In Part one of this series on the last 12 verses of Mark, I gave some reasons why the last 12 verses in the Gospel of Mark may be part of the Bible after all. In this article, I want to present some exciting evidence discovered by Russian scholar Ivan Panin about the last 12 verses of Mark.
Ivan Panin devoted a whole book just to the last twelve verses of Mark.[2] I have included a detailed description of his findings on this passage which will serve as an example to illustrate the extent and consistency of numerical patterns Panin had also found in many other parts of the whole Bible.
Panin worked for long hours each day, counting letters and words. He even compiled several of his own concordances in which he put in all the various forms of the Greek words.This whole process of making these concordances alone took several years. He also noted the numerical value of each word and letter. He gives an example in his book on the last twelve verses of Mark’s Gospel, where he starts with the Greek text as rendered by Westcott and Hort and then shows how he applies his tests to it.Panin apparently used meticulous methods for textual criticism on a par with the best scholars. ( See Bible Numerics Examined, Part 2, Dr. Ivan Panin, Russia’s Gift to Christianity, The Cutting Edge, 7 May 2003, http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1363.cfm.)
When Panin examined Mark 16:9-20, he found many patterns of sevens in the text, that is, features that are all divisible by seven exactly, with no remainder.
Let’s look at the last twelve verses of Mark, Mark 16:9-20. This passage has natural divisions―the appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene (verses 9-11), Christ’s appearances (verses 12-14), the speech of Christ (verses 15-18) and the conclusion (verses 19-20).
Bear with the math here. This is typical of what Panin found in the entire Bible.
And so on. There are similar elaborate schemes of seven in the numerical values of the vocabulary words and also in the word forms. We have looked at multiple features of seven in this passage. Ivan Panin found seventy-five in all![4] Panin is also emphatic to state that the same types of patterns seen in the complex example above are in fact found throughout the entire Gospel of Mark.[5] So the fact that some scholars dispute this passage does not affect the phenomenon as a whole, but a powerful argument is made here for its inclusion.
Would an ambitious scribe writing this passage be able to do all this? The detail I have shown here is also shown by Panin in his other examples throughout the Bible. In other words, what he found here is the same type of patterns he found not only in Mark’s Gospel, but throughout the entire Bible. Even with a computer it would be difficult to impossible to design any such text and have any paragraph make any sense at all, much less by a human scribe in the third to eighth century as some critics allege. This obviously indicates much more than chance or human effort alone.
Maybe we need to erase those footnotes in our modern Bibles that say these verses aren’t authentic!
[1] Ivan Panin, The Last Twelve Verses of Mark, The Association of the Covenant People, n.d., 17-23.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 10-11.
[4] Ibid., 16.
[5] Ibid., 28-29.
Panin’s numerological analysis is, from beginning to end, an artificial projection upon the text. This is not how one tells genuine Scripture from scribal accretions.
Panin seems to have used the Textus Receptus (the base-text of the KJV) as the basis for his work. If one were to use the revised text, there would not be 175 words in Mk. 16:9-20, and the other statistics would be thrown off as well. Of course advocates of Panin’s work would immediately conclude that this shows that the revised text is severely flawed.
For a defense of Mark 16:9-20 on an entirely different basis, see my multi-part presentation which begins at http://www.curtisvillechristianchurch.org/MarkOne.html .
Yours in Christ,
James Snapp, Jr.
James,
Thank you for commenting and sharing your obviously extensive research on the last 12 verses of Mark. I printed out a lot of your material and I am going to read and study it, as i am very interested in this subject. Thank you also for all the links to the textual criticism sites.
Ivan Panin’s work is not too well-known, I think many good scholars assume he just played with the text until he got the results he wanted. But having read some of his writings. I don’t believe that’s quite accurate. For one, he compiled his own concordance and used not the Textus Receptus, but the Westcott Hort revised text , to which he made some “editorial” changes. But the changes he made can be shown to be legitimate variants in the Greek. In my research I ran across one person who did a lot of research on Panin and showed that the variants he used in Mark 16 and Mark 1 were almost all in the text of the Nestle Aland text, and the ones that weren’t in were still listed as legitimate variants.. This same researcher also showed how difficult it would be to contrive the patterns Panin found , even without a limited amount of variants to use. I would like share the link with you but I found it some years ago, and the link is now down,the author’s name was Nick Diethelm. Panin had apparently a very reverent attitude toward the text, used legitimate methods, made it his life’s work, and was not the snake oil salesman or nut that some have made him out to be. But it is hard to get a hold of his books and material and his work, though provocative to me, as I said, has pretty much fallen into obscurity. That is why I write about his work but I don’t use it as if it were the only or even a main support for the trustworthiness of the text. As far as I am concerned it is merely frosting on the cake. As you know, there are so many other ways to demonstrate the reliability of the Biblical text we have.
All that being said, there are, as you said, other (and probably better, for most) ways to demonstrate that Mark 16:9-20 is indeed part of the Bible. I have written on this myself, although I have not done the extensive research that you have. It is refreshing to hear from someone like yourself who has not jumped on the bandwagon of scholars who come across as though it is an open and shut case against those verses in Mark 16.
Which brings me to my next question: Do you have any material you could share with me on the legitimacy of John 7:52-8:11, the story of the woman caught in adultery. I’ve read John Burgon’s defense of the inclusion of those verses and found it convincing.
Thank you for sharing and God Bless.
Vince Latorre