Textus Receptus vs Critical Text, Part 2

Good things do come in pairs, and this will be the first of two debates we have between Dr.

White and Dr. Riddle. And for those of you in Asia, it will be two debates in 24 hours, two debates.

Well, that 24 hours happens everywhere, but two debates on the same day. It's early Saturday morning for those of you in Asia.

We're gonna be having two debates. The second one will be live at 11 a .m. Eastern tomorrow or 11 p .m.

Hong Kong or Malaysia for those of you in Asia. Our topic tonight will be on the longer ending of Mark and our panelists will be debating the resolution,

Mark chapter 16, nine to 20 is not original and should not be received as the word of God.

And defending that resolution in the affirmative position, we have Dr. James White.

It's been on this channel many times before, no need for introduction, but I still will anyway. He's the director of Alpha Omega Ministries based in Phoenix, Arizona, host of the

Dividing Line and author of many books. The most relevant one to tonight's discussion would be the

KJV only or the King James only controversy. He's also written other classic books like the

Forgotten Trinity and let me go public and saying my favorite, The Potter's Freedom. So it's a pleasure to have you on Dr.

White and it's not been a great week for debates. I must say, yes, and also for moderators as well.

It's not been a great one, I'm just saying. And so just share with us if you will, your preparation for this debate and yeah, just feel free to just share what do you think coming into this debate?

Well, this will be the first debate that anyone will see this week actually, to be perfectly honest with you. This isn't gonna be a fashion show or a food fight.

So, and you should only have to be able to, you should only be required to keep the time, not have to actually engage the debate itself.

So hopefully that's what we'll be doing. Obviously the topic is extremely important. The issue of what the word of God is, how it has been transmitted to us, why we can believe it and trust it and most importantly, defend it.

I have defended the inerrancy and inspiration of scripture in mosques in South Africa and in London and in Australia.

Around the world, literally. And so this is a key important issue. I think it's central to the issue of how people understand how we got the

New Testament, how it was transmitted to us. And I'm really looking forward to hopefully being able to clarify a lot of key issues.

Thank you, thanks so much for that. And we also have

Dr. Jeff Riddle with us who will be defending or rather opposing the resolution and defending the longer ending of Mark and the

Texas Receptors. We have Dr. Riddle is a pastor at Christ Reformed Baptist Church in Louisa, Virginia.

He has a PhD in New Testament from Union Presbyterian Seminary. He is a husband and a father of five.

It's his first time on the channel. Dr. Jeff, we are privileged to have you. Just thank you so much for willing to do this, to set aside your time to do this.

It's a real honor to have you on the channel. Great, thank you, Samuel, for the invitation.

And I'm happy to be here tonight. And I agree that it is a very important topic.

It's a foundational topic. I'm a pastor. I'm not a professional apologist. And my main interest in work and labors is in ministering to my congregation, preaching and teaching and baptizing, serving the

Lord's Supper. So, but the scriptures are foundational. And as an expositional preacher, a number of years ago,

I had to deal with, what is the text of scripture that I'm going to preach?

The text of scripture I'm going to exegete. And so through that process of week by week preaching and having to deal with the text,

I had to confront the issue of text. And so I came to some convictions about that.

And I'm happy to have the opportunity and platform to share some of those ideas tonight.

And I, like my opponent, certainly anticipate this will be a charitable engagement.

And I don't think we'll be yelling or talking over each other. So anyways, thank you for the invitation.

I'm glad to be here. Absolutely. And just like I asked Dr. White as well, could you just briefly just share with us a bit of the preparation?

And you've been very kind to me and it's been a pleasure to get to know you over the last two months as well.

We've had lots of phone calls. And if you could just share with us your preparation coming into this. Also, what are you hoping to accomplish in both this debate and the debate tomorrow morning?

And that's directed to me, Samuel, I'm sorry. Yes, yes, Dr. Jeff. Sorry. Preparation, I mean, over the last couple of weeks,

I've been reading and studying. I actually told my wife when I left and I'm at the school where I teach right now, but I said,

I'm gonna kind of be happy when this is over tomorrow afternoon so that I can pick up some of the devotional books and other things that I've enjoyed reading.

I've got about four or five books sitting on my desk at home that I've wanted to read, but I've sort of put those aside for the last couple of weeks so that I could read and study things related to these topics.

But so it hasn't been any extraordinary preparation. I mean, what can actually, can you do extraordinarily to prepare for anything except doing reading and studying and going back and reviewing some things that I've previously written, talking to colleagues in ministry and other people who are friendly to the position that I have and getting their insights.

So that's basically been the extent of my preparation. Well, thanks for that,

Dr. Jeff. And again, we're very grateful to have both Dr. Jeff and Dr. James White doing this for us.

And I hope that all of you watching at home or wherever you're watching this from, you benefit from this. Just let me run through the format real quick before we start.

As I mentioned earlier, Dr. James White will be taking the affirmative position defending the resolution. And as such, he would be going first,

Dr. Riddle will be going second and that format of Dr. White first and Dr. Riddle going second will continue until for this debate, for the entirety of this debate.

The opening statements, we will begin with 20 minutes of opening statements from both sides, followed by rebuttal, 10 minutes from both sides.

And then we'll have the cross -examination from both sides with beginning with Dr. White cross -examining

Dr. Riddle and then vice versa. We'll also have a response and a closing period for 10 minutes before we have the

Q &A. We'll have about 20 minutes Q &A at the end. As for time, we will stick closely to the time for this one since this is a formal debate.

The bell will ring once if there's 30 seconds left and twice when the time is up.

So that way, even those of you watching at home, you'll get an idea of where we are in the time. For the

Q &A, really important for those of you watching, we would love to hear your questions and also to have your

Super Chats. Priority will be given to the Super Chats for the Q &A. You can send in your questions in the live chat, but please do type in the initial of the speaker you want to direct your questions to.

Please do not direct them to both because we want to accommodate as many questions as we can.

So direct them to one particular speaker. Please put the initials in all caps or the name of the speaker in front before your question and our team will be noticing your question and passing them to me.

With that, we're about ready to start. We will begin with the opening statements, 20 minutes beginning with Dr.

James White. The time starts whenever you're ready, sir. All right, well, thank you very, very much.

Let's get right into the topic this evening. The thesis has to do with the question, is what's called the longer ending of Mark, Mark 16, nine through 20, original to Mark itself?

And of course that asks the question, which will be the key question in both of these debates. What is our ultimate authority?

For me, I want to know what is apostolic. I want to know what the apostles themselves wrote.

The history of the text and its transmission over time, all of that is important only in so far as it allows me to know what the apostles themselves wrote because that's what makes something inspired.

It is the very nature of scripture itself that is under discussion here. And so the question is, is there a reason, and why is it,

I guess we could put it this way, that a large majority of even reformed scholarship in the world today questions the reliability of Mark 16, nine through 20 and sees it as secondary, as coming after the actual writing of the

Gospel of Mark itself, and being something though very ancient and very early on, something that was written because of a concern about the actual form of the

Gospel of Mark ending the way that it did. So a lot of folks aren't aware of what the data is.

Let's look at the data that's very, very important and then make some comments there on.

The manuscripts provide about five different endings, depending on what you count as an ending, about five different endings to the

Gospel of Mark. The two earliest manuscripts that we have, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, we do not have any surviving papyrus manuscripts of the

Gospel of Mark at this point that contain the last chapter. We have some papyri manuscripts,

P45, for example, but it does not make it to the end of the book. And so the two earliest manuscripts we have do not contain the longer ending or any other endings.

They end at verse eight with the strange statement, for they were afraid.

And so those are the two earliest. There's another interesting manuscript, though much later, manuscript 304, that likewise ends there.

And then, as I'll mention a little bit later on, you have certain of the Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian manuscripts as well that do not contain anything beyond verse eight.

Now, a few other manuscripts have a short summary statement, and it's clearly of secondary origin.

I haven't run across anyone who actually believes that this shorter ending is original.

It just seems very clearly to be something that was tacked on to the shortest ending, ending at verse eight.

And that says, and all that had been commanded them, they told briefly to those with Peter, and afterward,

Jesus himself sent out through them from the east and as far as the west, the holy and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation, amen.

And so that's in Babiensis. It's in some forms like that. And we'll run into it a little bit later on as well.

Now, a key, very early unseal manuscript, Codex Washingtonianus, Codex W, contains what is called the

Freer Logion, inserted into the longer ending after verse 14.

We knew about it originally from Drom, and then once we found Washingtonianus. And that says, and they excuse themselves saying, this age of lawlessness and unbelief is under Satan, who does not allow the truth and power of God to prevail over the unclean things of the spirits, therefore reveal your righteousness now.

Thus they spoke to Christ and Christ replied to them, the term of years of Satan's power has been fulfilled and other terrible things draw near.

And for those who have sinned, I was handed over to death, that they may return to the truth and sin no more, that they may inherit the spiritual and perishable glory of righteousness that is in heaven.

Now, the large majority of later manuscripts contain the block of 12 verses known as the

LE, or the longer ending of Mark, the text that has the resurrection appearances of Jesus, along with the odd sections concerning speaking in tongues, drinking poison, handling snakes, et cetera, et cetera.

But it should be noted that at least a dozen manuscripts contain notes indicating the scribe was aware of this material, was not present in manuscripts in his day.

Further, there are an inordinate number of variants to be found within those 12 verses, especially in the earlier witnesses to the longer ending, which is often a sign of a textual variant that has entered the tradition at a later point.

Finally, a group of manuscripts combine the longer ending and the shorter ending, not the

Freer Logion, but the short one that I read before that. And there's a, again, not only

Greek manuscripts, some written in margins, some in the text, but also some translations as well, some

Syriac, some Coptic, even some manuscripts in the Boheric. And obviously, that's coming from a later point in time when you have someone looking at two manuscripts that have both endings, and they're, well,

I'm not gonna lose anything, so we're gonna put them all together, is basically what you have in that situation. So it should be noted that some manuscripts combine some of these at different locations as well, showing again that there was a great deal of confusion, but that the tendency seen throughout the history of the transmission of the text in the

New Testament remained constant, and this is a good thing. When faced with multiple readings, the scribes were loath to lose anything that might be original.

And so the tendency was combining, keeping things, not getting rid of anything, and that's a good thing.

That's a very positive thing in regards to the nature of the transmission of the text of the

New Testament. Now, as to my position, why would

I, when I get to, if I'm preaching through the Gospel of Mark, when I get to the 16th chapter, why would

I make sure to either do a Bible study or a sermon, depending on what the situation was, where I was, obviously in the church where I'm an elder, everybody there knows what

I do, they've watched a lot of my debates, and so it's not like it would be surprising to them to hear something about a textual variant or something like that.

But why would I stop the proclamation of inspired scripture at verse eight and then talk about everything we just mentioned and everything we'll be talking about during the course of this discussion, maybe in a

Bible study or something along those lines? Well, as we noted, the two oldest exemplars of Mark in Greek end at verse eight.

And there's been discussion about, well, there was enough room to put it in. Well, no, there really wasn't.

In reality, Codex Vaticanus does, which is in the background here, have an open column, and yet it wouldn't be long enough for verses nine through 20 and there were other places in Vaticanus where open columns were left, and so it's not really a thing there, and there are issues regarding how

Vaticanus made note of textual variants and things like that. But the fact is the two oldest exemplars we have do not contain this text.

That has to be taken into account in light of the multiple other endings that exist.

Why would you have multiple endings? Why only in Mark? Why don't we have multiple endings of John and Revelation and all these other books in the

New Testament? That is an important question to keep in mind. The Sinaitic Syriac manuscript displays the oldest form of the

Gospels in the Syriac language, and it likewise ends at the same point.

There are about 100 Armenian manuscripts, and most would say that they represent the earliest forms of the

Armenian, lack the longer ending. And when we start asking questions about early fathers, this is a challenge for one simple reason.

When we look outside of the New Testament, we look to people who were writing, whether it be Ignatius or Tertullian or Didache or the super early stuff in the apostolic period or going to Origen or Clement or Irenaeus and so on and so forth, the question that you end up encountering is we're talking about whether people had the text in their manuscripts or whether they didn't.

How would you know that they didn't? You could only know if they did if they especially made reference to it.

And so there seems to be in Irenaeus a clear reference. Some people said maybe something in Justin, even though it's not nearly as clear,

Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century. Irenaeus definitely has reference to it.

But what about Origen? What about Clement? Well, it's hard to prove a negative.

It's hard to prove that they didn't have something. They just might not have quoted it. I mean, if we were to try to prove that everybody had second chronicles, that'd be tough to prove because how often are we quoting from second chronicles?

Does that mean it wasn't in our Bibles? No, it just didn't mean we weren't quoting from it. So those are some of the issues that come up in looking at some of the second and third centuries.

The most we can say is that we don't have any evidence that they had it. But then we get into something very important,

Eusebius, who provides us with all sorts of interesting quotes that sometimes send us off on all sorts of interesting rabbit trails.

Eusebius, in reference to this issue of verses nine through 20 and of course they didn't call it verses nine through 20 because versification is introduced long, long later.

But in regards to this longer ending of Mark, said, this can be solved in two ways. The person not wishing to accept these verses will say that it is not contained in all copies of the gospel according to Mark.

Indeed, the accurate copies conclude the story according to Mark in the words, they were afraid for the end is here in nearly all the copies of Mark.

So some people want to argue that Eusebius is just quoting somebody else. Not gonna get into that this evening.

The point is, in Eusebius' day, there is a division and there is the statement made that the accurate copies end with verse eight.

And then there are other copies that have this, what is seen as an addition. Now, of course, then you have

Jerome and Jerome is considerably more of a textual critical scholar because he is not only one of the few early church fathers who could read both

Greek and Hebrew, but he was comparing manuscripts because he was obviously the one who translated the

Latin Vulgate. And yet he can't travel around the world. He doesn't have the internet.

So he only has the manuscripts that are available to him locally in his area. And so he said that in scarcely any copies of the gospel, almost all the

Greek codices being without this passage. So he said almost all the

Greek codices in his day were without this particular passage. Some people say he was just paraphrasing

Eusebius. There's reasons to disagree about that. But it's interesting to remember that Jerome is also the first person from who we know about the

Freer Logion, which we found in Codex Washingtonianus. But we knew about that from Jerome long before we found that particular manuscript that matched up to it.

And so he did have a good insight into the background materials about this particular passage.

And so he said in his day, almost all the Greek codices that he had access to did not have this passage.

However, about 100 to 120 years later, you've got Victor of Antioch, late fifth century, saying very many copies of the gospel ended at verse eight and very many copies ended at verse 20.

And by that point, Victor is saying, and you need to have those verses.

And so there's a progression over time in regards to how these verses are being viewed, but very plainly for literally half a millennium, you have differing perspectives in regards to having or not having the longer ending.

So why the question is, do the large majority of those who study New Testament textual criticism agree with placing the longer ending, for example, in double brackets, providing a footnote?

I mean, it would be good, I believe, I realize there are others who would say it wouldn't be good, but I believe that it would be very good to provide all the information.

I believe Erasmus would have believed the same thing as well, to provide all the information and to let people know, here's what the data is, here's what the texts said.

So give the short ending, give the freer logion, give the longer ending, put it all out there.

Don't hide anything. I think that's extremely negative.

Let everybody know. And when you see those double brackets, one of the first things

I was taught as a very young man is that you never build a dogma or a doctrine upon a disputed text of scripture.

Now, some people just don't want there to be any disputed texts of scripture, but there are, as we see in early church history.

We can find various ways around that. King James onlyism does it its own particular way. For example, that doesn't change the fact there have been disputed texts of scripture.

And our Muslim friends and our Mormon friends and our atheist friends are going to remind us of that reality.

We can't really hide those things. So we keep in mind that the evidence is widespread that in the earliest centuries, it, the longer ending, was not the majority reading.

That is, it is secondary to the rest of the text of Mark from the information that we have.

Second, and this is key for me, the presence of other endings and the mixtures of those other endings speaks loudly to the reality that in later centuries, it was felt that Mark needed to look like Luke and Matthew and hence needed something beyond verse eight.

Now, anyone who has done synoptic gospel studies knows how frequent that comes up in textual critical studies where scribes are trying to harmonize

Matthew, Mark, and Luke, sometimes just based upon ignorance. But obviously that's what people felt.

They felt that there needed to be, there's needed to be something more than what was there. If the longer ending was original, why would the other endings have ever appeared?

Why would the other endings have ever appeared? Now, surely a great deal can be said about the so -called internal evidence, the actual content of longer ending, its style, its actual doctrinal content.

Maybe we'll get into some stuff about speaking in tongues, drinking poison, and handling snakes, and where the

Jesus appeared in different forms and things like that. There are some truly problematic material that can be interpreted in an orthodox way, but you sort of got to stand on your head facing west at three o 'clock in the morning to make it really work.

We can talk about that, but the biggest objection that people have raised against a 16 -8 ending, the shortest ending, is that there must be resurrection appearances, not just an empty tomb, despite the fact that the

Gospel of Mark prophesies it and everything else. Let me just throw out an interesting thesis that I think is very valuable and doesn't get much discussion.

I think that the Gospel of Mark is incredibly early, very much earlier than what most people would say in New Testament classes and things like that today.

It is very regular to put Mark well after 50, 60, sometimes after 70 AD, so that you can push all the synoptic

Gospels later and have all the fall of Jerusalem stuff be after the fall of Jerusalem and that kind of stuff.

But what if the Gospel of Mark is extremely primitive, so that there are many eyewitnesses who are still alive?

In that instance, what the Gospel of Mark does is lead you directly into the testimony of the eyewitnesses themselves who saw

Jesus. Rather than providing it for you in written form, it is so early that they're there.

And the reader is brought into dealing with the fact that they've probably been given this book or this book is being read to them by people who either are eyewitnesses or new eyewitnesses.

And then as time goes by and it becomes associated with Matthew and it becomes associated with Luke and so on and so forth, the idea is, well, it has to look like these others that have the resurrection of Jesus included.

And so we might get into a discussion of how Matthew, Mark and Luke are related to one another, whether you believe in literary dependence.

I do not personally, it puts me in a minority, but there are people who would say that if Mark's the earliest, and this is why

Matthew and Luke differ on resurrection appearances and things like that, because they didn't have anything in Mark to look at at that point.

But the point is that the gospel prophesied the resurrection and then said the grave was empty.

And so it ushers you directly into a gospel presentation.

What if Mark is like a really effective gospel track rather than some kind of dry historical document as we might like to try to have it function today?

If that's the case, then where it finishes would be a perfectly logical spot for it to finish.

And so the key issue for me is quite simple. The external evidence, especially the translations into other languages, and most importantly, the existence of multiple other endings.

There would be no need for the multiple endings if in point of fact, verses nine through 20 were original.

And we can talk about whether leaves would fall off and stuff like that and scrolls and issues like that as we get into it.

But there is a positive presentation as to why I would say the majority of folks today take that perspective and we'll be able to talk about a little bit more as we continue on.

Well, thank you for that Dr. James White finishing 10 seconds before the time.

We now turn our attention to Dr. Jeff Riddle for his 10 minute opening statement.

Dr. Riddle, the time will start whenever you start speaking. So let me begin again by expressing my thanks to Samuel Nassan of Explain Apologetics for this invitation to be part of this debate and discussion.

And let me also extend my thanks to Pastor Chris Myers of the Phoenix Reformed Presbyterian Church for extending the offer for us to host this event in his congregation.

I'm sorry that we weren't able to work that out. Tonight, I am here representing the confessional text position, also known as the traditional text position or the textus receptus position and the word textus receptus means received text.

Before I proceed to a defense of the traditional ending of the gospel of Mark, I wanna spend a few moments just talking about what the confessional text position is.

I believe the proper texts of the Bible are found in the printed editions of the Old and New Testaments of the

Reformation era, which in the providence of God were preserved as the authentic texts of the

Bible as it had been faithfully transmitted from the time of the apostles. Whereas modern text criticism is based on an enlightenment influence reconstruction or restoration model, the confessional text position is based on a pre -critical preservation model.

This position is perhaps best expressed in the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, 1689 in chapter one, paragraph eight.

It's the same in the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Mother Confession for the Baptist Confession and in the

Savoy Declaration. It affirms that scripture has not only been immediately inspired by God in the original

Hebrew and Greek, but that it has also been kept pure in all ages by God's singular care and providence.

The framers of the reformed confessions believed that the Masoretic texts of the Hebrew Old Testament and the received texts of the

Greek New Testament had been faithfully preserved by God through the process of copying and that with the technological revolution of the invention of the printing press, these faithful copies in God's providence were then firmly fixed in a stable and printed form, which could become the basis for uniform translations of the

Bible and for confessions, doctrinal preaching and scholarly study. Such as the view reflected in the writings of John Owen, the

Prince of the Puritans, who in a 1659 essay wrote, let it be remembered that the vulgar copy we use was the public possession of many generations that upon the invention of printing, it was in actual authority throughout the world with them that used and understood that language.

And then he concludes, let that then pass for the standard, which is confessedly it's right and due.

With respect to the Greek New Testament, the acknowledged Protestant standard is the

Texas Receptus, the received text. It is an eclectic text, meaning it was chosen or compiled by the scholars who edited it from a number of extant manuscripts that were available to them.

Therefore, we might say that their method was providential eclecticism.

In most cases, the received text reflects the text that is found in the vast majority of extant manuscripts, the so -called majority text.

In some cases, however, a reading was recognized as authentic from a minority tradition.

In our debate tonight, we are considering a text that has majority support,

Mark 16, nine through 20. And tomorrow we will examine a text that is supported only by a minority of extant witnesses,

Ephesians 3, nine, reminding us that manuscript evidence can only take us so far. Our task, we believe, is not to reconstruct the text from scratch, but to recognize the authentic text as it has been providentially preserved in history as evidence by its use among God's people.

This brings us then to our specific examination of Mark's inspired ending,

Mark 16, nine through 20. My opponent has the unenviable task of attempting to prove that this text is spurious and uninspired, and so it cannot be received as the word of God.

I believe he will fail in this task because God's word will ultimately vindicate and defend itself against all opposition.

Mark 16, nine through 20 should be gladly received as the word of God for at least three reasons.

First, on the basis of the external evidence. Second, on the basis of the internal evidence.

Third, on the basis of the historical, theological and canonical evidence. Let's start off with the external evidence.

Mark 16, nine through 20 should be received on the basis of the overwhelming support we find for it in the external evidence.

A scholar named James Kelhoffer, hardly a TR advocate, acknowledges the massive external support for the traditional ending of Mark in his book,

Miracle and Missions, when he writes, quote, "'In addition to numerous patristic citations "'and the longer endings inclusion "'in the

Byzantine lectionary readings, "'99 % of the surviving manuscripts "'agree with the textus receptus "'and preserve the reading of the longer ending.'"

Let's look at the Greek manuscript evidence. My opponent is fond of speaking about the importance of the papyri, but when it comes to the ending of Mark, as he's already acknowledged, there are no extant papyri evidence.

There is no extant papyri evidence for the ending of Mark. The earliest Greek witnesses to the traditional ending come in what are known as the unseal manuscripts, including

Codex Alexandrinus from the 5th century, as well as Codices C, Aframi Rescriptus, and D, Beza, from the same era.

Codex Washingtoniensis, W, comes from the 5th century, and it's also a witness to the traditional ending.

Even though it has the Freer Logion, it has 9 through 20 also. As already noted, the traditional ending prevailed as the dominant reading across all geographic regions where early

Christianity was found, to appear in 99 % of the over 1 ,600 currently extant

Greek manuscripts. Despite this, we will still find notes in our modern Bibles, like the

ESV, that read something like this. Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16, 9 through 20.

How many is some? Think about a number in your head. Does it mean there are 10, that there are 20, that there are 100 manuscripts that don't have the traditional ending?

In this case, some actually means only two, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.

But since the 19th century, these two have exerted an outsized influence among many academic scholars as they have been used to attack and topple the traditional text.

Both Sinaiticus and Vaticanus do indeed end Mark's gospel at 16, 8, but it has been rightly pointed out that the ending in both of these manuscripts is very strange.

In Sinaiticus, there are two strange features. First, the last verse ends in the middle of the line, and then the scribe filled in the remainder of the line space with an elaborate arabesque.

On the next line, the scribe added another decorative line that extended to the end of that line.

Both of these things were done to discourage addition to Codex Sinaiticus at Mark 16, 8.

The ending in Vaticanus is even stranger, perhaps. Mark ends in the middle of the second of three columns, and the entire third column is left blank.

This is not consistent with the formatting that is used in the transition from any other book to another book in the

New Testament in Codex Vaticanus. As Nicholas Lunn has pointed out, these two early unseals actually provide implicit testimony to the existence of a

Markan ending beyond Mark 16, 8. Let's turn to the patristic evidence, the evidence of the church fathers.

Here we will find the earliest witnesses to the traditional ending of the text of Mark. Justin Martyr, in his first apology, written about the year 150, cites

Mark 16, 20, and they went forth and preached everywhere. Tatian, Justin's disciple, included the traditional ending in his diateseron, through the four, his attempt to put together the four gospels.

He did that about the year 160. Hippolytus, in his Apostolic Constitutions around the year 200, offers citations from Mark 16, 16 and also

Mark 16, 17, and 18. But most striking of all the patristic references to the traditional ending is that that we find in the writings of the great bishop and apologist,

Irenaeus of Lyon, in his work, Against Heresies, book three, chapter 10, in which he describes how the gospel of Mark begins and ends.

This is what Dr. White talked about it either. Sometimes there's not explicit reference, but it's explicit in Irenaeus.

He writes this, "'Wherefore also Mark, the interpreter and follower of Peter, does thus commence his gospel narrative, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the

Son of God.'" He quotes Mark 1 .1. This is how Mark begins his gospel, quotes

Mark 1 .1. Then he continues and says this, "'Also toward the conclusion of his gospel,

Mark says, so then after the Lord Jesus spoke to them, he was received up into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God, citing verbatim

Mark 16 .19.'" That's in the year 180 that Irenaeus writes this.

This isn't just the earliest explicit citation of the traditional ending of Mark. It is the earliest explicit citation of the gospel of Mark in all the patristic literature.

In addition to these citations and others from the church fathers, references are also made to the traditional ending of Mark, oddly enough, in the writings of early pagan opponents of Christianity, such as Celsus and the

Platonist Porphyry. What about the versional evidence, early translations? The traditional ending is the dominant reading found in the extant versional evidence of the ancient translations of the gospel of Mark.

It's in the Old Latin, the Syriac, the Latin Vulgate, among others. So first, external evidence is overwhelming.

Second, internal evidence. Mark's ending should be received on the basis of overwhelming support of the internal evidence.

By internal evidence, we mean the language, the vocabulary, the style, the content. It is consistent overall with what is found in the rest of Mark's gospel.

Questionable subjective claims are sometimes made against the authenticity of the traditional ending based on its supposed lack of a

Markan style. Some will claim, for example, that this passage has vocabulary that is unusual, but when we examine this more closely, we find this isn't true.

For example, one of the words that appears for the first time in the traditional ending is in verse 14, when the disciples are referred to as the 11, the hendeka.

Right, it's a hoppock. It's only one time in Mark's gospel, but it only makes sense in Mark 16, 14, because it only makes sense when the 12 have been reduced to the 11 after the departure of Judas Iscariot.

Another allegedly unique word is the verb to follow after, ep -akalotheo.

It's the prefix epi plus the verb to follow. Well, that appears just once in Mark 16, 20, but the root verb, to follow, appears 20 other times in Mark's gospel.

Most telling are various scholarly studies that have been done that compare the 12 verses of Mark 16, nine through 20 with passages of similar length within the gospel of Mark, where they find that the style is completely consistent with what you find in the traditional ending and what you find in these various other passages.

One of the most recent studies where this has been done has been by a guy named Bruce Terry. He compared the traditional ending of Mark with Mark 15, 40 through Mark 16, 4, and he finds it has the same number of unique vocabulary terms, unique grammatical terms, et cetera.

Maurice Robinson notes that of the 166 words that appear in the traditional ending, 154 of them, or 92 .7%,

have some related parallel elsewhere in Mark. Even those who reject the authenticity of the traditional ending often concede that the internal evidence in its favor is compelling.

It sounds Marken when you read it. James Kelhoffer, who rejects its authenticity, suggests that whoever forged this ending must have successfully imitated the style of Mark.

But friends, there's a much simpler solution. And what's that solution? It sounds like Mark.

Why? Because Mark wrote it. It's original to Mark. Overwhelming external evidence, overwhelming internal evidence.

Thirdly, this passage should be received on the basis of the historical, theological, and canonical evidence.

First, the historical. There is no trace of any dispute about the ending of Mark in the first 300 years of Christianity.

The first sign of any dispute appears only in the fourth century in the codices

Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. We already talked about the strange way that each one of them end with an awareness of an extended ending.

Also in the fourth century, we have a letter to Marinus that was written by Eusebius, or it claims to be written by Eusebius.

It was only published in the 19th century. It's unclear as to how this letter should exactly be interpreted.

The point of the letter is not to address the ending of Mark, but it is to address a perceived difference between Matthew 28 .1

that talks about Christ being raised from the dead in the end of the Sabbath, and comparing it to Mark 16 .2

and Mark 16 .9, where it refers to the resurrection of Christ having happened early in the first day of the week.

Eusebius suggests that some had addressed this question by arguing that the gospel ends at 16 .8.

He never offers his own opinion, nor does he approve of that opinion. There are also a mere handful of six

Greek manuscripts, the earliest of which is dated to the sixth century, and the latest to the 15th century, and one

Greek lectionary that incorporates the so -called shorter ending that my opponent read earlier at the end of Mark 16 .8.

But in every one of those occasions, it doesn't stop there, but the text continues, and it proceeds to list verses nine through 20.

So every one of those occasions where the shorter ending shows up, there are only seven of them, they're all late, every one of them is also a witness for the traditional ending, verses nine through 20.

The evidence is clear. After a brief period of dispute for about 200 years from 300 to 500, an organic consensus was reached, and the traditional ending of Mark was affirmed as the proper and fitting conclusion to this gospel.

James Kelhoffer observes, it thus comes as no surprise that Mark's longer ending was met with near universal acceptance before the 19th century.

It was J .J. Griesbach in 1803 who for the first time suggested that the ending was accidentally lost and placed

Mark 16 .9 through 20 in brackets. It soon became the consensus view that the original ending of Mark had been lost or damaged, and that some later anonymous author had composed a traditional ending to bring the gospel to a more fitting conclusion.

Some scholars like Samuel Tregalus suggested that Mark 16 .9

through 20 might not be original, but it's still canonical. It should be accepted as canonical. Tregalus has been followed by Bruce Metzger and in recent days by Dr.

Peter Gurry in affirming this theory. The idea that the original ending of an inspired gospel might've been lost, however, would invalidate the doctrine of preservation and give every genuine believer pause.

By the mid 20th century, some scholars began to suggest not only that Mark 16 .9

through 20 was secondary, but that the original ending of Mark was in fact Mark 16 .8.

This view had been influenced by the rise of so -called new literary criticism.

Anachronistically seeing Mark as a sort of existential avant -garde author who wanted to end his gospel with angst -ridden women disciples who said nothing to no one for they were afraid rather than end it with the glorious resurrection appearances of the

Lord Jesus Christ. This idea was promoted despite the fact that it suggests an ending that is completely untenable grammatically as it would have the gospel end with the post -positive particle gar.

In these postmodern days, the envelope has been pushed even further as critics have suggested that we should not speak about the ending of Mark singular, but about its endings.

According to this view, all textual variations are equally valid and the reader is invited to invent his own ending.

And we see modern translations like the New Living Translation now inserting that very late shorter ending within the very text alongside of Mark 16 .9

through 20 and even putting the Freer Logion in the footnotes. Sadly, such a trajectory will not lead to freedom but to chaos.

The time is now to arrest this declension and affirm anew the inspired ending of Mark.

Theological reasons. If Mark 16 .9 through 20 is not original and it's not inspired, we are left with a highly dubious theological predicament.

Namely, we would have a canonical gospel that does not include any resurrection appearances of the

Lord Jesus Christ. When Paul summarized the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15, three through five, he said

Christ died for our sins according to scriptures. He was buried. He was raised again the third day according to scriptures and he appeared to Cephas and to the 12.

The resurrection appearances are a sine qua non and without which there is nothing for the gospel.

If we have a gospel without resurrection appearances, we only have a truncated gospel. We have no gospel at all.

Finally, let me address. The time is up, unfortunately, Dr. Riddle.

I'm really sorry about that. I hate to cut you off in the middle of that. No problem, no problem. But we have hit 20 minutes in that opening statement and we will now go to the rebuttal period.

And just before I do go to the rebuttal period, for those of you in the live chat, for those of you who've just joined us, welcome.

And if you want to post your questions, you can do that. Though I do encourage you stay on at least until after the cross -examination.

Once you've had the chance to hear both speakers out before you start posting your questions, you can post your questions by putting the names of the initials or the initials, the names in all caps.

That way our team watching in the live chat will be able to pick out your questions and to read them to our speakers in the

Q &A section. Priority will be given for the Super Chats that come in and your

Super Chats will be read regardless of whether we, if it's in the form of a question, we will get the speakers to answer them.

If it's in the form of a statement, we'll still read them. Nonetheless, if time permits. So with that, we move into the rebuttal period.

Dr. James White will have 10 minutes to respond to Dr. Riddle's opening statement. Your time, Dr. White starts whenever you start speaking.

Well, thank you very much. Let me point out that the positive case that I made really was not addressed in that opening statement.

Hopefully it will be during the rebuttal period. Since Dr. Riddle began with a theological perspective, let me just point out that I completely dispute the assumptions that underlie his very unique and very minority perspective.

And that is, it seems that Dr. Riddle does not understand or will not accept the reality that the individuals who frame the

Lend -A -Baptist Confession, Westminster Confession of Faith, the Savoy Declaration, did not have the information that we have today.

No one could have possibly known what the readings of thousands of manuscripts were before the modern period.

Why? Because there was no ability to catalog and communicate readings of manuscripts.

It simply couldn't be done. And so there was much that was said in the past that when faced with the reality of the manuscript evidence, doesn't turn out to be sound or well -reasoned or just simply based on the facts.

But the point is to try to drag men who were dealing with a small number of manuscripts into today's context, you gotta understand something.

Today, we have the Textus Receptus and we have the modern critical text.

This happens to be a Tyndale right now. I've got a Nestle -Aland over here. And so we can compare these and we can look at the manuscripts and we know what the manuscripts are.

And we have the papyri and the unseals and things that Erasmus would have loved to have had when he was doing his work.

So we can compare these things. They could not. They did not have that capacity.

They did not have that information available to them. To try to drag them in and say, oh, they're on my side, is an abuse of these men in history.

You cannot know what they would have said had they had the information that we possess today.

It is unfair to drag them into this situation. But it does raise the next important issue.

And that is you have one textual critical position being presented in this debate and only one.

Dr. Riddles is not a textual critical position. And as you will see, many of the points he was just making about overwhelming historical evidence tomorrow will mean nothing to him.

And that is because he has a theological position that determines everything that he sees in the historical column, in the historical data.

So as he has specifically said, quote, it is self -authenticating to the reader.

Mark 16, nine through 20 is scripture because it demonstrates itself to be that whether or not critics trust that or not based upon external evidence.

So for Dr. Riddle, this is the autograph. This is it.

And therefore all the external evidence that could be presented is utterly irrelevant.

In fact, the issue is right here. Let's put it on the table right now. If you reversed all of the external evidence that has just been discussed, made it the exact opposite,

Dr. Riddle's position would not change. Mine would, his would not. There is no external evidence.

If we found 10 notarized copies of the gospel of Mark today that go from 1 -1 to 16 -20, okay?

That would have a huge impact upon me because I want to know what the apostles wrote.

And so I'm looking at the data and I want to know what the external facts are saying.

But if we found those same 10 that we know exactly when they were written, they're written in 95

AD and they all ended at verse eight, no impact upon Dr.

Riddle's position at all. It can't have any impact if his theological position is the case.

And so that's really what's amazing here. He can talk about implicit testimonies and external evidence is overwhelming.

But then when we look at other texts, none of that will matter anymore because once you have your autograph, then you look at the data for any reading in the autograph and you defend the autograph using different argumentation.

I cannot do that. And you cannot do that in defending the text of scripture in debate around the world against skepticism, whatever else it might be.

And so this is the key issue. And this will come out in the cross -examination. And I will be asking,

I'll let Dr. Riddle know right now. First question, is there any external evidence that could be found that would change his belief that the longer ending is original?

I will say, yes, there is. He will have to say if his position is consistent or hasn't changed in the past couple of months.

No, there isn't. And so I talk about the external evidence because I think it's vitally important.

I don't see how the external evidence is relevant in a consistent fashion within the TR only position.

So I think it's important to look at that. Now, let me just point out, nothing, again, nothing was said about the development that we see in Eusebius, Jerome, that we see in the notes of the scribes recognized.

Much of what was just presented was, well, look how ancient the longer ending is. I said that in my opening.

Of course it's ancient. It's at least as ancient as Irenaeus, probably earlier than that. And I explained why.

Why is it so ancient? Well, because once you leave that early period where you have the eyewitnesses, you want to have that.

And it was just said, evidently there's a definition someplace. I'd like to know where it's found in the Bible. First Corinthians chapter 15 is not defining what the canonical elements of the gospel are for a gospel story, okay?

That's defining the gospel as a whole. Where do we get this idea that there has to be resurrection appearances for a gospel to be the gospel?

Because as I pointed out, Mark repeatedly includes prophecies of Christ's death, burial, and resurrection.

Repeatedly identifies him for who he is. Has the empty tomb in fulfillment of the prophecies.

And if therefore, not in some weird avant -garde post -modern weirdness, but if as a part of evangelism and introducing people to Jesus and facing them with who this risen savior is,

Mark ends with the women going away in fear, saying, now, what are you going to do?

And here's the eyewitnesses say, this is what Jesus said to me when I met him. This is what happened when

I encountered Jesus. Then that whole issue no longer exists. So you have to take out the prophecies.

And of course, you have to take out the reality that once you have Matthew and Luke, you have all of the resurrection appearances.

You have John, you have the resurrection appearances. Nothing, nothing. What specifically from a reformed perspective is impacted by not having the longer ending of Mark?

What do we not have anywhere else? We have resurrection appearances of Jesus.

That's not an issue. So what do we have? We have the idea of believing and being baptized.

We have the idea of Jesus appearing in different heteromorphies, different forms.

We have handling serpents, drinking poison, and speaking in tongues. Now I can see why some groups might go, yeah, we really want to have that, but I'm not sure why

Dr. Riddle would find that to be definitionally vitally important.

And so we once again have to ask the primary question, which hopefully will now be addressed in Dr.

Riddle's rebuttal. Why are there multiple endings? Why did

Jerome say what Jerome said? Why did Eusebius say what Eusebius said? Why did Victor say what Victor said? Why do you have the notes in the manuscripts that show that the scribes knew that this variant is early and it's ancient?

No one is arguing any further demonstration of the antiquity and ancient nature of the longer ending will be a waste of time.

That's already been given. That was one of the first things that I said. The issue is if it is the original, why the rest of it?

Why the shorter ending? Why the phrygologion? Why do we have mixtures? Why does the phrygologion end up inside the longer ending in Washingtonianus?

Why does that happen if the longer ending is actually original?

This is a key issue for the person who wants to approach this from a historical perspective.

My deepest concern is TR -onlyism has no consistent historical perspective.

The TR's history, how it was derived, the fact that Erasmus used the exact same kind of reasoning we do to produce the text and are then condemned for, takes the

TR out of the historical context. That is gonna be absolutely central to the discussion this evening.

Thank you. Right, thank you, Dr. White, for that rebuttal.

We now go to Dr. Jeff Riddle. You will have 10 minutes as well to respond to Dr. White's opening statement.

Your time starts whenever you start speaking. Well, tonight we're having the debate about the traditional ending of Mark.

Tomorrow we'll deal with Ephesians 3 .9. I said at the beginning that the TR position has some texts that are supported by the majority and some by the minority.

And so, strangely enough, I'm the person who wants to talk about the, seems like he wants to talk about the empirical evidence tonight.

Dr. White has said, what's wrong with having a gospel that doesn't have the resurrection appearance?

Show me a verse that says we have to have that. Well, again, 1 Corinthians chapter 15, when

Paul gives the summary of the gospel, when he tells them in 1 Corinthians 15, one, moreover, brethren,

I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also you have received and wherein you stand.

And he gives the summary that includes the resurrection appearances as essential. The other texts

I would ask you to look at in the Bible would be the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

All of them end with the resurrection appearances of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is essential for a

Christian gospel. There were Gnostic gospels that didn't include resurrection appearances, Gospel of Thomas, collection of sayings, but Orthodox Christian gospels have the resurrection appearances.

Think about before we talk about the fourfold gospel, they often circulated together, but they often circulated independently.

Again, this is before mass printing and production. And so Bibles were rare. A church might only have one copy of the gospel.

What if they only had Mark? Would it be sufficient if they had Mark without any resurrection appearances?

No, it'd be insufficient. That's why it didn't exist without those resurrection appearances. Now, let me respond to a few things that were said by my opponent.

Okay, he said, we've got all these endings because of the many endings that I don't believe that Mark 16, 9 through 20 is original.

Well, let's review the facts. There is zero evidence from the first 300 years of Christianity of any controversy surrounding the traditional ending of Mark.

There are only two extant Greek unsealed manuscripts that are early that omit the traditional ending and both have strange endings.

There are only six Greek manuscripts that have the so -called shorter ending, but then they proceed to have verses 9 through 20.

There are no extant Greek manuscripts which end at Mark 16, 8, and then add the shorter ending.

There is only one extant Greek manuscript, Codex W, which includes the Freer Logion. Look at the versional evidence for omission.

If anything, it's even weaker than the Greek evidence. We haven't talked much about Codex K, Codex Babiensis.

My opponent mentioned it briefly, but it's a Latin manuscript, an old Latin manuscript. It's the only old

Latin manuscript that excludes the traditional ending. It ends at Mark 16, 8, but it has a lot of other problems with it.

And one of the biggest is that there's a place within it where it inserts after Mark 16, 4, a long verse, but suddenly at the third hour of the day, it became dark throughout the world.

The angels ascended from heaven, rising in the glory of the living God and ascended with him, and immediately it became light.

So Codex K is not a good witness for the ending of the Gospel of Mark.

Let's talk about some of the other versional evidence. He mentioned the Sinaitic Syriac.

Yes, there is one old Syriac manuscript that omits the traditional ending, but remember, it's there in the

Diatessaron 160. It's there in a manuscript that's of equal antiquity to the

Sinaitic Syriac. It's there in the Curritonian Old Syriac. And it's in the

Peshitta Syriac, which is the Vulgate of the Syriac. It's also in the Harklian Syriac, which was issued in the year 616 by Thomas of Harkle.

He mentioned the Armenian manuscripts. This is taken directly out of Metzger's textual commentary.

So many people throw this out. You know, this information comes from a secondary source, and Metzger was citing another secondary source.

He was citing a 1937 Journal of Biblical Literature article by E .C. Colwell.

And Metzger and my opponent just now conveniently forgot to say that there are also 100

Armenian manuscripts that have the traditional ending within it. And that was nearly 100 years ago.

It's about time we update the research on that. Again, James Kelhoffer, not a

TR advocate, says, Mark's longer ending or traditional ending was met with near universal acceptance before the 19th century.

I think if my opponent will be honest, he will confess that his views on the traditional ending really don't have anything to do with multiplicity of readings in early

Christianity, but it has to do with the reading of the ending of Mark in the 19th century, and how scholars latched onto Sinaiticus and Vaticanus in order to topple and undermine the received texts.

Let's talk a little bit about the internal evidence. He raised a couple of points. One is whether or not

Mark could end at Mark 16, 8, and he hasn't really taken a position on this, and I'd love it if he would clarify, because he's arguing that Mark 16, 9 through 20 is not original, and it's not inspired as should not be received as word of God.

Well, there are only two options. Either the right ending was lost, and Mark 16, 9 through 20 was then created to replace it, or the gospel originally ended at Mark 16, 8.

In previous statements that I've listened to online, he said that he believed it ends at Mark 16, 8.

He hasn't said that tonight. He said he basically agrees with Dan Wallace, but he hasn't declared that tonight. I'd love to hear him take an actual position on it.

Again, the idea that Mark ends at Mark 16, 8 is highly problematic. Grammatically, it would be a sentence and a gospel that ended with the post -positive particle gar.

Norman Perrin has said that such an ending would be grammatically barbarous. William Barclay said it would be impossibly abrupt.

Eugene Boring said it would be no proper conclusion. And if it ends at Mark 16, 8, again, he didn't really address what

I suggested. That view didn't emerge until about 1970, 1980.

You can't find earlier scholars, for example, who were arguing that the proper ending for Mark was

Mark 16, 8. It came about with the rise of new literary criticism.

It came about with the zeitgeist of the 20th century scholar put it, one that favors disorder and irresolution.

In modern literature, there was an emphasis on the open -ended narrative technique and the idea of an anti -closure.

And so many began to say, well, it could end with mystery.

And you also, as a reader, have doubts, and this is appealing to you. Well, this is a complete, again, fantasy that was created in the late 20th century.

As one scholar put it, who has written extensively about this, and I encourage you read his book,

Croy's book on the mutilation of Mark's gospel. He said, Mark is a gospel, a proclamation of good news, not a brooding, inexplicable, existential riddle.

Mark is not Kafka. Mark is not Sartre. Mark is a gospel, and it's not gonna end without the resurrection appearances of the

Lord Jesus Christ. My opponent asked a question at the end.

He said, what would we miss out on if we didn't have the traditional ending of Mark? He mentioned a couple of things.

He talked about the reference to Jesus appearing in another form. Well, all the gospels say that when

Christ appeared to the disciples, that many had a difficult time immediately recognizing him.

This is the account of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. It's the experience of Mary Magdalene in John's gospel, and also the seven disciples by the

Sea of Tiberias in John 21. They didn't immediately, the new form is the resurrection form.

That's what they didn't immediately recognize. He also made a couple of glancing blows at some other things, but let me see if I can focus primarily on his saying that we don't need the list of the so -called signs that are given at the very end of Mark 16, nine through 20.

There are five signs that are listed there, casting out devils, speaking with new tongues, taking up serpents, drinking any deadly thing, and laying hands on the sick that they might recover.

Those aren't strange things. Paul will cast out the demons from the slave girl in Philippi in Acts 16, the girl who has the pithec spirit.

In Acts 2, Pentecost, the disciples will speak in new tongues, taking up serpents.

Paul will do this in Acts 28, one through six, after he shipwrecked on Malta. Drinking any deadly thing.

This may be one of the hardest ones, but consider Luke 10, verse 19. Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you.

Well, that's consistent with what Luke said, isn't it? What about the laying of hands on the sick so that they can recover?

Time has called for time. Yeah. Yeah, I'm really sorry to cut you off again, Dr. Jeff, but it's crossed 10 minutes.

And with that, I thank you both, Dr. James White and Dr. Jeff Riddle for the rebuttal.

We're now gonna go into the fun part of the debate, the one I know that those of you watching at home will look forward to.

It's the cross -examination. We're gonna begin with Dr. James White, but before we go to him, once again, a reminder for those of you watching at home, you can submit your questions, which will be raised in the 20 -minute cross -exam, in the 20 -minute

Q &A happening at the end of this discussion. So feel free to submit your questions.

Just make sure you include the initials of the speaker that your question is directed to in all caps, and then followed with your question, our team will pick them up.

Preference will be given, priority rather, will be given to the Super Chats that come in.

We're gonna go to Dr. James White now, who will have 10 minutes in the cross -examination.

Dr. James White will ask questions and Dr. Riddle will answer them without dodging and without following up with another question.

Dr. James White, as the person cross -examining, will control the time in this discussion and will give his opponent ample of time to respond.

And so with that, your 10 minutes, Dr. White, starts now. Well, I wanna be a man of my word.

So Dr. Riddle, if the external evidence were the exact opposite of what it is right now, would that change your perspective on the longer ending of art?

Well, I mean, again, I'm not crazy about hypothetical questions because we really can't take hypothetical questions.

What if I said, I wanna ask you a hypothetical question. What if we found a copy of the 10

Commandments that didn't have the seventh commandment, thou shalt not commit adultery?

Would it be okay to commit adultery then? Well, we would say no, because whatever you found was gonna be a violation of the moral law of God that's revealed in scripture.

And so if I hold, as did, I think, the particular

Baptist forebears, the Westminster divines, that the scriptures that they had that were in the printed form, the copies that were printed in their time, that those autographs, those copies, were the autographs.

And so if you tell me that you find a manuscript that contradicts what is the word of God, I would say, no, it would not change my opinion, my position on that because the word of God is settled.

Is this the autograph, sir? The autograph, I would say that I agree with the

Trinitarian Bible Society statement on the doctrine of scripture, and wherein they suggest a group of printed texts of the

Texas Receptus, but I can't see what you're holding up. What is it? Trinitarian Bible Society TR.

Okay, I think that the Scribner's edition of the

TR is an excellent one, but like the Trinitarian Bible Society, I would appeal to the group of reformed printings of the

TR from the Reformation era as the standard for what scripture is, the Protestant standard for scripture.

Could anything be discovered in our day that would in any way lead you to not believe that verses nine through 20 of Mark chapter 16 are the inspired word of God and have been providentially preserved?

I do not believe that anything will be discovered that will invalidate the authenticity and originality of Mark 16, nine through 20.

That wasn't my question, of course. You changed my question. My question was, could anything be discovered?

Could any amount of information at all ever be discovered that would change your understanding that verses nine through 20 are absolutely inspired and inerrant and are in fact representative of the autograph?

Not you don't believe that something will, could anything be discovered?

Again, I think I answered it. I think I answered it from my framework and perspective. You might not like the answer, but I said,

I do not think anything will be uncovered that will ultimately deny the authenticity, originality of Mark 16, nine through 20.

I mean, if an atheist came up to a Christian and said, is there anything, any evidence or proof that I could show you that God doesn't exist, would you agree with me that you don't believe in the existence of God?

I mean, that's a question that a Christian can't rightly respond to because he says,

I, sorry, go ahead. So from your perspective, the existence of God and the infallibility of the

Textus Receptus are on the same level, epistemologically speaking. Well, my belief in the authority and the finality and the sufficiency of scripture is a biblical doctrine, as is the doctrine of God.

And so I think any key cardinal tenet of Christianity, I'm not gonna entertain the possibility that there could be something that can invalidate it because I'm a believer.

I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Can you not see the difference, however, sir, between the answer you gave and the question that was being asked?

Because what is being asked here is, is your belief in the

Textus Receptus' autographic nature something that is connected to its existence in history, or is it simply a presuppositional ontological commitment such as one's belief in the existence of God?

Definitely, I have a theological presupposition that I believe in the sufficiency of scripture and I believe in the word of God.

And I already said, I believe in what the scholar, Richard Brash, who studied the framers of the

Confessions, the Westminster Divines, he said, and as have others like Richard Muller, that they believed that there was a practical,

I can't ever say it, equality, let's say, between the autographs and the opigraphs.

And so when you say, can you find anything that would dislodge the text of scripture?

I would say, no, I can't discover anything that would dislodge the text of scripture. I wouldn't pose it.

So OCR is the definition of the text of scripture? It is, yes. For you? Well, I think it is for anyone and everyone.

It is for everyone, okay. Yes. So that would mean that, for example, when Athanasius is defending the deity of Christ, following the

Council of Nicaea, he was using the TR, right? Well, this debate is about Mark 16, 9 through 20.

And there certainly could be times and places in history where people who are

Christians could be in error about things. And so they could be in error about their beliefs about scripture.

Most people have had experienced some sort of development in their understanding of things. There was a time when

I didn't understand the text of scripture in the way that I do now. So any particular example of some person in the past who used a reading that wasn't compatible with the

TR wouldn't necessarily invalidate the faith of that person necessarily. But if you're saying that the text of scripture has been kept pure in all ages and the

TR is the autograph, then it would follow that if God providentially brought the

TR about in the 16th century, then he surely did the same thing in the 4th century when it was the issue of who

Jesus is. So surely this is what Athanasius was using and he had the longer ending of Mark, right?

I think in this case, rather than speaking hypothetically, we can speak, because this is a debate about Mark 16, 9 through 20, we can speak very concretely.

And as I've noted, when we look at the evidence, we see that there was a period of dispute about the traditional ending of Mark from about 300 to 500.

And there are a few scattered references to this that can be found. But then there was an organic consensus that developed that affirmed the authenticity of Mark 16, 9 through 20.

And so I think eventually there will be the, God will providentially preserve his word.

So any individual instances of persons who perhaps were in error don't invalidate

God's preservation of his word as the confession says, and I believe you hold to the second line of Baptist confession also.

Maybe I'll ask you in the Q &A how you interpret it. But what it says in chapter one, paragraph eight, that God's word has been kept pure in all ages by God's providence.

How else can we understand it? But you have said, for example, there's no evidence of dispute in the first 300 years.

Can you give me a manuscript that contains the long ending of Mark in the first 300 years? I cannot, but I cited for you.

Okay, I was only asking you one question. Can you give me any explanation for the arise of other endings in light of your assertion that evidently all manuscripts contain the longer ending, or are you even, are you willing to admit that all manuscripts in the first 300 years did not in fact contain the longer ending, so there had to have been disputes?

Well, there's no evidence of any dispute in the 300 years. For example, provide the canon for it. Excuse me?

Why doesn't Eusebius, for example, provide in his canon numbers for the longer ending? Eusebius is in the fourth century, not -

I know, but he's reflecting earlier. 300 years. I said in the first 300 years. Okay.

And so what I would say is, I don't know why, I don't know why there were limited and scattered disputes about the ending of Mark.

I suggested one reason that's been talked about, and that was there was some question that's reflected in Eusebius' letter to Marinus, that there was some question about the time of the resurrection.

Other people have suggested other reasons. William Farmer, another notorious KJV -oneless who taught at Southern Methodist University, wrote a book on the last 12 verses of Mark, and he suggested several reasons hypothetically for why there might've been an effort to suppress these verses, but I would say we don't know.

We don't know why there was effort. We only know that it was eventually overcome. All right.

With that, the time is up. 10 minutes. We now go to Dr. Jeff -

Sam, have you noticed that I'm very, very specific about time? Oh, absolutely. I did notice that.

I did. Yeah, you stopped. I think you've stopped five seconds ahead of time.

So yeah, that was taken into note. And I also wanna thank Dr. James White for also allowing

Dr. Jeff Riddle to answer the question. And we're now gonna go to Dr. Jeff Riddle who will ask the questions to Dr.

White, and Dr. White will answer them without dodging or without repeating back the question or answering in the form of a question.

Dr. Jeff, you have 10 minutes, sir, and your time starts at your first word. Okay. Given that the traditional ending of Mark is quoted by Justin Martyr around the year 150, and it's explicitly quoted by Irenaeus around the year 180, when do you think the traditional ending was created?

You gave an interesting theory about perhaps eyewitnesses even from the time of Mark, but how then was this ending, if it was spurious, able to be incorporated into Mark's gospel in such a way as to escape the notice or mention of any

Christian in the first three centuries of early Christianity? Well, of course, I dispute the entire foundation of the question.

First of all, there's question about whether Justin Martyr actually did cite it. You did say, Irenaeus, no one is disputing that it's very, very early.

It's definitely second century. So I don't need to really worry about that. What I did say, and at some point you said

I had never taken a stance on this, and yet everyone's commenting about the fact that I had very, very clearly taken a stance on this.

What I did say was that after the period of the eyewitnesses the form that Mark's gospel was written in would very naturally require someone to go, well, now that we have

Matthew, now that we have Luke, we want Mark to be like that. So as soon as you have the collection of gospel manuscripts, and as you know, pretty much every single early papyrus we have of gospel manuscripts is

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So once they are brought together, which is very, very early, I'd say by as early as 100 maybe earlier, then that force is going to be exerted of harmonization and therefore the desire to have, well, like I said,

Freer Logion, intermediate, longer ending, mix them together, that's what you end up having.

So it happens very, very early. Very early. I apologize for not understanding you earlier.

So can you simplify it for me? Do you believe that Mark originally ended at Mark 16, 8, or did it have another ending that was lost?

I said very, very plainly, very, very clearly multiple times in my presentation that I do believe that it ended at verse eight as we have it today.

I do not believe that an ending was lost. That's technically possible if the

Mark and gospel was written on a codex, but if it was written on a scroll, that wouldn't be really a possibility because the ending would be on the inner part of the scroll, not the outer part of the scroll.

But we don't have almost any scrolls of anything. So it's technically possible.

I'm not gonna go to the mat over something like that, but I know, I believe that it was finished at verse eight.

Okay, thank you. It had nothing to do with it. Now, do you think the person who wrote

Mark 16, 9 through 20 or compiled it from eyewitnesses as you gave this theory earlier, do you think this person -

I didn't say that. I, no, I'm - All right, let's just bring it back. I did not say that the longer ending was compiled from eyewitnesses.

Is that what you think I said? That's what I perceived, but I might be wrong. No, no, no. That's not essential for this question.

Let me ask this. Whoever compiled Mark 16, 9 through 20, was that person orthodox, you think, in theology?

Not from what he wrote. I mean, I do believe that, and I said this sort of humorously, but I'll make it very plain here.

I do believe that you can really work hard to try to come up with a way to interpret different form the way that you did, or believe and be baptized the way that you do, or the other things that you did.

Apostolic miracles as being every follower of Jesus. It just is an extremely unnatural reading.

And so, no, I actually don't think that it finds itself to be overly amenable to an orthodox reading.

Okay, so to be crystal clear, the person who wrote Mark 16, 9 through 20 was not orthodox in his theology.

You asked me if I felt that he was orthodox, and I'm just simply saying, given however many words are in verses 9 through 20, there seems to be some question about that.

But I don't know who it was. I don't know when it was. It was very early. So he could have just been,

I mean, this is around the same time period as the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas. And there's all sorts of stuff in both of those that when

I teach those subjects, I'm like, ugh. Okay, so just to be clear on something else.

So you believe then that Mark 16, 9 through 20 was essentially an unorthodox corruption of the

Gospel of Mark. Is that correct? I believe Mark 16, 9 through 20 most probably was written by someone who was not fully familiar with the entirety of the

New Testament and was added to harmonize it with Matthew and Luke. Yes, so any textual variation whatsoever is a corruption.

So if you wanna use the term corruption, you can. A lot of people consider the term corruption to be significantly of a stronger meaning than just simply a textual variant.

Okay, I wanna address something that just came to mind through your response. I didn't get a chance to complete what

I was saying about the five sign gifts in Mark 16. Do you believe that this was addressed, this teaching was addressed to all disciples or just to the 11?

You mean interpreting the longer ending? It seems -

When it says, for example, in verse 14, he appeared to the 11 as they sat.

And then it says in verse 15, he said unto them, to whom is the teaching that includes, and these signs shall follow in verse 17, to whom is that addressed?

To the 11 or to all believers? Well, verse 17 specifically says, these signs will accompany who?

Those who have believed. So it's not just limited to the 11. But isn't the whole issue, isn't the issue if you go back to verse 14, that Christ has been upbraiding them for their apostia, for their unbelief.

And now he's saying that these signs will follow those that believe.

In context, isn't it clear that he's addressing the apostles, the 11? No, I do not believe so because it says, notice it says, he said to them, go into all the world and preach the gospel to all, to all creation.

And then in the context of that, he says, these signs will accompany those who believe, tois pistusasin.

And so if you wanna limit that, I find that to be a very unnatural reading. I think the natural reading is that this is a statement that this is the supernatural vindication of what

Christianity is supposed to look like. These are the sign gifts that go along with it. That would be a problem for me because I think they're apostolic sign gifts that were only given to the apostles.

So I can see why you'd wanna limit it that way. Well, if someone were to interpret this passage as this teaching being directed to the apostles, then wouldn't this be one of the chief texts that we have within the

New Testament that addresses cessationism? Because it says, for example, in verse 20, that speaking to those who are gonna go out and preach to the apostles, that the

Lord was confirming the word with signs following. So isn't it addressed to the 11?

And wouldn't this be one of the key passages that addresses cessationism?

I have never heard anyone use it that way. And if they did, I think a sharp continuationist could make the exact same point that I did.

That's not what verse 17 says. Mm -hmm. But you can see the possibility though that this passage could also be meant to oppose continuationism.

I really doubt that. I've never read anyone who actually thought that that was relevant to this particular subject, but I know some really sharp continuationists and I wouldn't try that with them for love no money.

No. Do you really think that early Christians would have accepted a gospel that did not have any account of the resurrection appearances of the

Lord Jesus Christ? Yes, I've already said that. Because Mark very, very plainly, very, very clearly prophesies with specificity, more than sufficient specificity of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us the empty tomb, transitions right into the evangelistic presentation.

No problem at all. Yeah, definitely. Sam, how much time do I have? 41 seconds.

I will stop so that I will stop on time. Well, you do have at least more than 30 seconds, but yeah, if you want to go.

I'll stop. Dr. Riddle, I'd like to offer to send you a digital stopwatch for future use.

I'm new to this. I'm new to this, so. They're really cool. They've got buttons on them and it's really neat.

Now, I know this is not the first time you've offered your opponent a stopwatch, Dr. White. That's right, that's right.

I've done that many times. I have my suspicions whether you're being sponsored in any way, but. Well, I was sponsored by RadioShack, but they went out of business, so there you go.

Well, thank you both, Dr. Jeff Riddle and Dr. James White for having this with so much cordiality and for allowing the other person time to respond.

This has been wonderful. For those of you still watching, this is when your questions need to start coming. You can type in your questions as I keep repeating.

Ensure that you have the name of the speaker your question is directed to or the initial in all caps so that our team can pick them up.

Again, priority will be given to the Super Chats. With that, ladies and gentlemen, we go into the final phase before the

Q &A, which is the response and the closing statements. 10 minutes.

Dr. James White, I'm sorry, we'll have 10 minutes. Your time, Dr. White, starts at your first word. Well, thank you very much.

There's just so much here, and we will be continuing this, at least for us, tomorrow morning, for those of you in Malaysia, late, late, late tonight,

I guess. And so some more of this is gonna be fleshed out. Just on the subject of today, very, very briefly,

I dispute very strongly the assertion that there is no evidence of 300 years of a conflict over this.

There very plainly is. And that is seen in Eusebius and Jerome. You see,

Eusebius and Jerome are giving us information in their day. That's not like it had just started happening. So obviously, given that there can be no, there's been no positive evidence given of a manuscript containing the longer ending from that time period.

And yet we know from what they said that there were both those that had and did not have it.

Obviously, there was a discussion about this. The only reason you don't have a discussion about it in extant materials, there's just not that much extant material from that time period that would get into it.

I just think that is really a bad argument. I thought that the 1

Corinthians 15, one response as well was very, very poor. Gnostic gospels, to even try to parallel them, there is simply nothing in scripture that says, if you're going to write something called a gospel, then it has to have these issues in it.

And Mark does cover everything, by the way. The prophecies of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, please do not undo them.

Do not make them secondary. They are right there. No one reading Mark's gospel, when they encounter the women at the empty tomb are gonna go,

I don't wonder what happened. Very plainly, the spirit of God gives us this gospel and Matthew and Luke and John.

And here's the point, just because something has come down to us later does not allow us to turn that around and force it back onto what was apostolic.

What is the key issue here? The key issue is what did the apostles write?

What did they give us? Not what fits into our parameters or even our confessions of faith at a later point in time.

We want to know what the apostles wrote. And the key issue here is that for Dr.

Riddle's position, and this came out, you don't have to listen to me, go listen to the dialogue that he had with Peter Gurry and James Snap and the issues that came up at that time.

As Dr. Gurry said, is there any evidence that I could present to you? I think they were talking about the comet that time, but it's the same thing here.

Is there any evidence I could give you? And I think what is very, very, very, very, very important, I hope everyone caught this, is that in the conversation that Dr.

Riddle and I were just having, Dr. Riddle paralleled his knowledge of a textual variant, not of the scriptures, but of a textual variant that appears in the

Textus Receptus with the knowledge of God as the epistemological presupposition of all reasoning.

Now that to me, folks, is extremely dangerous. We must make that distinction.

We have to make that distinction or we are stuck with massive contradiction.

What do I mean? Well, the fact of the matter is, there is no manuscript that reads like this anywhere on God's green earth, nowhere.

And so not only do you end up cutting off the ancient church, cutting off, when you look at the manuscripts that Athanasius used to defend the deity of Christ, this isn't what he was using.

That was vitally important. Folks, do you have any idea how important those four decades after the Council of Nicaea were?

During that time, Arianism reigned supreme. We would have had a semi -deity

Jesus. There would have been no Christianity. It would have collapsed. Athanasius contramundum, but he did not use the

TR. And so if you make the mistake of equating the specific textual readings of this

Greek text, which was based upon an English translation, which was based upon printed Greek texts, based upon maybe 12 to 20 manuscripts at most, if you confuse this with the epistemological foundation of the existence of God himself, you're in big trouble.

You must make a distinction between the canonical authority of the gospel of Mark and the decision you make regarding the longer ending of Mark because of the fact that there is the historical reality of a dispute about its originality.

There is no basis for having a historical dispute about the originality of Matthew as scripture, but the variant readings, the

ECM of Mark is about to come out. Well, they told me when I was in Munster in 2019, it was done, but I'm not sure why it's taking so long.

But the ECM of Mark is about to come out, please, faster than, sooner than later. And there's a variant at the beginning, beginning of the gospel of Mark, where it describes

Jesus as a son of God. It's a long genitive phrase there. And I'm really looking forward to what the

CBGM analysis of that is gonna be, et cetera, et cetera. That is a textual variant in the gospel of Mark, but it is not the same as the gospel of Mark as a whole.

If we do not make the distinction between Mark as scripture, Mark as canon scripture, and individual readings of a letter or an article or the order of words, then you will end up having to create what we've created here, a standard that never existed in history until Scribner created it.

Never existed in history. There is no manuscript that reads like this anywhere. And there is no evidence that anyone, the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, on the way down had what we have here.

So if you do that, you end up destroying the role of scripture in the development and defense of Christian theology down through the history of the church.

And I believe Christ has been building his church for 2 ,000 years, is gonna continue building his church.

And I believe he's preserved his word, but he didn't have to providentially re -preserve it, inspire it, whatever.

I don't even know how you use the term preservation when you don't have any historical evidence of this text in this form in history.

So however you wanna put it, I believe that every single original reading of the apostles continues to exist in the manuscript tradition today.

Every single one, it has been preserved. And I am so thankful that in the day of the internet, when people like Bart Ehrman are spewing their unbelief all over the place, at that very time, we have access to more information about the transmission of the text of both the

Old and New Testaments than any generation before us. We have it sitting on these little things.

Amazingly enough, we know where the manuscripts are. Thanks to CSNTM, now we can even go and look at the manuscripts in many instances and demonstrate the accuracy of the collations that we have been given.

Erasmus would have given anything to have what we have today.

My concern is once you buy this confusion, and this is not, not, not what the framers of the

Westminster Confession of Faith, London Baptist Confession of Faith believed. They did not have these two different texts in their hands and they weren't going, well, this is better than this.

They didn't have that. They didn't have the information we have today. That's why I said you cannot drag them into this conversation and say,

I'm the one representing them. That is not fair in any way, shape or form. And so I am so thankful that today we have so much more available to us to be able to give a full orb defense, not a humanistic defense, not a skeptical defense, but to defend against the skeptics.

You can believe in the absolute sovereignty of God and his providence in time and believe that he has protected his word and defend it historically.

I was gonna mention this earlier. If you wanna dig more into this particular subject, there's an excellent book out there,

Perspectives on the Ending of Mark, four views that came out a number of years ago. Check it out, look at all the evidence and then ask yourself a simple question.

Here's the question that I've been asking all evening. If the longer ending's original, why the other endings?

Why the textual evidence in translations, in manuscripts? We've sort of forgot manuscript 304 once, it sort of disappeared, but that manuscript as well.

Why the comments from Eusebius? Why the comments from Jerome? Why the other endings?

That is the key issue. I only wanna preach what is theanoustos, what has been given by God.

When you have that kind of evidence, you need to be very, very careful. Thank you for listening so carefully this evening.

Eight, seven, six, and we'll call it a stop right there. Oh, yes. And the bell didn't work this time, so I'm not sure what's happening there with the bell, but thank you,

Dr. White, for sticking so promptly to time. We now go to the closing statements from Dr.

Jeff Riddle. Dr. Jeff, your summary and your response in 10 minutes, whenever you're ready, sir.

Well, I thank you as well for this opportunity to be here this evening. Again, the traditional ending of Mark demonstrates its antiquity, its ubiquity, and its authenticity.

Regarding its antiquity, it is the most ancient reading. How do we know that it existed in the first 300 years of early

Christianity? Look again at the citation that was given by Irenaeus in the year 180, where he clearly says, this is the way

Mark begins, this is the way that it ends. Regarding ubiquity, it appears in some of the earliest uncial manuscripts from throughout the

Christian world, and it dominated in all the early versions that were produced in early

Christianity. Regarding authenticity, at the time of the Reformation, it was acknowledged to be the word of God and was rightly incorporated without controversy into the printed editions of the

Greek New Testament and translated into the vulgar languages of the people. Among the Protestant Orthodox, it was preached, taught, studied, and used within the foundational

Protestant confessions. It is the traditional text. To defend and hold fast to Mark 16, 9 through 20 as the word of God is to be traditional and conservative in the best sense of those words.

We can affirm the authenticity of Mark 16, 9 through 20, again, on the three grounds I mentioned in the beginning, on the basis of the overwhelming external evidence.

Secondly, on the basis of the overwhelming internal evidence. Even those who reject the authenticity of the traditional ending concede that it is hard to argue against the fact that it has a distinctly

Markan feel to it, and my opponent hasn't even challenged that tonight. To suggest that Mark originally ended at 16, 8 is to deny the doctrine of preservation by suggesting that a notorious corruption has been wrongly accepted as the word of God for the vast majority of Christians throughout

Christian history. If Mark 16, 9 through 20 is a corruption, an unorthodox corruption we heard tonight, it's cited in the

Westminster Confession of Faith and the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith. There is a heretical unorthodox corruption cited in our

Protestant confessions if this is the case. I've already said that to end Mark 16 at verse 8 would be a grammatically barbarous conclusion.

He has never opposed that. He's never offered any opposition. I've said that several times. He's never explained why it could end with a post -positive particle.

Even N .T. Wright, hardly a TR advocate, has confessed.

He said this, I tried for some years to believe that Mark was really a postmodernist who would deliberately leave his gospel with a dark and puzzling ending, but I have for some time now given up the attempt.

Structurally, it could not have ended without the story of the risen, vindicated

Jesus. And in this case, I agree with N .T. Wright. Don't agree with him often. On historical, theological, and canonical grounds, to remove the traditional ending again is to say we could have a canonical gospel that might have existed without resurrection appearances.

It is to remove from the Bible one of the strongest and clearest texts addressing cessationism. There, I finally got to it.

I recently recorded a podcast on the book titled Why Religion, written by the

Princeton University professor Elaine Pagels. She was a scholar of the

Gnostic literature of early Christianity, and actually an advocate for sort of the revival of Gnostic spirituality.

Near the end of this book, which is her memoir, she spends some five pages discussing the ending of Mark, in which she revels in embracing the notion that Mark originally ended at Mark 16 .8.

She says, someone among Mark's early readers wanted the gospel to end on a more positive note and wrote a second ending, adding several episodes to mitigate that awful scene.

Later, she adds, troubling as others found Mark's original version, I preferred it.

Well, of course she prefers it. The Gnostic gospels, like Thomas, that she admires so much, also omitted any reference to the resurrection and the resurrection appearances.

Would we really have had an Orthodox gospel in the context of apologetics against Marcion and Gnostics?

Would they have approved a gospel that did not have resurrection appearances? We've also been told tonight that, you know, the men of the

Reformation era, the Puritans, the framers of the confessions, they really didn't have all the evidence.

If they had all the evidence that we had, they would have made a different decision. I would encourage you to take down the commentary written by Thomas Manton, who was one of three clerks at the

Westminster Assembly. His commentary on James is still in print, published by Banner of Truth, and read the preface in which he defends the canonicity of the book of James.

And he says this, he says, if James were removed, it would exceedingly furnish the triumphs of hell.

And the church would be greatly disadvantaged by the loss of so considerable a part of the canon.

What's really interesting is what he says next. He says, for the case doth not only concern this epistle, but diverse others, as the second of Peter, the second and third epistle of John, the book of Revelation.

And then he says, the last chapter of Mark. They were not ignorant of these things.

He also goes on to talk about the Pericope Adultery and some other passages that were being defended.

Manton and the other men of that era believed that it was essential that they defend the traditional text of the word of God.

In preparing for this debate, I also reviewed the conclusion of James Kelhoffer's important study that I've mentioned a couple of times,

Miracle and Mission. And on the last page, he offers this observation.

He says the rejection of the authenticity of the traditional ending noted a conspicuous alteration with the creation of the traditional ending.

It was a conspicuous alteration of the ending of Mark's gospel. And he says, interestingly enough, it is a striking example of what

Bart Ehrman has credibly termed the corruption and continual rewriting of biblical texts by proto -Orthodox believers.

Now, I was thinking that James White might say that the author of Mark 16, 9 through 20 was at least partially

Orthodox. Bart Ehrman says that he believes Mark 16, 9 through 20 was a corruption and it was done by some proto -Orthodox believer.

Whether it was a proto -Orthodox believer or a semi -Orthodox believer or even an unorthodox believer, it seems that James White and Bart Ehrman actually have exactly the same view on Mark 16, 9 through 20.

They believe it is a spurious corruption. And we've been told tonight, we can't do apologetics against Bart Ehrman unless we embrace the modern critical text.

But it seems to me that there have been evangelicals who in embracing the modern critical text have essentially capitulated to the

Bart Ehrmans of this world. And it is actually those who hold to the traditional text who can have a meaningful apologetic in our world today against those who have denied and rejected the scriptures.

It is time in my opinion for traditional and conservative men in the best sense of those terms,

Protestant, evangelical, reformed and confessional men to realize that we must take a stand for the text of scripture.

And we must defend it from the inroads of the enlightenment influence academy.

Well, I'm looking at my time. Friends, we must clearly reject the resolution that has been put forward and defended tonight by my opponent.

The traditional ending of Mark is original. We have overwhelming external evidence that validates this.

It is inspired. It is theonoustos. It is self -authenticating, altopistos.

The sheep have heard and will continue to hear in its words the voice of their shepherd.

It should therefore be gladly and confidently received as the word of God.

Thank you. Well, thank you for that, Dr. Jeff Riddle.

You finished with 33 seconds on the clock. So, oh yes.

Well, thank you with that. The formal part of this debate has just concluded.

And before we get to the Q &A, I just wanted to thank both debaters, Dr. James White and Dr. Jeff Riddle for maintaining such

Christian charitability to one another, being charitable to one another, and really gracious, particularly in the cross -examination.

I'm sure our viewers at home really managed to hear both sides of the argument.

Well, with that, we go to the Q &A. And we start with the, well,

I have three Super Chats for Dr. White, which we'll go first, and then we'll have questions for Dr.

Riddle as well. Dr. White, the first question - So, you're telling me that I get the expensive questions and everybody asking him -

Well, I guess that's a motivation for those of you in the chat who want to ask questions for Dr.

Riddle to ask expensive questions for Dr. Riddle. Well, that's one way to do it. Thank you, Dr. White. I'm just trying to get you a little more money here, bro.

I mean, you're a starving seminary student. I remember what that was all about. Well, thank you.

Well, the first question, thank you, Andrew Clover, for your question and your Super Chat. Dr. White, could you address your argument that your position is, could you address the argument that your position is inconsistent with your presuppositionalism?

Well, I didn't hear that specifically being laid out, but I did actually address the fact that I see a real danger here.

I see epistemological confusion when you can't make the distinction, the category distinction, between variant readings of articles and words, so on and so forth in a text, and the text as a whole.

So if you can't tell the difference between the Gospel of Mark as the Gospel of Mark and the

Gospel of Mark, whether it says the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, or it doesn't say the Son of God, that creates a real problem.

So I obviously do not see any contradiction, inconsistency whatsoever in recognizing the presuppositional nature of the triune

God as the foundation for anything that we've been discussing. We've been discussing divine revelation.

Well, you have to have a God who speaks, you have to have creatures who've been made in His image, they're able to understand what is being said, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's no contradiction. If someone is trying to say that to be a true presuppositionalist, this is the position you have to hold, tell that to Van Til, tell that to Bonson, none of them held this position.

So I just don't see where there's an issue of contradiction at all. Well, thank you.

The second question again for Dr. White from Bill Hardecker, thank you for your super chat. The question is, would or could it be possible that Aleph and Bea copied from a

Markan text that had lost its last leaf? Yeah, that's one of the comments that is made.

The problem is that, first of all, we know that, for example, with Bea, in light of P75, that both go back to an earlier exemplar, probably around 100.

And so the idea that a massive undertaking, such as Vaticanus or Sinaiticus, which are huge,

I mean, it's hard for people to understand just what a huge undertaking it was to produce these things, would be dependent upon a single manuscript that had lost the last leaf.

I could see that during the period of persecution, maybe with a single book, like a

P72 or something like that, but something like this that is clearly being done in a large scriptorium, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

And then the other issue that I did mention was if Mark was originally written on a scroll, and there's questions about this, because the

Christians use the Codex. We have almost, what, half a dozen, at most, Christian scrolls, grand total.

But if it was written on a scroll, the ending wouldn't be in danger. It would be actually the beginning that is at issue.

But combine this, and I'm not getting any feedback from people on this, combine this with the fact that there's very obviously other manuscripts that didn't have them.

Jerome and Eusebius said the majority in their day did not have the longer ending.

They ended at verse eight. I guess you could theorize that one manuscript lost the last section, and all of those are a copy from that, but that's pretty wild.

That's pretty wild. Well, thank you, Dr. White. Third question, again, for Dr. White, before we move on to Dr.

Jeff Riddle from Bow Sutton. Thank you for your super chat. The question is, Dr. White, from a theological perspective, what areas of the longer ending of Mark can be considered unorthodox?

Well, again, it was said that I have decided the theological perspective of the individual.

I tried to be very clear about what I said. All I can judge is the longer ending, and the longer ending requires you to really stretch the meaning of the words, to read them in a fully orthodox fashion, okay?

That's all I said. I'm not one of those people who think you can come up with much more than that.

I'm not gonna try to read the man's mind or anything along those lines, but very clearly, the issues that are troubling in the longer ending is the use of the phrase other forms.

That's not just simply, well, people didn't recognize Jesus because they didn't expect to see him. No, this literally says, and please give me a second here to grab this again.

I'm sorry, I have to pull it up here. There it is. Verse 12 specifically uses an heteromorphic.

Now, in another form, that sounds like it's tinged with Gnosticism to me.

I think you can make a good argument along those lines. That's troubling to me.

The issue of believe and be baptized, connected together in the way that they are, and then the extension to all believers.

I appreciate Dr. Riddle's attempt to limit it to the apostles and stuff like that, but it seems pretty obvious to me, verse 17, all those who believe, this is what they'll do.

And there are a lot of people in the Appalachian Mountains that take that very seriously along those lines.

Those would be the areas that I would go, man, that really requires you to, I said in my opening, you can come up with an orthodox interpretation, but it seems like a real stretch to me.

Well, thank you for that, Dr. White. Now, our first question for Dr. Riddle, would you accept a reading that is majority, but can be explained as not original by homo taluton or homo archicon, spelled in the

English. So isn't the issue which reading explains the others rather than the majority?

Dr. Riddle, you're muted. Sorry. Even though the language of that question reflects the presupposition that I would be using reason to collecticism, which teaches that you try to get the best reading.

The best reading is the one that explains all the other readings. And we've seen some example of that in my opponent's arguments tonight, saying he has to reject the longer ending because he's gotta have an explanation for why there are all these endings and so forth.

So I would reject the presupposition. I'm not attempting to do reason eclectic study of the text.

However, yes, there are places where I would say that there's a text that is authentic that might not be represented in the majority text.

We'll look at an example of this tomorrow in Ephesians 3 .9. But I will not do it on the basis of using the reason eclectic method because I don't advocate using reason to eclecticism or thoroughgoing eclecticism as a method.

I said I refer to the method that I would prefer as providential eclecticism, that is relying on the passages that were chosen to be incorporated into the traditional text by those who edited the text with the invention of the printing or with the printing revolution, technological revolution that happened correspondingly with the

Reformation. Well, thank you for that. Another follow -up question to you, Dr.

Riddle. What does Dr. Riddle believe about the Boomberg Hebrew text, traditional text via the reformers versus the modern

Hebraica Stuttgart, I can't pronounce that, but I'm sure you know what

I'm referring to. Stuttgartensia. Yeah, that's the one. He's asking for a comparison between the 1525

Blomberg, which was used in the King James and the current Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. There's only eight differences between the two of them, but anyway, that wasn't my question.

Obviously, our debate tonight is about Mark 16, 9 through 20 and I didn't come prepared to defend the

Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. But again, I would say I am in agreement with the

Trinitarian Bible Society statement on the doctrine of Holy Scripture. And if you read that statement, not only does it mention that the authoritative text for the

Greek Texas Receptus is the group of printed editions of the

TR that were created in the Reformation era, but it also notes that the Bomberg Hebrew Bible printed also in the

Reformation era is considered to be the standard printed edition for the

Masoretic text. So if that answers the question, I would prefer the readings and I would hold that the readings in Bomberg would be the ones that would be authoritative.

We'd have to talk about differences. He just said there were eight differences. You know, we'd have to talk about those on a case -by -case basis.

And I'm obviously not prepared to talk about that tonight. I think. Another one question for you.

This is a super chat. Thanks again from Bill Hardecker. To Dr. Riddle, do you believe that Erasmus had no access to Aleph?

Well, I think we, to Aleph? Yep, that's the question. And I don't know.

I mean, there's, we'll probably touch on this a little bit tomorrow when we're talking about defending a minority reading from the

TR. There's lots of speculation about what manuscripts

Erasmus had access to. And you can read different scholars who have different opinions about that.

But we don't know. We can't say that we know exhaustively what he had access to.

I think it's highly unlikely he would have had access to Sinaiticus. Was it Sinaiticus or Vaticanus?

Vaticanus, he wrote, he had a correspondent that he wrote and got information about it.

But, you know, he asked for that about several passages like the

Coma Ionaeum. But did he have access to, like, did he ever see it? Did he ever examine it?

I don't know. Right. Dr. Riddle, do you mind if I answer that? Sure, go ahead.

Sinaiticus wasn't discovered. Tischendorf, that's hundreds of years down the road. So of course he didn't have access.

Of course it wasn't, but that doesn't mean that he couldn't have, you know, it's unlikely. It was in the monastery at St.

Catherine's, but I don't know. I mean, could he have had some access to it? Is it absolutely no?

I don't know. Yeah, I would say, yes, it's absolutely no, but you were correct.

You mentioned Bombasius, which was his correspondent in Rome. He did know about the Vatican manuscript and did ask him about some readings, even though he could not utilize it.

But Sinaiticus was a long ways away and there wasn't no internet back then. Right, and for those of you watching, do you know how nice it is to actually have a discussion without the moderator jumping in?

Just saying. Well, with that. What, you didn't like what Chris Wallace did?

Come on, man. I'm not mentioning any names here. Well, now the question, a super chat for Dr.

White. Thank you, Tanner Dicken. Question for Dr. White. If disputed canonicity is enough reason to doubt a text authority, what about the

Reformation dispute over James' canonicity? I'm sorry, could you repeat? I didn't hear the first part of the question.

Sure. If disputed canonicity is enough reason to doubt a text authority, what about the

Reformation's dispute over James' canonicity? Okay, I'm not sure what the individual thinks disputed canonicity is.

I think he's probably confusing, once again, textual variants with the entirety of a book.

So you can have a discussion about James as canon without discussing every single variant within James.

There are some people that struggle with that, but they only struggle with that because they live after 1949.

Anyone who lived before 1949 would never have struggled with that. You know why? Because that's when photocopiers were introduced.

So all of humanity up until the last century, and I wasn't around before 1949.

Some of you think that I was, but I was not close, but not quite. All of humanity would have recognized the difference between written and printed issues and the corpus of a book.

So there really actually wasn't all that much. I mean, I read an excellent master's thesis on Luther's actual view of the canonicity of James a number of years ago.

I've lost it, but I wanna track it down again. He made a very good argument long after he made his James and Epistles straw stuff that he was quoting from James canonically.

And that would, I won't go into that right now, but that probably relates to 1525 and Luther's experience and stuff like that.

But the issues of canon and the issues of text and the text we're talking about here, remember, there's only two segments of the

New Testament this long that are disputed. The long writing of Mark and the

Percocet adultery in John chapter 7, 53, 3 to 11. People need to understand, that's it.

Everything else is like one verse, maybe two phrases, stuff like that.

Those two, that is the whole shooting match. And it's important for people to understand that.

It's not like every book has something like this going on. It doesn't. People need to recognize that, but those are two different issues.

So there's two different subjects. Right. Well, another super chat for Dr. White. Thank you,

Nintendonot. Can we truly know what the providentially preserved scripture is or can we only hope to know in this lifetime with the best approximation?

Well, again, this is also what motivates King James onlyism.

Let's just be honest. The King James onlyist wants to have no notes in the margin. Just give me exactly what it is.

No questions. I'm sorry. God did not preserve his word in that way.

And if you think he did, here's the problem. The New Testament writers quote from the

Old Testament in such a way as they quote passages that contain textual variants in the

Old Testament. You've got to deal with it. That's the reality. That's the fact.

And again, no one in the history of the church until the invention minimally of the printing press and now, especially with photo digital reproduction ever had an issue with it because that's how you communicate it.

That's how written documents were communicated. And nobody had a question about it until the modern period.

But it's that introduction, especially the printing press, which can very much solidify a text.

And now today, the digital age, which can make it identical, has changed all of that.

So the issue, I think, was asking me what I mean because I do believe, unlike certain people, in the fact that God has preserved every original reading of the scriptures.

I do believe it's in the manuscript tradition, but I'm not infallible and I would love it if we found 10 manuscripts of Mark that contained the longer ending.

I'll change my view. They were dated to 125 or 95 or whatever the example

I'd used earlier. Wonderful, but we have to base it upon the evidence because God gave us his word in time and history.

He sent his son into time and history. I think that's important. Thank you.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, the Q &A time is officially closed, but we do have a few more questions left.

I mean, the questions coming in, we've officially closed them. So we are not going to be accepting any new questions, but the few questions that we have, we'll just go through them rather quickly.

From, oh, let me pull, this is from Turangi Newell. Thank you for your super chat.

He says, James, why do you keep calling us Danny P? So. Was that addressed to me?

Yep, it's addressed to you. He says, why do you keep calling us? And it puts there from Danny P. Guess we won't know.

Why do you keep calling us what? That's it, that's it. That's not a question that can't be answered.

Oh yeah, so we're gonna move on to a couple more questions from the super chat.

Okay, the same person again, Turangi Newell. Again, thank you for your super chat. Hey James, asking on behalf of the people of Turangi here, are you still coming to the

Cadillac Cafe next year? I've never heard of it.

So I have no idea what that's in reference to. Sounds like a great place. Sounds good.

Yeah, unfortunately, let's just be honest. I have no travel plans for next year at all right now, other than possibly going to Germany, but I've even told them in Germany, I am very, very concerned that there will be restrictions placed upon travel that will require forced inoculations, all sorts of stuff like that.

Our world has changed. Our world has changed. And let me just say one thing, Dr. Riddle and I have crossed swords many, many times, but we're both

Reformed Baptists. And both of us believe in the Lordship of Jesus Christ and that he is sitting on his throne.

And I think he'll join with me in saying there has never been a time for believers to be more focused upon the fact that what happens upon this earth cannot begin to shake the kingdom of God and cannot take

Jesus off of his throne. I just see a lot of Christians that are very, very nervous and literally fearful.

That tomb is still empty and the light still shines out from it. And so I don't know what the question was about, but I would love to go where, if I was supposed to be going someplace, yay, but I just don't know if it's gonna happen in light of everything that's going on in the world today.

Absolutely, one last question for Dr. White and two more for Dr. Riddle, that will be it. Dr. White, thank you for Undisputed, for your super chat.

He says, for someone that doesn't speak Koine Greek or Hebrew, what English translation of the

Bible would you say in your opinion is the best English translation? Same question for Dr.

Riddle. So I guess, yeah, both of you can answer this one. Okay, well, since we'll both be answering, if you're a

TR only person, the New King James is a fantastic translation of the

TR and of the 1525 Blomberg. So I would just simply say,

I think the New King James, if those are your textual choices, the underlying text, awesome. If you use

Biblia Hebraica Steirica Tentia, take into consideration the Greek Septuagint, which I think is very, very important to do because the apostles did and use the modern eclectic text.

I still love the 1977 New American Standard Bible. And the reason I still love it is it still used thee and thou in the

Psalter, in the poetic sections. But the 95

NASB, and obviously the ESV has been used has earned its place as having a tremendous pedigree as well.

But I still, if I have to use an English text, I use the NASB. Normally the 77 translation is what

I utilize. Absolutely. Now, for Dr. Riddle, would you like to tackle that question as well in translation?

I'm sure it will probably surprise no one to hear that I prefer the authorized version, the

King James Version. It's a literary, cultural icon.

It's one of the saddest things is that so few people are reading it today, are hearing it, the cadences, the beauty of it, its excellence for liturgical use, for preaching.

So in devotional reading, some people have gotten in their minds that it's hard to understand, it's too difficult to understand.

And it actually greatly rewards the person who reads it and you become more educated, you become more sophisticated, you become better in English, your vocabulary increases.

So I would recommend the King James Version. And there may be people from other nations, there are tonight, and I could say hello to friends in Malaysia.

Samuel knows I was in Malaysia a couple of years ago in Kuala Lumpur as a guest of the Damansara Reformed Baptist Church, a beautiful country, beautiful people.

But I would recommend a translation if you live in one of those places that's based on the traditional text.

There are many of these that are published by the Trinitarian Bible Society. You can go to their website where you can find translations in various languages of people all over the world.

I was a missionary for a short period of time in Hungary, and all the countries of Europe have basically their equivalent to the

King James Version. And in Hungary, it's the Karolyi Gospar Bible that predates the

King James Version, was done I think in 1590. And when

I sit down and read the Hungarian Bible, that's the one that I sit down and read devotionally.

But I'm also, again, I'm not a KJV only -ist because I'm confessional.

And chapter one, paragraph eight of our confession says that the Bible is immediately inspired in the original languages of Hebrew and Greek.

And it also describes the role of translations. But I think for English speaking people, the

King James Version is just a beautiful, it's a masterpiece. And so I recommend the reading of it, even if you don't use it in your local church, read it yourself and you'll be improved by it.

Thank you, Dr. Jeffrey Riddle. Another question for you, what do you see as the primary strength of your position and the primary weakness of your opponent's position?

Well, the first thing that came to my mind with that question is the fact that we actually have a

Bible. We actually know what the Bible is. And I think the weakness of people with all due respect to my opponent is they really don't have a

Bible. It's somewhere in the mass of the manuscripts and they're hoping one day they might get it, one day it might emerge.

But in truth, once you've hitched your wagon to the scholar's Bible, there's gonna be a new edition that comes out every couple of years.

There was a note on the evangelical textual criticism blog the other day, I don't know if Dr. White saw it, but they're saying now it's gonna come out,

I think in 2022, the NA 29, and then the

UBS six edition will follow after that. Do you think it's gonna stop there? Well, of course not, because the

CBGM is gonna be applied to all the books, but then once it's applied to all the 27 books, is it gonna stop then?

No, there's gonna be another process. And again, I think this is one reason why we need to exit this.

We need to exit the academies producing new editions of the Bible that tinker with it and change it.

And the thing to do is for us to, is us to commit ourselves to the traditional texts, and then we don't have an ever -changing, ever -shifting text of scripture.

We don't have Bible translations that are ever -shifting and ever -changing. We're able to have what the men of previous generation had.

You know, you can pick up Matthew Henry, you can pick up Matthew Poole, you can pick up John Owen, they're all citing the same version of the

Bible. We've lost that cohesion. We've completely lost it, but it can be regained.

By God's grace, it can be regained. Thank you. One final question for the night to Dr.

Jeff Riddle, and that is where do the reformed scholastics of the 1560s to 1725 say the printed edition of the

Greek text is the Apograph as you just claimed? Where do they say that? Yeah.

Well, I don't know if you heard the citation that I gave in the very beginning from John Owen.

And if you're looking for some place to read, I would encourage you getting about sort of confessional, the confessional text position or confessional bibliology,

I would encourage you to get volume 16 of John Owen's collected works, published by Banner of Truth.

There are two essays in that volume that are written by John Owen, and I think he lays out the confessional text position.

And if I could do some shameless plugging, I actually wrote a modernized simplification and abridgement of those two essays in this book that's called

John Owen on Scripture, subtitled Authority, Inspiration, Preservation.

And I wrote an introductory article on John Owen's views on scripture.

And then I, Owen is hard to read. He went to school when he was about 12, where all the classes were conducted in Latin.

He spoke Latin. And when he wrote English, it's sort of like Latinized English.

He's very hard to follow. And so I know different people have different opinions about the value of paraphrases or simplifications or abridgements.

I'm not crazy about them, but if reading through Owen in the original, particularly part of the reason

I did this, I've done this with, also did this with Owen's work on church government, particularly for people who are not

English speakers and want to read it in a simplified version that can still get the content.

And I did, again, a simplification of his book, The True Nature of a

Gospel Church and Its Government. It was published by Grace Publications in the UK under the title

Gospel Church Government. And, but in relationship to scripture, and the confessional text position,

I would encourage this book by Owen on scripture. All right.

Yeah. Okay. One last, okay. Well, we are out of questions. And so before we go,

I did want to say this. Dr. White, before we go, is there anything you want to respond to?

Because I noticed you were saying you wanted to say something just now. Just I'll give you the opportunity. Well, I think was when you have questions only for one side for like 10, 15 minutes and you, you know, it's sort of hard to have an opportunity to respond to anything.

But maybe next time we can, you know, split them up a little bit so that there's an opportunity for a little bit more back and forth.

Sure thing. We'll do that for the next debate, ladies and gentlemen, which will be tomorrow morning, 11 a .m. Eastern.

That is 11 p .m. tonight. For those of you in Asia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, for those of you in Philippine, please work that out yourself.

A lot of different time zones we're playing about with here. So 11 a .m.

Eastern, 11 p .m. Malaysia and Hong Kong tomorrow. That'll be the second debate.

I also want to inform you that after the second debate, we'll be having a review of both these debates between Dr.

James White and Dr. Jeff Riddle featuring Dr. Stephen Boyce and Jonathan Sheffield.

I mentioned Jonathan Sheffield also because later this month, we're going to be having a debate on the ecclesiastical text between Jonathan Sheffield and Dr.

Bart Ehrman, who I believe may have been mentioned in today's debate. I'll need to check that again.

Dr. Bart Ehrman will be coming on the channel and explain apologetics to debate Jonathan Sheffield on October 30th this month.

More details will be coming. So do stay tuned for that. And if you want to find out more details about that debate as well, do log on to our

Facebook page, Explain Apologetics. And for those of you who haven't subscribed, probably a good idea that you do so that you stay notified for our upcoming debates.

Until tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, I just want to thank both our speakers for this excellent first debate.