Quid Est Veritas?
I was reading about the different endings to the Gospel of Mark today – getting ready for Easter Sunday. A quick recap for those who don’t know:
The 2 oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark end at verse 8 “…and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” And a lot of ancient manuscripts don't have anything beyond verse 8. Now a lot of ancient manuscripts have the so-called “longer ending” of Mark (16:9-20) but many indicate somehow that they are not original.
One website calls these other endings forgeries…
Others try to harmonize things. So what is true in this? How should the Gospel of Mark end? If the last 12 verses are not actually from Mark’s hand, does that make them any less fitting an ending for the Gospel? (If you read through Hosea, for example, it seems likely that at least part of it was assembled by an editor who wrote some of it – being sometimes in the third person, sometimes in the first person).
Heh – I guess the Gospel of Mark was the first candidate for snopes...
You know the drill, you get an email that says this story is true and it’s some heart wrenching tale about a dying child or a dying mother or some shoes at Christmastime or something.
When I was a kid, such stories just got passed on from one person to another around the campfire, but today they go from inbox to inbox. Remember the story of the woman who thought she had a mole on her face but it was a spider egg sac? I still freak out thinking of that one. Yeah, urban legends. Campfire stories. Whatever.
The thing is, the internet has made these kinds of stories fly all around the world. But the internet also makes it really easy to check on the truth statements in these stories.
Can we please all just go to Snopes and read everything there? No? Okay, that’s a lot to ask, I know, but they have a handy search function and you can input stuff like “woman spider face” and get this:
And yet, I have been told by a couple of people, “How do you know that snopes isn’t lying?” Sigh. Yes, I realize that they could be lying, too. But then a quick Google search often turns up the truth of many stories. Yes, EVERYBODY could be lying, or mistaken, and the spider face thing could be real…ugh… But, um, is that really likely?
So, really, it’s easier than ever to check on the validity of things. And easier than ever to have untruths pushed forth as truth. Wikipedia is a great source for information – but, let’s face it, not everyone who puts information in there is an expert – or unbiased.
Check out this article from USA Today about the veracity of Wikipedia
A guy found out that Wikipedia had his name listed as a rumored suspect in both Kennedy assassinations for four and a half months.
"We have trouble with people posting abusive things over and over and over," he [Wales, Wikipedia's founder] said. "We block their IP numbers, and they sneak in another way. So we contact the service providers, and they are not very responsive."
But this isn’t about internet bullying, it’s about truth – and perception – and how we’re in an era where what really is true is getting blurred.
A couple years ago a parishioner forwarded me an article about how Harry Potter had turned all these kids on to Satanism . The article looked legit, of course.
You know, this wasn’t just the old “Madeline Murray O’Hare is trying to get God off of television” email we’ve all gotten a hundred times, with looooooooong lists of names on the petition. This is an article linked in an email that took you to a website where you could read the whole thing. Of course it took me about a minute to realize that the website was The Onion which is a satire site.
Man, I miss the Weekly World News. You know, all the news that’s fit to make up.
I still get taken in (April 1 comes around every year, and I get “got” just about every year). And the reality is, I’ve sometimes passed on the great story that I get in an email – though I usually qualify it with, “This probably didn’t happen, but it’s a great illustration of…” I mean, I’ll quote Star Wars so I’m not sure that the story of the kid who sang "You Are My Sunshine" and his sister immediately turned from death’s door and fully recovered is really any different.
So what is truth? Didn’t Pontius Pilate ask that very question? He was, of course, asking that question of the one who IS truth.
I love this painting. It’s called Ecce Homo and it’s by Antonio Ciseri:
The longer or shorter or “original” ending of Mark? They’re all okay with me. I’ll use ‘em as I feel led to – but I’ll probably make a note that some of this is probably not Mark’s original hand (of course, who is this Mark guy? Can we be sure that he really is Mark? Heh…)
So what is truth? Well, here’s one time I don’t need to check snopes. I know truth. He’s my Savior.
The 2 oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark end at verse 8 “…and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” And a lot of ancient manuscripts don't have anything beyond verse 8. Now a lot of ancient manuscripts have the so-called “longer ending” of Mark (16:9-20) but many indicate somehow that they are not original.
One website calls these other endings forgeries…
Others try to harmonize things. So what is true in this? How should the Gospel of Mark end? If the last 12 verses are not actually from Mark’s hand, does that make them any less fitting an ending for the Gospel? (If you read through Hosea, for example, it seems likely that at least part of it was assembled by an editor who wrote some of it – being sometimes in the third person, sometimes in the first person).
Heh – I guess the Gospel of Mark was the first candidate for snopes...
You know the drill, you get an email that says this story is true and it’s some heart wrenching tale about a dying child or a dying mother or some shoes at Christmastime or something.
When I was a kid, such stories just got passed on from one person to another around the campfire, but today they go from inbox to inbox. Remember the story of the woman who thought she had a mole on her face but it was a spider egg sac? I still freak out thinking of that one. Yeah, urban legends. Campfire stories. Whatever.
The thing is, the internet has made these kinds of stories fly all around the world. But the internet also makes it really easy to check on the truth statements in these stories.
Can we please all just go to Snopes and read everything there? No? Okay, that’s a lot to ask, I know, but they have a handy search function and you can input stuff like “woman spider face” and get this:
And yet, I have been told by a couple of people, “How do you know that snopes isn’t lying?” Sigh. Yes, I realize that they could be lying, too. But then a quick Google search often turns up the truth of many stories. Yes, EVERYBODY could be lying, or mistaken, and the spider face thing could be real…ugh… But, um, is that really likely?
So, really, it’s easier than ever to check on the validity of things. And easier than ever to have untruths pushed forth as truth. Wikipedia is a great source for information – but, let’s face it, not everyone who puts information in there is an expert – or unbiased.
Check out this article from USA Today about the veracity of Wikipedia
A guy found out that Wikipedia had his name listed as a rumored suspect in both Kennedy assassinations for four and a half months.
"We have trouble with people posting abusive things over and over and over," he [Wales, Wikipedia's founder] said. "We block their IP numbers, and they sneak in another way. So we contact the service providers, and they are not very responsive."
But this isn’t about internet bullying, it’s about truth – and perception – and how we’re in an era where what really is true is getting blurred.
A couple years ago a parishioner forwarded me an article about how Harry Potter had turned all these kids on to Satanism . The article looked legit, of course.
You know, this wasn’t just the old “Madeline Murray O’Hare is trying to get God off of television” email we’ve all gotten a hundred times, with looooooooong lists of names on the petition. This is an article linked in an email that took you to a website where you could read the whole thing. Of course it took me about a minute to realize that the website was The Onion which is a satire site.
Man, I miss the Weekly World News. You know, all the news that’s fit to make up.
I still get taken in (April 1 comes around every year, and I get “got” just about every year). And the reality is, I’ve sometimes passed on the great story that I get in an email – though I usually qualify it with, “This probably didn’t happen, but it’s a great illustration of…” I mean, I’ll quote Star Wars so I’m not sure that the story of the kid who sang "You Are My Sunshine" and his sister immediately turned from death’s door and fully recovered is really any different.
So what is truth? Didn’t Pontius Pilate ask that very question? He was, of course, asking that question of the one who IS truth.
I love this painting. It’s called Ecce Homo and it’s by Antonio Ciseri:
The longer or shorter or “original” ending of Mark? They’re all okay with me. I’ll use ‘em as I feel led to – but I’ll probably make a note that some of this is probably not Mark’s original hand (of course, who is this Mark guy? Can we be sure that he really is Mark? Heh…)
So what is truth? Well, here’s one time I don’t need to check snopes. I know truth. He’s my Savior.
Comments
There's a lot of misinformation floating around about Mark 16:9-20, and I recommend that you investigate the question carefully before drawing any conclusions. I didn't get very far in your blog-entry before noticing some things that need clarification:
BB: "The 2 oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark end at verse 8." That's not exactly true. The oldest copy of Mark is Papyrus 45, but it's so extensively damaged that it has no text from Mark 16 at all.
The next-oldest copies are Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus -- but in Vaticanus, the manuscript-maker left an extensive blank space after 16:8, as if he regarded the abruptly-ending text as defective or incomplete. And in Sinaiticus, all four pages containing Mark 14:54-Luke 1:56 are replacement-pages, not the pages written by the main scribe who wrote the pages immediately before and after the end of Mark.
So there are some significant quirks in the equation.
Plus, the earliest existing manuscripts are not the earliest *evidence.* Over a century before Vaticanus was made, Irenaeus cited Mark 16:19 in about the year 184; Tatian used the entire passage in the "Diatessaron" in about 172, and Justin Martyr made a strong allusion to 16:20 in "First Apology," c. 160.
BB: "And a lot of ancient manuscripts don't have anything beyond verse 8." That is simply false. The only two ancient Greek manuscripts that end the text of Mark at 16:8 are the two I just mentioned. Only one other one merits consideration as a third possibility -- MS 304, a medieval manuscript -- but it is probably a damaged manuscript that was rebound without being fully repaired.
BB: "Now a lot of ancient manuscripts have the so-called “longer ending” of Mark (16:9-20) but many indicate somehow that they are not original."
That's not true either. The number of Greek manuscripts of Mark with annotations about 16:9-20 is about *20,* (out of some 1,500 copies); the annotations do not draw the passage into question but rather tend to justify its presence in the text.
I welcome you to visit
www.curtisvillechristian.org/MarkOne.html to consult a summarized presentation of the evidence pertaining to this disputed passage.
Yours in Christ,
James Snapp, Jr.