Audio only:
Joe tackles a big issue surrounding the canon of Scripture, particularly Mark 16. Wes Huff made a good video explaining the debate between scholars one whether Mark 16 is inspired or not. Joe weighs in with a definitive answer…
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe, Heschmeyer, and I want to explore the bright ending to the gospel of Mark. Now that might sound obscure, but I want to suggest that Jeffrey Riddle is onto something when he declares that contemporary Christians are in the middle of a canonical crisis, a crisis about which books and which parts of books belong in the Bible. In his words, he says, we’re facing a contemporary canonical crisis to a degree we haven’t seen since the days of UCBs in the fourth century, and it involves what’s the proper ending to the gospel of Mark. So one camp says the gospel of Mark ends Mark 16 verse eight. Another camp says, mark 16 ends in verse 20, and a third camp says, the ending to the gospel of Mark has simply been lost. So why does this controversy over Mark 16 exist? I’m going to let Wes Huff explain. I’m going to agree with him on a lot of what he says. I’m going to disagree on a few particular issues, but I like the way he frames the issue.
CLIP:
Mark 16, nine through 20 is found in nearly every New Testament manuscript and is the single longest textual variant in the New Testament. However, it is missing from two very significant manuscripts, codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinus. And these are significant because sinus and Vaticanus are our earliest witnesses to the end of Mark.
Joe:
Okay, so in the two oldest manuscripts that give us the ending to the gospel of Mark, they end in this very strange way that the women go to the tomb, they find the empty tomb. The angel tells them Jesus has been risen, but they never see Jesus. Instead, they leave with trembling and astonishment overcoming them. They say nothing to anyone for they’re afraid and then it abruptly stops and abruptly stops in this way that even grammatically is kind of strange. Now we don’t know why that is and there are a few, well, there are actually many different theories. I want to focus on three major possibilities as to what might be going on here. One theory is that Mark simply stops his gospel intentionally on this cliffhanger in verse eight, and that verses nine to 20 are a later edition either by St Mark or by somebody else.
So you can imagine some reasons why this might be because remember at the time it isn’t like Mark’s gospel as part of a Gideon’s Bible in the hotel bedside. You’re just picking up and reading on your own that rather these texts would be proclaimed in community, particularly in the church. If you read Revelation one, there’s a blessing upon the one reading it and upon those who are listening to it. So you would have someone who would be in many cases, literally accompanying the gospel arriving in your community. And these might be eyewitnesses, these might be people who knew Jesus personally. So you could imagine a scenario where in the very early days you wanted to end with this, well, what happens next in the mind of the audience. So you can then say, let me tell you what happens next and give a personal testimony about your encounter with Jesus.
Maybe I want to throw that out there as kind of one possibility. And in that possibility we actually don’t know still well, did Mark then write those final verses or did somebody else? But there’s an argument that Mark intentionally leaves us on a cliffhanger and you’ll find people give different reasons for that. A second theory is that Mark didn’t leave on a cliffhanger. He gave some other ending, but we’ve lost it that the reason that you have manuscripts that end in verse eight is because the last page of the gospel of Mark has just been lost. And so then verses nine to 20 or somebody else’s attempt to recreate or reconstruct an ending, a third possibility is similar but kind of goes in the other direction. It says No, all of Mark is written by Mark, but then some communities, most notably Alexandria, might have had a copy of the gospel of Mark that was missing his last page. So those communities simply had an incomplete version. So when later copies of those which are the backdrop to Codex, Vaticanus and sous are using those, they don’t have the last page, those are all possibilities. Now, one reason why you’ll notice two of those three possibilities involve that there might be a lost page. Well, why is that? Well, Wes explains it this way.
CLIP:
So we actually have manuscripts of Mark like P 45 that are older than sinus and vaticanus, but they don’t have this latter half of Mark in particular. It’s just missing from these documents, and that’s extremely common. If you simply just think about a codex, what we would call a book, the beginning and the ends are the most vulnerable places you can see. Imagine that the most exposed to the elements to where to those kinds of things is the beginning and the ends of a book. So we have a lot of middles of books, but we tend to more often than not miss the beginnings and the ends. And this is especially true when we’re dealing with documents that are a thousand plus years old.
Joe:
So I think the lost page theories are interesting. There is a weakness in them, which is that Mark didn’t write on a codex. Codex is like the forerunner to a book. So if you saw what west was holding up, you’ve got a bunch of pages with a front and a back, and those are the parts likely to fall off. But in the first century, new Testament was written on scrolls. The move to the codex happened shortly after that, but it’s unlikely that Mark’s original gospel would’ve been written on a codex at a time when everybody else is still using scrolls. So that makes me question a little bit the second theory that the last page of the gospel of Mark got lost because this is assuming that it’s a codex, and as we’re going to see if there is a replacement going on, it is happening super early on.
I want to at least say all of these theories have smart people who have given a lot of thought as to why this is the best explanation, but all of them have weaknesses as well. In fact, I don’t think any of these theories are completely convincing or have overwhelming evidence or proof behind them. And I think I can show that by looking at the people who’ve spent a lot more time and effort on this and have been unable to come up with any kind of conclusion to it. In answering this though, I don’t want to leave you in a state of just, oh no, I have just total uncertainty. I think there’s a really important distinction we need to make that a lot of people just failed to make, and that’s between the human authorship. Did Mark write these verses and divine inspiration or divine authorship?
Did God write these verses? So we want to keep those two questions completely distinct. It’s possible to say yes to one and no to the other. Hypothetically you could say, let’s say archeologists tomorrow, somehow they find what they can prove to be the grocery list of St. Mark’s the evangelist. It doesn’t follow from that fact that therefore is inspired. Obviously you can say, yep, mark wrote it, but it’s not divinely inspired. On the flip side, mark doesn’t have to write something for it to be divinely inspired. Think about the rest of the Bible not written by Mark still divinely inspired. Nobody has a problem with that and there’s nothing with no offense meant to St. Mark. There’s nothing special about St. Mark that he’s needed for inspiration. Mark wasn’t even an apostle. He’s the scribe of St. Peter. And so if Mark wrote the first 15 and a half chapters of the gospel of Mark and another companion of Peter wrote the last half chapter, there’s no clear reason in principle that God couldn’t inspire that we even have clear examples of this, the ending of the book of Deuteronomy tells of the death of Moses.
Now, traditionally Jews and Christians have believed that Moses wrote most of the Torah, but the last chapter, he very clearly did not write about his own death. And so the question, did Moses write it and is it inspired by God are very distinct questions and people understood that that you could say Moses didn’t write the last chapter of the Torah and it’s still inspired by God that the divine authorship didn’t depend on the mosaic authorship. Well, same here. The divine authorship doesn’t depend on the mark and authorship, but this seemingly clear point is missed by a lot of people, even very smart people tackling these issues. So you’ll notice when West Hoff addresses this, he believes Mark didn’t write the ending of the gospel of Mark and then says therefore is not inspired, but that therefore doesn’t follow logically.
CLIP:
So first cards on the table, I do not think Mark 16 nine through 20 is original. I don’t think Mark wrote it and therefore I don’t think it’s inspired scripture and that’s the majority position of textual scholars who look and analyze the data on this issue.
Joe:
So I think we can give better answers. I think it is fine to say we don’t know whether or not Mark wrote the ending of Mark’s gospel, but I think we need to be very clear that Mark’s gospel in its entirety is inspired canonical scripture. So let’s answer both of those questions kind of in turn. First, did Mark write Mark 16? Well, Wes is going to give a pretty good argument about how many of the early manuscripts don’t have it, but I think he has a few blind spots that I’m going to at least point out. And I’m not going to say this proves that Mark really did write it, but that many times people exaggerate the case against Mark writing the second half of his chapter 16.
CLIP:
I would argue that even when we move to Codex Alex and dryness, our earliest example of it being included, that particular manuscript though it does include Mark 16 nine through 20 as our first witness historically to that text.
Joe:
Okay, so Wes is right that the Codex is from the four hundreds and that’s the oldest written manuscript that we have that has the longer ending of Mark. And if that’s where the evidence stopped, we’d be like, well then pretty clearly this is a later edition maybe from the three hundreds, but that’s clearly not true because we have other evidence. Because remember, one of the ways we know about which things Christians considered canonical scripture is finding old copies of their Bibles. That’s what a manuscript is. But a much more common way is just finding various writings where they quote scripture. And here we have the great fortune that Saint Eu, the very first person to tell us Matthew, mark, Luke, and John, are the four Gospels quotes from this longer portion of the gospel of Mark and he cites it as such. This is his work against heresies book three, chapter 10.
Now bear in mind this is in 180. This is way before the fourth century. And so as far back as we have evidence of the four gospels being the four gospels, we have the same author s telling us that towards the conclusion of his gospel, mark says, and then he quotes from this longer portion of the gospel of Mark that is not in that Oconus and Koko son Atticus, but is older, quite a bit older than either of those two codices. So this is I think, important because it’s easy to say, okay, remember how West framed it? Most manuscripts have the longer ending, but the two earliest ones don’t. That’s true, but that’s incomplete because even before those two manuscripts, you have quotations like this one from saying eu. Now EU is the clearest to cite this. There are plenty of other times where there are language that might be references to the longer version of the gospel of Mark, but I don’t think you can put too much weight on that.
So all of that, okay, we at least know that if the gospel of Mark has a longer ending added later that later it’s super early on in the first century or at the latest, the early second century. Now it’s clearly not a medieval forgery, it’s not from the time of Constantine, nothing like that. This is all older than that. That doesn’t settle the issue, but it at least frames it differently than just looking at the manuscripts might give you the impression of, but then you have this other issue because the early Christians didn’t all just say, yeah, this is definitely the ending of the gospel of Mark the way Iranis does. Christians in the three hundreds were unsure whether it was or wasn’t. Now that actually makes sense if a page of it had been lost. It also makes sense if you just see that there are these two sets of Bibles, some that have it, some that don’t.
So a really important text on this is by UUs the church historian. He’s dealing with an alleged biblical contradiction on the dating of the resurrection, like the time did it happen the very end of Saturday or the morning of Sunday? And I don’t think this is much of a contradiction, but he says, well, the answer to this turns on whether you think this part of Mark is canonical or not. And so he says, if you think it’s not canonical, then you’re just going to say, well, it’s not found in all the copies of the gospel of Mark, that accurate copies end with what we now call verse eight. And then he says, that is where the text does end. And almost all copies of the gospel according to Mark what occasionally follows in some copies. Not all would be extraneous. Now many people have accused that of being u B’s physician and it might be, but notably UCBs is not speaking in his own person.
He’s saying, here’s what someone who rejects the longer version of Mark would say. And then in the next paragraph he says, here’s what someone who accepts the longer version of Mark would say, and then actually the rest of the answer that he gives is written from the perspective of someone who takes the longer ending to be true. So this at least tells us one thing. We know the Christians in the three hundreds were unsure if this was authentically part of the gospel of Mark in terms of whether Mark had written it or not. We might draw from this that most manuscripts didn’t have it back then, even though most manuscripts do have it today, but I think that might be asking too much kind of out of the text. So it’s at least one kind of important piece in figuring out does this belong at the ending of the gospel of Mark or not? There are a bunch of other kind of stylistic questions and grammatical questions and those kind of things where, so in addition to what do we have from the writings of the church fathers, what do we have from the ancient manuscripts? There’s also internal evidence. So I’m going to let Wes point to a few of those things and then we’ll address a couple of them.
CLIP:
The Greek in 16 nine through 20 is quite different, somewhat awkwardly Reintroduces, Mary Magdalene who has already appeared three times in the latter sections of Mark and it seems to draw a particular style and content from Luke’s gospel.
Joe:
So I will say of the three things that he mentions, he mentions the Greek style, he mentions Mary Magdalene and he mentions allegedly Mark borrowing from Luke. The only one of those I think is a strong argument is Mary Magdalene, and I’ll explain why the Mary Magdalene argument is strong in this sense. If you read verse nine, it says that Jesus appeared first to Mary Magdalene from whom he had cast out seven demons. Why is that significant? Because that’s the way you introduce someone who hasn’t been introduced yet. But if you read the rest of the gospel of Mark Mary Magdalene’s already been introduced multiple times. So that might read like a new author is picking up and just making sure you know who Mary Magdalene is, I think that’s a decently strong argument. On the flip side, I don’t think that the arguments on style are particularly strong.
Now admittedly, I’m not very good with Greek, so maybe someone who has great Greek proficiency can just immediately tell the stylistic difference. I will defer on that. But without having more awareness or acumen there, it’s hard to say. And I’ve seen people on both sides of the question of how big that stylistic difference is. And a lot of that might be subjective. I mean, trying to read a document and guess where one author stopped writing and somebody else started writing is usually not that easy unless there’s a massive difference in their competency in English or in this case in Greek. But the third issue, the borrowing I think is just a bad argument. And I’ve seen this argument used by both sides of this question and it almost always begs the question, so to make sense of what Wes is arguing for here, he’s saying, okay, look, if you read the ending of the gospel of Mark, it looks like somebody is just paraphrasing, giving a short version of the gospel of Luke’s ending where you have a shortened version of the road to Emmaus.
You have a shortened version of all these different events and it’s just summing up what we know from the other gospels. And here you go, that’s possible. But here’s the problem with that. The actual evidence doesn’t show Mark sums up Luke’s longer version. The actual evidence simply says the same version, the same event is referred to in a short form by Mark and in a long form by Luke. And the funny thing is people who argue for Mark and priority, the idea that Mark’s gospel is first use this exact same argument in the opposite direction. They’ll say for Mark one to 15, oh look, mark gives these very short versions of events and Matthew and Luke give much longer fuller versions. So Mark must have written first and the other two must be expanding on his version. Well, you can’t make the exact same argument in opposite directions and expect it to be persuasive both ways.
What you have is that Mark is pretty consistently shorter than Matthew or Luke. He’s much more terse in his style. Does that mean he wrote before or after them? I think you just can’t reasonably draw a conclusion from that. If you saw two different news reports of the same event, you wouldn’t know from the length of the article which one had been written first. I think this is just a very weak argument. The other thing that could be possible is neither one is stealing from the other. Neither one is copying the other or paraphrasing or borrowing from the other. They’re both just recording the same event in their own language. And in Mark’s case, it’s very brief language and Luke gives you more color and detail. So I think that you just can’t make much in the way of those stylistic arguments, but I hear them all the time.
So if somebody says, oh, they’re alluding to X here so we know that it must have been written after X, that’s almost always begging the question because X could be alluding to them. So I don’t want to pick unfairly unless, because I’ve seen this in people on the opposite side of the question from him, people saying, well, look, we know the longer ending of Mark must go back to the first century because one Clement uses a lot of the same language as the ending of the gospel of Mark. Now that might be right, maybe one Clement is alluding to the gospel of Mark, maybe the ending of the gospel of Mark is alluding to one Clement. Maybe they just happen to both use similar language. You just can’t draw much out of it. So where does that leave us? I think it leaves us in this spot that you can spend a ton of time on this and only have tentative conclusions about whether or not Mark wrote the ending of the gospel of Mark. And to that point, I would cite to Mike Winger who spent like 150 hours and still wasn’t very confident in his conclusions. I want to be clear, I’m not saying this as a knock on winger. I’m saying this is a way of showing how difficult this problem is.
CLIP:
Alright, here is the big, big question that I’ve spent way more time than I thought I would trying to figure out the answer to, which is do the last 12 verses in the gospel of Mark, that’s Mark 16 verses nine through 20, do they actually belong in our Bible? And this breaks down into multiple questions that each need to be examined and we’re going to do it thoroughly today. Did Mark write these words in verses nine through 20? That’s one question. Some people say yes, some people say no. Also, we want to ask, were they originally part of Mark’s gospel when it started circulating? And then we’re going to also want to ask, do we want it in our Bibles today? And I’m going to give you my conclusions towards the beginning of this study because it’s going to be a very long study warning and we’re going to have timestamps down below so you can find different places where with different things. I’ve spent at least 150 hours preparing today’s study, reading all kinds of content from everywhere because I just was having a really hard time wrapping my head around it. So here’s my best understanding as it stands now.
Joe:
So I want to second what Mike g Winger has said. I haven’t spent nearly 150 hours on it, at least not recently, and still find every time I encounter a piece of evidence, I’m like, well, it’s an interesting one on this side of the equation. That’s an interesting one on that side, or that’s not very strong or at least not as strong as the advocates think it is and vice versa. And there’s not a home run that is not a silver bullet. And so it is true. Most scholars think that Mark didn’t write the ending of the gospel of Mark, but many of the arguments being made there are maybe not as strong as people think, but there are still good arguments. So it is worth taking seriously as a question that then leads to the second question, which is the more important one, is the gospel of Mark inspired all the way through Mark 16 or does divine inspiration stop at verse eight R verses nine to 20 inspired scripture?
And the answer to that I think is very clearly yes, and I’m going to blatantly appeal to the Council of Trent here, which affirms as canonical all of the books that were in the Latin Vulgate. These are the 73 books that are now in the Catholic Bible and affirms both the books and all their parts. Now, the reason that they’re focusing on the parts is because there’s a difference in Esther and Daniel about which like the Catholic versions of Esther and Daniel, we go off of the Greek versions which are longer than the Hebrew versions and Council TRS acknowledging this and saying, yeah, those longer parts are inspired as well. Now already, that’s a pretty important clue because a lot of people will concede this might not have been in the original manuscript of Esther, this might not have been in the original manuscript of Daniel, but it’s still happening at a time when divine inspiration is occurring.
And so we’re fine saying, yeah, it’s still divinely inspired regardless of who the human author is, that the human author and divine author questions are distinct. And the council of Trent is clearly aware that there are these manuscript discrepancies and does not turn divine inspiration on a question of human authorship. Now, the limitation here is Trent uses this language of parts. And so there is something of a disputed question of how big is a part. It’s not a very technical term because Trent is clearly not saying every word of the Latin Vulgate is divinely inspired as a translation. In fact, one of the things the council calls for is better translations of the Vulgate. And so one of the first things the church does after Trent is cleans up the Vulgate version. Now that is pretty clear indication that they’re not trying to say every individual letter, every individual word in the Latin is divinely inspired.
So what is a part in the inspirational sense? Well, it’s bigger than a word. It’s smaller than a book. And so as Les Huff says, the largest textual variant is this second half of Mark 16. So I think this would pretty clearly count, at least in New Testament terms, this is the biggest part you’re going to get. But in addition to that, in this same decree declaring which things are canonical scriptures, they talk about how Jesus proclaimed the gospel and then commanded it to be preached by his apostles to every creature. Now that is almost certainly a reference to Mark 16, which talks about proclaiming the gospel to all creation, whereas the Indian of Matthew says to all nations. So the creaturely reference actually seems to be a nod towards Mark 16 as scripture, which is just more indication that Trent is meaning to say, yeah, this is part of scripture.
So if you read a Catholic Bible, you’re going to see this kind of acknowledgement. We don’t know textually about the human authorship, but we know about the divine authorship. So for instance, the Catholic edition of the RSV says, this passage is regarded as inspired and canonical scripture, even if not written by mark. It’s possible. In other words that Mark did not write it. It says that right there. But then it also says on the other hand, he would’ve hardly left his gospel unfinished at verse eight. Many think that the original Indian was lost at a very early date and that this Indian was composed at the end of the apostolic period to take its place. And there’s no reason that that should be a problem if one inspired author begins it and another inspired author finishes the work. That’s fine. There’s no reason in principle we should object to that.
Just as St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, he clearly does not write all that by hand because in Romans 16, the actual physical author of the text gives greetings. And presumably Paul didn’t dictate even that greeting. So at least one line in the epistle to the Romans chapter 16 verse 22, I believe Tuss greets the reader. And so we know at least one verse in there comes from Tereu, and that doesn’t mean that divine inspiration just stops for a second. That’s a strange theory of inspiration. Now, this explanation that the human and divine authorship questions are really distinct is important for making sense of things like for instance, Pope Benedict 16th in the Jesus of Nazareth series suggests that the ending of Mark poses a particular problem that what he calls the authentic text of Mark seems to end in verse eight, meaning the original version of the text.
If you just read that, you might think, oh, Benedict doesn’t think that verses nine to 20 are actually part of Mark’s gospel. Now granted, this is his view as a private theologian, but that would be very striking since it would seem to contradict the cons of Trent. But then you read what he says as Pope and he gives where he quotes these parts and explicitly says that they’re from Mark’s gospel. He quotes Mark 1616 and he quotes Mark 1618 at various times and describes him as being part of the gospel. So how do we make sense of that apparent incongruity? Well, Benedict himself explained that he’s not as worried about the human authorship. He’s fine believing that Matthew, mark and Luke, there might’ve been a process of redaction of different human authors bringing material together. But in his view, that whole question is secondary that all of this is happening based on authentic historical accounts and guided by the Holy Spirit.
So whether you agree with Benedict’s particular views of the textual transmission history, I’m not arguing for or against those here. The whole point there is the human authorship question is of secondary importance to the divine authorship question. But obviously Protestants aren’t going to say, well, we know this is inspired because the Council of Trent says so and they don’t accept that the church got the 73 books of the Bible, right? They think they only got 66 of those, right? So that leaves this question open of, well, is it divinely inspired? And if your case for divine inspiration turns entirely on apostolic authorship or it being a companion of the apostles not knowing for sure who wrote the ending of the gospel of Mark, throws a real wrench into your belief in its inspiration. And so if you ask, well, is it inspired or is it heretical or is it neither?
You’re going to find Protestants all over the board, even among conservative Protestants? So as I think most people would recognize, most Protestants, most ordinary Protestants still think of this as part of the Bible. It’s in as far as I know, every major English Bible, but often with a little footnote acknowledging the controversy. But then you also have prominent conservative Protestants like John MacArthur, James White, et cetera, who’ve openly called into question whether it really should be there and have even suggested that it’s not just not inspired, but it might actually have things that are strange and maybe scandalous, even heretical. So here’s James White’s take on it.
CLIP:
I haven’t even touched on the theology. I mean other than the drinking of poison and picking up serpents and all the rest of that kind of stuff, that is somewhat a strange to put it mildly. And then you also have Mark 1612 where you have the phrase, and he morphe appeared to them in a different form as they were on their way to the fields of the country. And that’s troubling to be honest with you on a theological perspective.
Joe:
Similarly, Paul Carter at Gospel Coalition says, not only is this not in the Bible, but we should be thankful that it’s not in the Bible because he says that you should read the longer endings, but don’t treat ’em as scripture. Read them instead as a testimony to some of the things people wanted the Bible to say that thankfully it did not. I find that position very difficult, the idea that we should be thankful that God allowed basically 2000 years of Christians to have a Bible containing falsehoods as the latter part of Mark 16. That’s a very strange thing to be thankful for because whether if you think it shouldn’t be in the Bible and you’re glad that this theology isn’t in the Bible, you should be alarmed that it literally is in the Bible, that if you open your Bible, you will find it. And that most people reading their Bible believe it to be inspired scripture.
So turning back to riddle, he’s focusing particularly on John MacArthur who’s similarly rejects the ending of Mark 16. And he says that this represents a distinct repudiation of the consensus view held for centuries across various geographical, cultural, and ecclesiological lines that verses nine to 20 are indeed canonical. So whether you think it’s heretical or good reading, but we should be thankful it’s not really part of the Bible or part of the Bible. Those are seemingly big doctrinal issues. Now here’s where I want to turn my attention specifically to Sola script. This is a problem for two reasons. Number one, the whole idea of sola scriptura that scripture is our final authority and doctrinal disputes, that’s a real problem. If we don’t know which books are and aren’t in scripture, there are distinct questions about doctrine, things like in Mark 1616 where Jesus says whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.
That looks like a very strong endorsement of baptismal regeneration. You also have these texts that have been used for things that I think they’re being misused misapplied, but people will appeal to Mark 16 for things like snake handling and speaking in tongues as being an important part of a Christian salvation. Now, those are fringe views, but my point here is that there are real doctrinal disputes that turn on things found in Mark 16. And so if you don’t know whether Mark 16 is or is not part of the Bible, then it’s hard to know how to answer those disputes. So solo scriptura needs a clear canon of scripture seemingly, and you can imagine a more exaggerated form of this. If someone says, oh yeah, I go by scripture alone, but my scriptures are the Quran, they’re going to have obviously very different theology than someone who says, I go by scripture alone and it’s the 66 books of the Protestant Bible or 65 and three quarters books of the Protestant Bible as the case may be.
That question obviously carries doctrinal implications. You can’t just say you appeal to scripture alone if you and the person next to you have different length bibles and you have different doctrines contained in the disputed parts. But second, this is a problem because resolving this, if you think about the arguments West Huff is making, if you think about the arguments that Mike Winger is exploring for 150 hours, this is not coming from scripture. Scripture is incapable of answering the question of whether Mark 16 is divinely inspired. That answer has to be drawn from somewhere outside of scripture, whether you’re Catholic or Protestant, there is no verse that tells you whether to include verses nine to 20. It does not exist. So you are going to have to appeal to an ultimate authority on this canon question that is not scripture itself and your ability to trust scripture is going to be matched with how much you can trust that authority.
I’ve pointed this out before that the question of the canon is really important because you need an infallible church to have the level of certainty you want with the canon that so of s scriptura requires a clear canon and you can’t have a clear canon with scripture alone. And when I’ve said that people have kind of scoffed at it at times and said, oh no, we can just, we’ll know you don’t actually need that. It is ridiculous. Otherwise you do have to be personally infallible to understand the infallible church and they make sort of an ad absurdum argument. Well look here very concretely, Catholics can know the latter half of Mark 16 is inspired because the church tells us. So Protestants can’t know if the latter half of Mark 16 is inspired because you can spend 150 hours and still not be sure what the right answer is.
But then I want to highlight an additional problem, which is that the problems don’t stop with Mark 16. The people arguing against a longer ending are arguing on the basis of critical scholarship that textual critical scholars say, Nope, mark didn’t write this. And it’s a different hand. But the problem with that is they don’t just attack the second half of Mark 16 as this is IVP academic. So this is a InterVarsity press conservative Protestant publisher dictionary of Paul in his letters and points out that uncritically, we would assume there’s 13 Pauline letters excluding Hebrews. Now we’ll get into Hebrews in a second, but critical scholars only accept seven of them. They accept Romans one and two Corinthians Galatians, Philippians one Thessalonians Andon. They doubt two Thessalonians and Colossians. And most critical scholars reject Ephesians first and second Timothy and Titus the so-called pastoral letters. So it’s not just how much doctrine is included in the second half of Mark 16, but how much of the Bible are you willing to cut out just because modern academic scholars are dubious about it.
And then the final point on that would be the epistle to the Hebrews. This is the clearest indication that we need to distinguish the human authorship question from the divine authorship question because no one reliably knows who wrote Hebrews, and yet Catholics and Protestants alike have the whole epistle in their Bible. So if dubious authorship is a reason to reject Mark 16, then you would seemingly also have to reject a lot of the Old Testament, maybe some of Paul’s letters, and then certainly the epistle to the Hebrews. And so I would suggest these are all real problems with Solo s scriptura. You can’t form a reliable cannon of scripture based on your best guess or scholar’s best guess about which books are and aren’t written by apostles or companions of the apostles. You don’t have the historical resources to resolve those questions in a satisfying way.
None of us do. And so at a certain point, we either trust that the Holy Spirit led the church to get the Bible right. We trust that the Holy Spirit guided the early Christians to assemble the right books and that they knew what they were talking about when they told us, who wrote them and so on, or we question all of that and we reject that. But you’re not going to end up with Mark 15 and a half and the rest of the Bible. If you reject that, you’re going to end up with a very confused, very incomplete, very uncertain Bible. So I would suggest if you’re a solo script Protestant, you have to take this seriously. Either you trust the church and you should have 73 books in your Bible or you don’t trust the church. And I don’t know what Bible you should have, and I don’t think you have any tools to know which Bible you should have either. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer, God bless you.