Questions & Answers

We believe that the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament and the Greek text of the New Testament are the inspired Word of God. Although the original documents themselves have been lost, we believe that the Lord in his providential care has accurately preserved the Hebrew and Greek texts through the many hand-copied manuscripts that exist. Although there are minor differences or "variants" between the various hand-copied manuscripts, these variants do not cause any changes in doctrine.

This does not have anything to do with the verbal inspiration of Scripture. "Verbal inspiration" refers to the giving of the Bible (1 Corinthians 2:13, 2 Peter 1:21, and 2 Timothy 3:16), not to its copying and printing. God gave the Bible to us through the prophets and apostles in an errorless form. Minor human mistakes can be detected, however, as a result of the centuries-long process of copying the Bible by hand, and even later on after the invention of printing. For example, there was a famous printed Bible that was nicknamed the Wicked Bible because the printer left the word "not" out of the sixth commandment. Such mistakes are easily corrected through a study of the context and of the many other copies of the Bible that can be found.

Some slight differences or "variants" are apparent among the many ancient, handwritten copies of the Bible that are available. However, when we study the early variants, such as the end of Mark chapter 16 where editors disagree about which reading is the original, we find that none of the variants affect the doctrinal content of the Bible since the same information can be read in other parts of Scripture.

In both scrolls and books, pieces are most easily lost at the beginning and the end of a document. Apparently some ancient copy of Mark lost the end page. Certain manuscript copiers who were aware of this may have supplied a replacement for the missing page.

The opinion of the note in your English translation of Mark, which says that the longer ending is not the original, is just that—an opinion. A better editorial approach probably would be to print the longer form of the text and then note that it is not in all manuscripts. In either case, the length of Mark 16 does not affect our knowledge that Jesus rose from the dead, appeared to his disciples, and then sent them out to preach the gospel.