Confident on Better Grounds

Ad Fontes, Lesson 4 of 4. Return to the series overview for the previous lessons, glossary, and reference material.

Let me show you where this discipline really lives. Open to Mark 16:8. The women have come to the tomb, the angel has told them Jesus is risen, and Mark says, “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.” Verse 8. End of sentence.

If you’re reading the ESV, the next thing you see is a bracket, and then a note. Some translations print verses 9–20 in brackets. Some print them in regular type with a footnote. The KJV prints them straight through, no notation. What’s going on?

Here is the situation, in one paragraph, just to give you the flavor. Our two oldest and most respected complete manuscripts of the New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both from the fourth century, do not contain Mark 16:9–20. They end the Gospel at verse 8. Vaticanus is especially striking at this point: the scribe leaves the rest of the column blank after verse 8, an unusual feature that many scholars read as evidence he knew of the longer ending but chose not to include it.¹ Several other early manuscripts and ancient versions either omit the longer ending, include a different shorter ending, or mark the longer ending as questionable. The fourth-century church historian Eusebius wrote that the most accurate copies in his day ended at verse 8.² The longer ending, when it appears, is also written in a Greek style noticeably different from the rest of Mark — different vocabulary, different rhythms. On the other hand: the longer ending shows up in the vast majority of later manuscripts, was used by some early Church Fathers, and has been read in the church for many centuries.

You don’t have to decide right now. The question I want you to feel is this: What do we do with that? Is the longer ending of Mark Scripture? If we’re honest about the evidence, what does faithful confessional Lutheran teaching look like on a passage like this? The book takes a full chapter on it — the manuscripts, what Luther said, what the Lutheran Confessions actually require. And I think you’ll find the answer is both more honest and more pastorally satisfying than either “the modern Bibles took it out” or “obviously it’s not Scripture.”

That’s the kind of work this discipline does at its best. Not arms-folded skepticism. Not pretend-everything-is-fine triumphalism. Honest evidence, careful reasoning, confessional faithfulness, pastoral care.

Why this should make you more confident, not less

I want to land this series where we started — on confidence. Because I know that for some readers, this whole conversation feels risky. You came in loving your Bible, and I’ve told you there are places where we have to ask hard questions about what the original text was. That can feel like the ground tilting.

So hear me say this clearly. I am not asking you to be less confident in your Bible. I am asking you to be confident on better grounds.

There is a kind of confidence that depends on never looking too closely. It says, “I have a Bible, it’s been the same forever, please don’t tell me anything that complicates it.” That confidence is brittle. It cannot survive a single college class, a single internet skeptic, a single honest conversation with a thoughtful friend. When it breaks — and for many young Christians it does break — what often follows is not a deeper faith but a collapsed one.

The confidence I want for you is different. It’s the confidence of a person who has looked at the evidence, understood the situation, weighed the variants, seen the manuscripts, and concluded — on good grounds — that we have, with very high reliability, the words the apostles wrote. That is the confidence of a Christian who can look an Ehrman fan in the eye and say, “Yes, I know about the variants. I know about Mark 16. Let me tell you what I think and why.”

The confessional distinction that makes honest examination possible

The confessional Lutheran doctrine of Scripture has always made room for this. We confess that the autographs — the very words penned by Matthew, John, Paul, and the rest — were inspired and inerrant. That’s the doctrine of inspiration, and it is anchored in the originals. We also confess that God has faithfully preserved His Word in the apographs, the copies, that came after. That’s the doctrine of preservation, and it is anchored in the manuscript tradition as a whole. It is the distinction the seventeenth-century Lutheran scholastics worked out with care, retrieved for our era by Francis Pieper and Robert Preus.³

I want you to see what that two-part confession does for us, because it is theological gold. It tells us that inspiration applies to a fixed, historical event — the moment Paul, or his secretary, set ink to papyrus — and that preservation applies to the long, providential history of copying and recopying that brought those words down to us. The originals are inerrant. The copies are faithful. And “faithful” does not mean “identical down to every last spelling.” Faithful means God so superintended the manuscript tradition that the apostolic message has been preserved, in its substance and in nearly all its details, across two thousand years of hand-copying. The variants are real. The faithfulness is also real. Both can be true at once, because preservation operates not in any single manuscript but in the tradition as a whole — the whole stream of evidence, taken together, witnessing to what the apostles wrote. The church received what the church wrote.

This is why no single manuscript and no single printed edition can be elevated to the place of “the preserved Bible.” Not Vaticanus. Not Sinaiticus. Not Erasmus’s 1516. Not the Textus Receptus. Not the 1611 King James. Not the Nestle-Aland 28. None of these is the preserved text by itself. They are all witnesses, of varying weight, to a text God has preserved in and through the manuscript tradition as a whole. To pin our doctrine of preservation on any one of them is to make a category mistake — to demand that a fixed printed edition do work that only the providence of God, working across the whole tradition, can do.

When confessional Lutherans read their ESVs on Sunday morning, they are reading the fruit of that providence. We are not, when we do textual criticism, trying to rebuild a Bible that was lost. We are tracing the contours of a Bible God has been preserving the whole time.

Where we go from here

This closes our walk through chapter 1. The full journey continues in the book: how we got the New Testament, how the printed Greek text developed from Erasmus to the present, how textual critics actually work — and then the variants that matter most: the ending of Mark, the woman caught in adultery, the Comma Johanneum, the variants that touch the words of Jesus, a fair hearing for the Majority Text position, and two closing chapters on the confessional Lutheran doctrine of Scripture and on reading your Bible with new eyes. Every chapter ends the way this series has tried to: no academic suspension — every chapter ends in faith.

If this series serves your class or personal study, share it with someone who would benefit. And if you want to see the manuscripts for yourself, the great codices are freely viewable online: Sinaiticus at codexsinaiticus.org, and thousands more at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

Thanks be to God, who gave us His Word. And thanks be to God that He gave us a Word we can study.