and short: what the difference is, where the evidence leans, and why the faith of the church does not hang on it. Those sentences will go into your capstone study.