What Happened to Mark 9:44 and 46?
If you pay attention to verse numbers as you read your Bible (and most of us do not, so this is actually hard to catch), you will notice every now and then that a verse or group of verses are missing. That is the case for our sermon passage this week (8/28/22) in Mark 9:30-50. When you read through this passage in a modern translation (published after 2000), 9:44 and 9:46 will simply be omitted from your Bible’s print. At most, you might get a footnote noting, “Some manuscripts add verses 44 and 46.” So what is going on? I will try to explain the reason for this very simply. At the end of Mark, we will talk through this much more extensively as we will run into the same issue in chapter 16.
As time moves forward and brings academic and historical advancements, we find more and more manuscripts of the New Testament. A manuscript is a piece (often just a fragment) of an ancient text- in this case, the New Testament (we have over 5,000 manuscripts that give witness to the New Testament). As archeology advances, we find more manuscripts that give us a better idea of what the original documents said. We do not have the original copy of Mark’s gospel that is a product of his own hand, but we have hundreds of manuscripts that give us witness to what that original document contained, and scholars determine the content of our Bibles based on the agreed content of the manuscripts. For example, if we found 7 manuscripts of Mark 9:40-50, and only two of them included the content of verses 44 and 46 (identically translated in the NKJV, “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched”), we would conclude that it is unlikely that Mark’s original document included this content. That is what has happened in the manuscripts that witness to Mark’s gospel, but with many more pieces of evidence to consider. We should naturally determine that the original document would have included the content that we find in the majority of the manuscripts that are known to us today (more than number, there are several other categories that scholars use to determine what was likely original and what was added in later).
So why does the NKJV and KJV include these verses? The answer is simply because they were compiled and published at an earlier date, which means that they didn’t have access to the manuscript evidence that we have today. A lot is discovered and determined in 50 years (in the KJV’s case, four hundred years). It is not so much that the Bible is changing as it is that our Bibles continually grow to conformity of what the original documents said as a result of archeological, technological, and academic advancements.
Should we read mark 9:444 and 9:46 as the inspired words of God? My answer is that we should not, and that is why we see Bibles simply omit them. We usually get content added to the Bible (not taken away) because the scribes who copied Scripture and the teachers who taught it are more likely to add in some words to help the reader understand the text more clearly than to take away from the text. When this happens, the additions to the text are not inspired by God but added by humans for the sake of their readers. We want to know what God spoke.
We affirm that the Bible is completely inerrant and infallible in the original manuscripts because we, like Paul and Peter, believe in the inspiration of Scripture (2 Tim: 3:16, 2 Peter 3:15-16). Our Bible scholars today work hard to make our Bibles match those original documents, and I suggest that we have supreme confidence in their work; the church has for thousands of years (the discipline is called text criticism, and it is a very good endeavor). If this is God’s exclusive method of communication to his people (John 14:26 and surrounding context), he will sovereignly see that his sheep are able to hear his voice (John 10), and that requires a Bible that contains his words. God will see his promise through, and he works through his faithful servants to ensure this process. What grace of God that he gives us himself in a language that we can understand and know.
