An Interesting Scribal Change at the Beginning of Mark

written by Dr. Bart D Ehrman

Since I’ve started saying something about how scribes altered the Gospel of Mark over the years as they copied it (yesterday I mentioned eight changes made by scribes in just the five verses, Mark 14:27-31) I would like to pursue this theme a bit, and talk about some of the more interesting changes.   In this post I’ll pick just one that occurs right at the beginning of the Gospel.  It’s an interesting change because scribes appear to have made it in order to eliminate a possible contradiction that was originally found in the Gospel – already in verse 2!

The first verse of Mark’s Gospel is often understood to be a kind of title for the entire account: “The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  To that opening statement, most manuscripts add the words “the Son of God.”  I’ll talk about that textual variant in my next post, because it is complicated and interesting too – were those additional words originally found in v. 1 or not?   And why would it matter?  It turns out it does matter, but for reasons a casual reader would almost certainly not expect.  More on that later.

For now I’m interested in a variant reading in the next verse.   I want to focus on this one because it illustrates well how textual scholars go about deciding what the original author wrote and how scribes changed his words – and why.

If you know Mark’s Gospel well, you will remember that it does not contain an account of Jesus’ birth (e.g. of a virgin in Bethlehem) (you find that account in two different versions, one in Matthew and the other in Luke).  Mark’s account begins instead with Jesus as an adult, being baptized by John the Baptist.   John is introduced in Mark 1:2-3 with the claim that he had come as a fulfilment of the predictions of Scripture.  This is what the verses say in the Textus Receptus (the no-longer-followed older form of the Greek text that stood at the basis of such venerable translations as the King James Version):

2Just as is written in the prophets, “Behold I am sending my messenger before you who will prepare your way, 3a voice crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”

John the Baptist, then, is the one anticipated by the prophets.  It’s an auspicious beginning of this Gospel.  Jesus is preceded by the one who fulfills God’s plan.

The textual variant I want to consider occurs in its first words “Just as is written in the prophets.”  When older manuscripts than those used for the Textus Receptus were discovered, it was found that

…it was found that the oldest and best manuscripts – along with lots that were not so old – said something slightly different.  In those manuscripts Mark begins by saying “Just as is written in Isaiah the prophet.”  And then the quotation of Scripture follows.

Now *that* is interesting.  It’s interesting because of the prophets that are quoted.  Verse 2 “Behold I am sending my messenger before you who will prepare your way” appears to be some kind of combination of words found in Exodus 23:20 and Malachi 3:1; verse 3, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” is a quotation of Isaiah 40:3.

And so the question is, which did the author originally write?  Did he claim that the quotation could be found “in the prophets” or that it could be found “in the prophet Isaiah”? There’s an obvious problem with the latter.  The first half of the quotation does not occur in Isaiah but in the prophet Malachi (and Exodus, a book understood to have been written by Moses, the great prophet).

Scholars have to judge which form of the text is original, and you might unreflectively think that the introduction “in the prophets” is more likely original, because it does not create a mistake/contradiction, whereas the other reading “in Isaiah the prophet,” could, technically speaking involve a contradiction (since the first bit is not from Isaiah).  BUT, textual scholars apply just the reverse logic.

Here’s what they think.  Suppose you are a scribe copying the text.  Which form of the text are you more likely to want to change?  Would you be likely to want to change a text that creates virtually no problems (“in the prophets”) or one that potentially creates a very big problem (“in the prophet Isaiah”).  Obviously a scribe would want to resolve a contradiction if possible, rather than create one.

In other words the contradiction is a “harder reading.”  And since the early eighteenth century, textual scholars have argued, maintained, and insisted that “the harder reading is to be preferred.”  That is to say, given the choice between two variants, it is the harder one that is more likely to be the one a scribe would alter and the easier one is the one that is more likely to be what a scribe would produce.

This judgment is seen by almost all textual scholars (every one I know, in fact) to be decisive in the present case.  And the judgment is born out beautifully by the surviving witnesses: the harder reading here is the reading of the earliest and by far the best manuscripts, and is attested in all the church fathers who quote the verse from the second and third centuries, prior to any of our surviving manuscripts.

That means that Mark began by indicating John the Baptist was a fulfilment of what Isaiah said, even though the first part of the fulfilment does not come from Isaiah.

Now I have been arguing that this appears to be a contradiction, but I should also stress that it may simply appear to be a contradiction.  It is sometimes thought that the author was simply indicating the most important of the sources from which he is drawing his quotation – Isaiah 40:3 – and the opening part, from Exodus and Malachi, is merely setting up the point he wants to make by quoting Isaiah.

The decision over whether there is a contradiction or not has to be based on an interpretation of the words of the text.  But here is my ultimate point:  you can’t know what the words mean if you don’t know what the words are.  Textual criticism is not the discipline that studies a text to see what the words mean.  It is the discipline that establishes what the words are.  Once that is done, interpreters can be handed the text so they can figure out how to interpret it.