Missing Verse #6 — Mark 9:46
Missing Verse #6 — Mark 9:46
How Many Is “Some”?
Mark 9:46 — “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.”
Open a King James Bible to Mark 9:46 and those words are right where they have always been.
Open many modern versions, however, and verse 46 is missing. Depending upon the version, you may find a footnote explaining that “some manuscripts” include the words found in verse 48. 1
“Some manuscripts.”
That sounds straightforward enough. But before accepting the explanation, there is a simple
question worth asking: How many is “some”?
The answer may surprise you. Mark 9:46 is not found in merely a handful of obscure Greek
manuscripts. The verse is supported by the overwhelming majority of the Greek manuscripts. It is also supported by important individual Greek witnesses and ancient translations. 2 Even sources supporting the modern critical text acknowledge that “most later manuscripts” contain Mark 9:46, while discussions of the textual evidence have described verses 44 and 46 as appearing in the “vast majority” of Greek manuscripts. 3
Now compare that information with the footnote: “Some manuscripts.”
Those words create a very different picture. If you knew nothing about the manuscript evidence and read that “some manuscripts” contain the verse, would you naturally conclude that the overwhelming majority contain it? Probably not. “Some” sounds like a portion of the evidence, perhaps even a small portion. It certainly does not communicate what most people understand by “majority,” much less “vast majority.”
There is another way the evidence could have been described. If the majority of the Greek
manuscripts contain Mark 9:46, then the manuscripts that omit it are the minority. The footnote could therefore have drawn your attention to that side of the evidence: “A minority of manuscripts omit this verse.” That would immediately tell you something important about the quantity of manuscript evidence on each side.
But notice what happens when the description is reversed. Instead of telling you that a minority omit the verse, you are told that “some manuscripts” include it. The minority disappears from the description, while the majority becomes “some.”
Words matter.
Imagine a mother who bakes a cake and puts it under a cake cover. When she comes home, she notices crumbs on the counter and asks her six-year-old son, “Did you have any cake?”
The boy sheepishly answers, “Yeah, I had some.”
She smiles. “Oh, okay.”
Then she lifts the cake cover. Almost the entire cake is gone.
“I thought you said you only had some!”
The little boy looks at her and replies, “Mom, I'm only six years old. How do you expect me to know what the word ‘some’ means?”
Maybe the six-year-old has an excuse.
Should that excuse work for a textual critic?
The people making textual decisions about Mark 9:46 know the manuscript evidence. They have to know it. Examining and evaluating manuscripts is precisely what textual critics do.
Their textual apparatus identifies which manuscripts support different readings, and their scholarly discussions demonstrate that they know the difference between a few manuscripts, a minority, a majority, and the vast majority.
That makes the choice of the word “some” particularly important.
At VBI, we say “Because Every Word Matters.” We are normally talking about the words God gave us in the Bible. But words also matter when people are telling Christians about the Bible. If changing one word can change someone's understanding of the evidence, then the word chosen to describe that evidence matters very much.
Most Christians will never examine hundreds of Greek manuscripts. They will never study a critical apparatus. They may never learn the names of the manuscripts upon which modern textual criticism places the greatest weight. Instead, they encounter the conclusions of modern textual criticism when they open a modern Bible and discover that a verse is missing. The footnote is supposed to help them understand why.
And there they find those two words: “Some manuscripts.”
Consider what those words lead the reader to believe. Then consider what the manuscript evidence actually shows. The verse isn't sitting in a lonely handful of manuscripts on the fringes of the evidence. The overwhelming majority of the Greek manuscripts containing this passage include it.
The manuscripts omitting it constitute the minority.
So why describe the majority as “some” rather than describe those omitting the verse as the
minority?
That is a question worth asking.
It matters because the issue is not merely academic. When a Christian sees that a verse appearing in the KJB has disappeared from a modern version, he naturally wants to know why. If the explanation leaves him with the impression that only a relatively small amount of manuscript evidence supports the verse, he may reasonably conclude that removing it was an obvious decision.
But what happens when he discovers that the overwhelming majority of the Greek manuscript evidence actually contains the verse?
Suddenly, “some” becomes a very important word.
The question then becomes larger than Mark 9:46. When information concerning the words of God is presented to Christians, shouldn't the words used to describe that evidence give them an accurate understanding of what the evidence actually looks like?
Our six-year-old could claim that he didn't understand what “some” meant.
Textual critics cannot make that claim. They know the evidence. They know what minority,
majority, and most mean.
They also know what “some” means to the person reading the footnote.
Read the footnote again.
“Some manuscripts.”
Then ask one simple question: How many is “some”?
Because Every Word Matters.
Endnotes
1. New International Version, Mark 9:46, footnote, Bible Gateway,
2. NET Bible, Mark 9:44 textual note, NETBible,
3. James Snapp Jr., “A Moment Please, Dr. Holmes!,” The Text of the Gospels, May 2018,
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