Christ is the Amazing End

Mark 16:9-20

Today we will be wrapping up the book of Mark. We started our journey in a completely different building with considerably fewer people on October 2, 2022. I was four months in as pastor here and I just rolled over 2 years being with you. It has been a wonderful journey for me and I hope that the Lord has moved in your life as well.

I have told you that my job on Sunday mornings is to tell you what the bible says, tell you what it means and how to apply it to our lives. I can do that because the bible is the inerrant, true Word of God. If I wrote it or someone else wrote it, then you can like what is written but I wouldn’t put my faith in it.

Today we are going to transition into something a little different. I am going to cover the ending of Mark but I am also going to start a small teaching series for a few weeks that walks us through our statement of faith here at Community Church.

I think that it is important that we look at some of the things that we say we believe and make sure that everyone is on the same page. What does it mean that Jesus is God, the Father is God and the Holy Spirit is God? What does it mean to be justified through faith alone? What does it mean to be a part of the universal church? What does it mean to live a life that is Christ like?

We will get to those questions in the next few weeks, but today we are going to tackle what we mean by the inspired and inerrant Word of God we have in the bible.

All my cards on the table, I have wanted to talk about this for 21 months. I have wanted to get to Mark 16 for that long. In fact, I picked Mark because of this topic.

Have you ever put together a piece of furniture from IKEA?….. Extra parts at the end. They have gotten better now and they tell you there are extra parts but at the beginning you had a completed project and then you had the left overs that you would comb back through the instructions to see if you missed anything.

It has been said that the bible is like a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle with 10,100 pieces. To understand that, we have to know how we have this bible that is in front of us.

Why do I bring this up? If you will turn to Mark 16:9-20 in your bibles, if you are reading in the ESV or the NIV which is probably the most common in this room, you will see a note that says something like “some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16:9-20”.

If you have a King James or a New King James, your bible will not have that caveat. Why is it there? Is it “The Word of God”? If it isn’t, how did it get there?

There are a lot of attacks on the bible today from everywhere. People say that the bible has been changed or corrupted, today I want to show you why we should have all the faith in the world that the bible in front of you is the Word that was preached and written down.

There have been thousands of gallons of ink spilled over this specific study with various levels of disagreement and agreement. If you haven’t noticed by now, people feel strongly about a lot of things. I don’t want to get into the weeds of all of the controversies, but I really want to show you what I believe is the best evidence as to why we can look at the bible the way we do.

I want to briefly cover what we call the Old Testament and then really get into the heart of the New Testament.

What we call the Old Testament was written by several authors over the time frame of about 1000 years from about 1400BC to 400BC. The common belief is that Moses wrote the first 5 books of the bible and he would have done that after the Exodus and the 40 years in the desert. The following books are written in the next thousand years. The entirety of that text was written and preserved in the Hebrew language. The only people that spoke Hebrew were the Jewish people so they were able to secure it and protect it. The earliest known complete scroll that we have from the OT is from around 150-100BC and it is the entirety of the book of Isaiah. There were some amulets found in 1985 that date back to the 6th or 7th century BC that have inscribed on them a passage from Numbers 6:22-27 which says,

“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you; the Lord turn his face toward you and grant you peace.”

The New Testament is a little bit different. It was originally written in Greek and a little in Aramaic. Greek is a common language of the world at this time in history. The Gospels and the epistles, or the letters, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, etc are being written in the 50s, 60s and 70s AD, some have argued a little later on the dates but all were written within the 1st century AD. 20-40 years after the death and resurrection of Christ.

The Gospels and the Epistles are being written to churches….by hand. Remember there is no machine, the printing press will not come for another 1400 years so all of these are written by the hand of a man.

The church would receive this gospel account or letter and they would make copies and as the disciples of those churches went out to spread the gospel and start new churches, those people would make copies and as new letters came in, they would make copies of those and send them to the previous church they had just come from. It was an explosive time in the life of the church. Each church wanted to glorify Christ correctly and have all the information they needed because they are dealing with a wild world, the likes we have never seen.

This practice of copying letters and gospels by hand goes on until the printing press. At the beginning, Christianity was not a religion of the upper class but the lower. These people did not have the schooling that the higher ups had, so as they copied, they made mistakes. Misspelled a word here, forgotten word there, most of the early manuscripts didn’t have spaces between the words, let alone punctuation so as you can imagine it was the equivalent to a large game of written telephone.

As Christianity began to gain footing, there would be Scribes that would make copies in large scribal rooms where a man would read the text and several scribes would copy what they heard. As you can imagine, even in that process people get tired and miss hear or their mind wonders or the lighting is not great as most places didn’t have great lighting and mistakes were made.

The writing material was often expensive until papyrus comes along but even then if you made a mistake some scribes would add the verse in the margins to keep from having to throw out the material they were writing on. Sometimes a Scribe would feel the need to explain something that seemed confusing so he would write a note in the margin. As that copy got passed down another scribe may take that note for Scripture and add it into the text.

This happened for 1400 years all over the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Imagine if you started a game of telephone in 55AD and got to hear what the end result would sound like a thousand years later. Could you imagine what it would be? If I started in here with the front row and listened to the final product at the back of the room it might be completely different, but thats not what happened.

Through all of the years and wars and conquests and fires and water damage and persecution, when the manuscripts were compiled to put together the King James Bible in the late 1500s, all of the manuscripts said primarily the same thing. There were mistakes and what scholars call “textual variants”. In fact there are around 400,000 textual variants in the New Testament. That means misspelled words, punctuation, wrong words. That seems like a lot if you don’t have all of the information.

The New Testament has the most manuscripts than any other writing of antiquity and it is closer in dating than any other writing. We have 5600 Greek manuscripts that are 99.5% textually pure with the earliest being within about a hundred years of the death and resurrection of Christ. On top of that we have over 19,000 manuscripts in Syriac, Latin, Coptic and Aramaic.

To give you an idea of how far ahead the bible is in its manuscript tradition, the nexts closest ancient text is Homer’s Iliad. Homer lived around 900BC, the earliest copy we have is from 400BC, a 500 year difference, and the number of copies that we have are 643 with a 95% textual purity.

We have approximately 24,000 fragments, partial and whole manuscripts of the New Testament which now if you look at the 400,000 textual variants, if you put it all together means that we have a textual variant on every 2 to 3 pages of the bible.

Scholars that put together the bible in the distant past and today get the text that they have at their disposal and they look at all of them together and they make choices on what goes into the text or how the text is translated.

This was the case with the group of scholars that put together the King James bible. They took what they had and translated it into English. The King James is a great bible. If those scholars came to a text that had a differing variant they chose to go with the line that was used in the majority of the other manuscripts. That makes sense, most people said this way so they decided to take that route as well.

In 1947, a discovery called the Dead Sea Scrolls was made. That gave us some of the earliest New and Old Testament text that we have, so when bible translators started looking at the new older data that they had, they went about translating a bible in more modern English than the King James and when they came upon a variant that there was not an agreement on, then they chose what was written in the earliest manuscript that they had. The reasoning being that the earlier manuscript was closer to the original than the later. That is why you have differences in the King James and modern translations like the NIV or ESV.

There is nothing sinister in this, it is just two different ways to look at bible translation.

Like I said earlier, most of the differences in the manuscripts are small and none of them change the essential doctrines of the church.

There are two variants that are longer, one is John 7:53-8:11 which is the woman caught in adultery. It is the story that we get the saying from Jesus, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” It is a great story but it is likely an oral story that was passed down and wound up at the end of John 7 and 8. This story has also been found after John 7:36, in others 7:44, in a group of others John 21:25 and in another it is found in Luke 21:38. This passage also has the same disclaimer that it is not found in the earliest manuscripts.

The other long variant is the one that is the text for today, Mark 16:9-20. It is not found in the earliest manuscripts dating back to the 4th century, but when it does start popping up, the ending varies in length. Some just contain verses 9-11 and some contain a full paragraph between verses 14 and 15.

This ending is also very different from the rest of Mark. Let’s look at it.

9 Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.

10 She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. 11 But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.

12 After these things he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. 13 And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.

14 Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. 15 And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. 16 Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

19 So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. 20 And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs.

If you are just reading this section a few things should stick out to you. If we just stop and go back to verse 8 and read into 9, it appears that the story backs up. That is unlike anything Mark had written previously. It isn’t wrong, but why does it introduce Mary Magdalene in this way at this time when she has already been introduced in 15:40, 15:47, and 16:1? The transition is weird and it doesn’t fit.

Mark doesn’t do a lot of repeating unless it is something that is repeated like Jesus saying that he would be killed and would rise three times. The language is also different in this ending.

There are 18 different words used just in these 12 verses that are not used anywhere else in the book of Mark. Some say that this longer ending is just a patchwork of scripture pulled from other Gospels.

The overall consensus is that this longer ending is not part of the original text of Scripture, so what do we do with it? We still can look at it and learn from it. There is nothing in this text that is outside of our belief in Christ. Let’s just look at the wilder claims.

14 Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen.

It doesn’t seem likely that this would happen because Jesus goes to doubting Thomas and asks him to put his fingers inside of His pierced side and nail scars on his hands, but it isn’t outside the realm of possibility for Jesus to be weary of their unbelief. He shows them his frustration when they couldn’t cast out the demon from the little boy and says in Mark 9:19, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?”, but a condemnation for not believing his resurrection is not in any of the other Gospels.

Let’s look at this next passage.

15 And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. 16 Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

Some want to take this passage and say, “Look! Right here it says that you must be baptised to be saved.” I had a conversation with a youth pastor from a certain denomination that did not like musical instruments in their services on Sunday morning and he pointed to this verse to tell me that you must be baptised to be saved. Is that what the verse says?

Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, ……but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

It is the belief that saves, not the baptism.

If we keep reading in the text we find some more interesting things.

17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues;

We know that these things take place at and after Pentecost. People speak in new tongues and demons are cast out but then you get to the ones people really want to talk about..

18 they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

There are “churches” built around this. We see this happening in Acts. Paul is shipwrecked and he gets bitten by a viper and he suffers no ill effects and it is likely during the Christian persecution that people were trying to poison Christians.

Notice that this text is not prescriptive. It is not telling the believers to do this. That would be testing God and Jesus tells us that we shouldn’t do that. When the devil wants Jesus to jump off the Temple so God’s angels could rescue him, Jesus says, “Do shall not test the Lord your God.”

We see the real Scriptural evidence with Paul and with Daniel. Daniel was thrown in the lion’s den and God shut their mouths, he wasn’t out looking for lion’s dens to jump into. The meaning of the text is that God will protect His people if they are on His missions.

This longer ending is just what happened in the rest of the Gospels after Jesus was resurrected.

19 So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. 20 And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs.

What are we to make of these things? You might be saying, “I thought you said that we believe at Community Church that the bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God?” We do. I believe that we have every word that God meant for us to have in these bibles. It just so happens we have a few more. The few more words that we have do not deviate from the truth of the Gospel and the power of Christ.

I think the biggest miracle that God pulled off and one of the greatest ways that we can see His sovereignty is how he kept the bible in tact throughout the ages and protected it so that we can be sitting here reading it this morning and we can have the utmost certainty in it.

Think about this, God takes imperfect people and entrusts them with spreading his Gospel. The Holy Spirit works through them and engages with the Holy Spirit in them and He protects them. He also takes imperfect people and entrusted them to transmit the text but He protected it and gave us this wonderful collection to treasure.

In my opinion, Mark’s short original ending is great. What was Mark’s intention when we started reading his Gospel? He was trying to prove to you that Jesus was the Son of God. Mark 1:1

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

From that point on it was all about this amazing, terrifying man named Jesus. So amazing that people dropped their livelihoods and family businesses to follow him and every where he went people were “amazed” Mark 1:27, “never seeing anything like this” Mark 2:12, “full of fear” Mark 4:41, afraid Mark 5:15, they marveled at him Mark 5:20, overcome with amazement Mark 5:42, astonished Mark 6:2, terrified Mark 6:50, utterly astonished Mark 6:51, astonished beyond measure Mark 7:37, terrified Mark 9:6, greatly amazed Mark 9:15, amazed at his words Mark 10:24, exceedingly astonished Mark 10:26, astonished at his teaching Mark 11:18, they marveled at him Mark 12:17, Pilate was amazed Mark 15:5,

In Mark 15:39, the culmination of this story is complete, that when Jesus dies, the curtain in the temple is torn in two, the sky is black and a Roman, gentile centurion says, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

Then to end this wonderful work, Mark ends the book the way that he had written in the earlier chapters. Mark 16:8

And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

That is a fitting ending to Mark. He is the Son of God and He is the Christ that died and rose again. We can trust that and we can hold on to that hope and know that it is the Word of God for our lives.