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Does your Bible have a note in it saying that in the Gospel of Mark, the last twelve verses (Mk. 16:9-20) are not in the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament?

Let’s consider that the last twelve verses of Mark―a passage that many textual critics say does not belong in the Bible, may nevertheless be inspired text.  Now, it turns out that if these verses are left out of the Bible, no essential doctrines of the Christian faith are affected whatsoever.  But I am going to take a minority position here, and I will defend it with some facts that need to be brought out.   There has been much controversy about these verses in Mark. Many scholars exclude them because they are not found in some of the earliest manuscripts [Codex B (Vaticanus) and Codex Aleph (Sinaiticus)] from the fourth century.  But this is not such an open-and-shut case as is usually assumed.    For example, a very competent defense for the inclusion of these verses was written by the great scholar Dean John W. Burgon.[1]

One reason he gives for their authenticity is that several early church fathers, who wrote before the date of those early manuscripts, quote from them.  These quotes go all the way back to the 2nd century (Ireneus).[2]

Another is that there is a suspicious-looking blank space in the early manuscript Codex B, the oldest codex we have, where these verses would have been written.  This is the only blank column in the whole manuscript. It looks as though these verses were deliberately left out for some reason.[3]   Perhaps the codex was defective in this area, and the error was passed along to Codex Aleph, but we don’t really know.

Also, early translations such as the Peshito, Vulgate, and Old Latin contain them, going all the way back to the 2nd century.  Of all the ancient codexes, only two, B and Aleph, omit them.  But between the early church father’s quotes and the translations, there are six independent witnesses before the time of codexes B and Aleph, that contain these verses.[4]

Some claim the last 12 verses of Mark have a different style and vocabulary from the rest of the book, but this argument seems weak. On the basis of style one could say, for example, that the first chapter of Mark verses 9-20 should be excluded because it also has the same type of quick, brief style as the last 12 verses of Mark 16, but no one claims Mark 1:9-20 is inauthentic.  [5]   Also, it is claimed that there are 27 words and phrases that only occur in Mark 16:9-20, and on that basis it is claimed to be inauthentic.  But if you take the 12 verses previous to those, namely Mark 15:44-16:8, you can find 17 words not used elsewhere in Mark [6], so this argument also seems unconvincing.

But I want to throw out some very compelling and unusual evidence discovered by Ivan Panin, a Russian scholar who discovered many numerical patterns in the Biblical text. By using his numeric tests on available variants of the text of these verses,  he not only claimed that they belonged in the text, but he came to this conclusion because they contained intricate patterns of sevens just as he had found in other biblical texts that are accepted as authentic.

See my next article for the exciting evidence that Panin found in defense of the last 12 verses of Mark!