Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Expecting the end Was Mark written in Aramaic and was a key verse added to John by Bart Ehrman?
[00:00:10] I've received some heavy duty questions recently on diverse but interesting issues.
[00:00:15] Don't some Christians today seem to share Jesus view of the coming end? Was the Gospel of Mark composed in Aramaic rather than Greek and did a scribe insert what is now John 16:15 into the gospel so that originally it didn't have it? Here we go.
[00:00:33] Question Recently I've been talking to my grandma who is a Seventh Day Adventist and it seems like their views of the afterlife are quite similar to the one of the historical Jesus. Are you at all familiar with their beliefs? Am I correct in my interpretation?
[00:00:48] Barthes reply Seventh Day Adventists emerged out of the great disappointment of 1844 when William Miller, a self taught Bible scholar, and his followers, a large group across America, had predicted to the day when Jesus would return based on biblical prophecy, especially the Book of Daniel. It didn't happen. So huge disappointment. Some folk had sold the farm literally.
[00:01:12] Some morphed into other groups either directly or indirectly directly including the relatively familiar Jehovah's Witnesses and the Branch Davidians. The Seventh Day Adventists were the largest of these groups, formed under the leadership of Ellen White.
[00:01:25] They continue to maintain that the end is coming soon and they insist that their teachings precisely are the teachings of Jesus. Then again, so does every Christian group, even though Jesus certainly didn't predict the end would come in the 21st century.
[00:01:39] In some ways though, all conservative groups with high apocalyptic hopes sound a lot like Jesus in the New Testament. But the differences are quite significant as well.
[00:01:51] The Japanese New Testament scholar Kenzo Tagawa argues that Greek was not Mark's native language.
[00:01:57] How much can we infer about the author's linguistic background from his Greek?
[00:02:02] Mark's style features parataxics, especially repeated Kai the word and stringing together a number of clauses. Frequent historical presence and expressions such as Kai Egeneto often translated and it came to pass since historical presence also occur in Greek more generally, how strong is the evidence that these features reflect Semitic interference?
[00:02:26] How persuasive is the further inference that Mark was an Aramaic speaker writing in Greek as a second language?
[00:02:32] This connects with my question about whether Mark used Aramaic sources. Although recognize that an author's native language and the language of his sources are separate issues.
[00:02:42] How do specialists distinguish features arising from an author's native language or bilingualism from those inherited from sources or deliberately adopted imitation of the Septuagint?
[00:02:53] More specifically, what linguistic evidence could distinguish direct use of written Aramaic sources from dependence on oral traditions or traditions already translated into Greek.
[00:03:05] Response it is obviously, I guess a highly contemporary, complicated question.
[00:03:11] There are very good reasons for thinking that Mark was written in Greek rather than Aramaic. Without getting too deeply into the weeds on this one, here are some of them.
[00:03:20] Number one if the author of Mark wrote in Aramaic, it would almost certainly mean he was a Jew from Judea or possibly Galilee. It seems he's unlikely to have been Jewish. He appears not to know, for example, that many Jews did not wash their hands before eating. That's Mark chapter seven.
[00:03:38] He does use Aramaic words on occasion, but he also uses Latin ones that can't be used to show that his native tongue was Latin any more than Aramaic words show that it was Aramaic.
[00:03:48] If I hear Hallelujah in my local Maranatha church, it doesn't mean that the congregation normally speaks Aramaic.
[00:03:57] Most Greek translations of Semitic writings can be detected by their Semiticisms, I.e. greek wording that seems to be using Hebrew or Aramaic ways of expressing things rather than Greek.
[00:04:07] This even happens in the writings of Paul, who was definitely not writing in Aramaic and probably didn't know it. This is especially the case because early Christian writers were influenced by the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which has numerous Semiticisms.
[00:04:22] There isn't a ton of Semiticism in Mark and the few that exist don't show that he was writing in a Semitic language.
[00:04:30] Fourthly, Matthew and Luke, written in different locations are our earliest evidences of Mark's gospel and they both know him in Greek, hence their extensive verbatim agreements.
[00:04:41] 5 It would not be a strong argument that Mark was likely written in a Semitic language because his Greek isn't very good. Scholars sometimes argue that about revelation as well. What the lower level Greek shows is that the author was not a high level literary elite, or if you prefer, that he just didn't write well or at least at an exalted level. But so what? Most English speaking people with much higher education than he has can't write great English either, specifically noting that he uses and a lot or it came about that or historic presence, which by the way you can find in Thucydides and many others.
[00:05:18] It does not really help to determine his native tongue.
[00:05:21] All in all, since the Gospel of Mark has always been transmitted in Greek, we would need some pretty compelling reasons for thinking it was written in something else and we just don't seem to have them. That's why there's not a lot of dispute about it among Markan scholars.
[00:05:36] Question in your Opinion as one of the leading modern textual critics of the New Testament and as a disciple of the late Dr. Bruce Metzger, would you conclude that John 16:15 is likely original to the Gospel and is not a textual variant?
[00:05:52] Response first, to make sense of this question to others, John 16:15 says all that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and he'll declare it to you.
[00:06:05] The verse is missing from only two of our Greek manuscripts, so far as I know, and some Coptic manuscripts, but they are two of the oldest and most important parchment 66 and Sinaiticus. It's worth pointing out that p. 66 is somewhat notorious for having a lot of scribal errors. The verse was inserted into John 16 later, either by the original scribe who realized he left it out, or a later corrector, and offhand I don't remember which.
[00:06:32] I think there is a virtual consensus among textual specialists that the verse was original and that it was accidentally omitted in both cases because of get ready for this.
[00:06:43] Homoioteleteleuton I love it when I can say that.
[00:06:47] Homoioteleuton is when two lines end with the same words.
[00:06:52] In this case, you can see in English. Notice how verse 14 and verse 15 both ends verse 14 he will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and he'll declare it to you.
[00:07:03] Verse 15 all that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and he'll declare it to you.
[00:07:12] In Greek. The last words immediately before what is now verse 15 are Kayanangali human, and he will declare it to you. Verse 15 also ends in Kainangeliyumon.
[00:07:25] I have written these three words without separating them with spaces to help make my point. They are exactly alike.
[00:07:31] If a scribe copied the end of verse 14 and then looked back at his manuscript to copy the next verse, his eyes may well have fallen on the second occurrence of the words rather than the first, and continued from there.
[00:07:42] That is, his eyes skipped to the wrong spot because of the verses ended in the same way, an error known as periblepsis occasioned by homoio Teleuton. In other words, an ice skip because of the same endings.
[00:07:55] It happens sometimes. That would explain the omission. Moreover, given the massive manuscript support for verse 15, it's difficult to explain why it's found in virtually all the other manuscripts if it was added later, so it appears to have been original.
