The Nature of Biblical Authority
In the summer
of 1995 a period of Sabbatical Leave allowed me to complete a
dissertation for the MA degree in Aspects of Biblical Interpretation at
London Bible College (a College of Brunel
University).
The full text
of the dissertation is available in LBC Library and through the usual
academic sources. The abstract below indicates the direction of my
argument.
Is the Longer Ending of Mark (Mark 16:9-20)
Holy Scripture?
– an Examination
of the Nature of Biblical Authority.
Modern scholarship is agreed that Mark
16:9-20 is very unlikely to have been originally written to follow 16:8
but was added at a later date. However I argue that this does not
necessarily remove the Longer Ending from carrying the full authority of
Scripture, for a number of reasons.
1. The authority of Scripture rests in
the historicity of the events of salvation and revelation which it
records, and on the foundational nature of the theological
interpretations given to those events by the original faith communities.
The words of Christ in the gospels are authoritative not because the
writers were “inspired” but because Christ said those words. The
authorship of a particular passage affects its credibility, but not its
authority. So if we believe that Christ actually did say Mark 16:15-18,
who actually recorded those sayings is
secondary. The case for including the Longer Ending is considerably
stronger than that for John 8:1-11 which seems to be more widely
accepted, curiously.
2. Locating Biblical authority in the
“original inspired autograph” is unnecessary and flawed. Inspiration is
the guardian of Biblical Authority but not its source. Many scholars
seem to embrace the underlying assumptions of inerrancy in practice
whilst (rightly) challenging it in theory. During the period of Canon
formation variant readings were all accepted as authoritative, not just
the underlying autograph. It is deeply unsatisfactory to locate Biblical
authority in an underlying (sometimes inaccessible or reconstructed)
autograph in preference to any of the texts which have actually been
used in worship and witness by the church over the centuries.
3. It rests with the Church and not the
Academy to decide what is or is not “Holy Scripture”. The vast majority
of believers through history have accepted the Longer Ending as
Scripture. Recently too often the Longer Ending is disregarded simply
because the tools of Redaction and Narrative criticism which require a
single author or final redactor are unable to cope with the
discontinuity at Mark 16:8. Is the tail wagging the dog here? For some
writers, there is a theological problem in Mark 16:9-20 with its
portrait of holistic mission stressing signs and wonders, in contrast to
Matthew 28:16ff on teaching and discipleship. But we do not complete the
jigsaw of Scripture by throwing away pieces which to some perspectives
may not seem to fit (as Fee seeks to do with 1 Corinthians 14:34-35).
That would be a very slippery slope!
4. Whilst not in any way basing my case
for authority on Markan authorship, I did
come to feel that the case against Markan
authorship rested too heavily on the (undisputed) discontinuity at 16:8.
I am not convinced by the linguistic arguments suggesting that the
Longer Ending in “unquestionably not Mark”.
An original simple linguistic test I devised investigating the
distribution of “singly-occurring” words in Mark suggests persuasively
that 16:9-20 is “typically Mark”. Elements of “non-Markan”
vocabulary are explicable by the unique subject matter. I would love to
explore further the possibility that the Longer Ending was a fragment of
a different work also by Mark – perhaps his equivalent of Acts. This
seems to me an excellent explanation of how its addition to the gospel
at a later date was so readily accepted by the churches?
5. B.M.Metzger
has written,
Since Mark was not responsible for the composition of the last twelve
verses of the generally current form of his Gospel, and since they
undoubtedly had been attached to the Gospel before the Church recognized
the fourfold Gospels as canonical, it follows that the New Testament
contains not four but five evangelic accounts of events subsequent to
the resurrection.
(B.M.Metzger
The Text of the New Testament Oxford: OUP, 1992, 229.)
If he is right, the Longer Ending must be
treated as Holy Scripture!
The following authors were most important
in my understanding of Biblical Authority and Mark 16:9-20.
B.S.Childs
Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture London: S.C.M.
Press, 1979.
The New
Testament as Canon: An Introduction
London: S.C.M. Press, 1985.
Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments
London: S.C.M. Press 1992.
J.Hug
La Finale de l'Evangile de Marc
Paris: J.Gabalda, 1978
B.M.Metzger
The Canon of the New Testament
Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1987
A Textual Commentary on
the Greek New Testament
Leiden:
E.J.Brill, United Bible Societies, 1971.
The Text of the New
Testament Oxford
University Press, 1992.
C.H.Pinnock
The Scripture Principle London:
Hodder, 1985.
