The Textual Problem of Mark 16:9-20

The point: Let your yea be yea, and your nay be nay, avoiding ambiguous responses.

Martin recounts the church's history of meeting in Phase I and anticipating Phase II construction, providing context for his sermon series on Mark.

The following message was given on December 16, 1990, in the Adult Sunday School class of the Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, New Jersey. Now, I wish to begin the class this morning by giving a little bit of general background and Trinity Church history with reference to the public ministry of the Word of God. While the Phase I building was our meeting place for our stated seasons of worship, and while anticipating the beginnings of the construction of this place of worship that we call Phase II, on June 12, 1983, as I stood to preach in what was then our place of meeting for worship, I s...

0:02 - 1:27 Read in full sermon

The point: Let your yea be yea, and your nay be nay, avoiding ambiguous responses.

Martin describes his recent extensive travels (Dominican Republic, UK, Pakistan) to explain why he's been intermittently preaching on public worship, leading to questions about the Mark series.

working through Mark's spirit-inspired account of the life, ministry, deeds, words, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And there have been some briefer series breaking up the exposition in Mark, such series as a godly building program, the anatomy of a man of God, and others. However, in August of this year, I completed my exposition of Mark 16, verses 1 through 8, and then gave an additional exposition from Matthew 28, 11 to 15, entitled The Ludicrous Attempt to Cover Up the Fact of the Resurrection of Jesus. And then, at that point in my own personal history, I hardly k...

1:27 - 2:39 Read in full sermon

Driving home: All Scripture is given literally by the out-breathing, by the out-breathing, by the out-breathing, of God. Scripture is the breath of God.

Martin uses Satan's question 'Yea, hath God said?' to Adam and Eve as an example of how Satan builds his kingdom on doubt and denial of God's Word.

Okay. We are not ignorant of Satan's devices. And the first question he posed to our parents in Eden, by which he sought to ensnare them and alienate them from God, was the question, yea, hath God said? He raised a question mark over the veracity and certainty of what God had spoken.

4:25 - 4:52 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Romans 14.23 is the fundamental text that has held my conscience and that text says whatsoever is not of faith is sin.

Martin recounts his experience in a 1953 Greek course translating Mark, where he first felt a profound impression of a different author in Mark 16:9-20, illustrating the impact of internal evidence.

many decades ago 1953 to be precise our second year Greek course was a matter of doing our own translation of the Gospel of Mark and we would be given at the beginning of one week all the vocabulary words in Mark chapter 1 that did not occur in our first year Greek course we used Davis' basic Greek grammar and by Friday we had a test on all those vocabulary words and then the following Monday we would start doing our own translation parsing the verbs and giving a justification for our translation about 10 to 12 verses three times a week and I can remember the profound impression after living f...

23:27 - 24:55 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin and Pastor Nichols explain internal evidence, focusing on Mark's distinctive stylistic use of the conjunction 'and' (kai) and vocabulary, which changes markedly in Mark…

Martin uses the analogy of his own sermon vocabulary, where he might use a word multiple times in one minute but not again for years, to illustrate why isolated word usage cannot be the sole basis for textual criticism.

And this is where some so-called textual critics go bonkers. And they set up arbitration. Very standards. I may use a word in a given sermon four or five times in the space of a minute and never use that word again for three years.

37:09 - 37:24 Read in full sermon

The point: Recognize the necessity of an official teaching office in the church for biblically accurate ministry, especially when dealing with complex textual matters.

Martin uses the analogy of coming home to rearranged furniture to describe his disorientation when encountering the stylistic changes in Mark 16:9-20 after immersing himself in the rest of Mark's Gospel.

And verse 19 begins with so that it's not it's not the use of time. Yeah, so here you have a translational problem and that's why we go back to the matter of in some of these things one must be dealing in the original in order to be able to perceive those differences. And that's where they really leap out. As I said, they did for me as a second year Greek student, and having lived with 12 to 14 verses three times a week in Mark, when I came in, I just felt like I was it's like coming home and your wife didn't tell you she's rearranging the furniture.

50:23 - 51:00 Read in full sermon