I've got a touch of the flu today and was able to spend some quality time alone with my computer.
At least I got to miss the Eagles loss to the Ravens. :tongue3:
Much of the early evidence for dismissing the long ending is covered in Snapp’s appendix at the end of text of Palmer’s translation of Mark (sited in the opening post).
The rest of this is stuff I dug up on the net or books.
[Concerning Mark 16:16 – “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.”] Clement of Alexandria supposed, with the Roman Hermas and others, that even the saints of the Old Testament were baptized in Hades by Christ or the apostles. But exception was made in favor of the bloody baptism of martyrdom as compensating the want of baptism with water; and this would lead to the evangelical principle, that not the omission, but only the contempt of the sacrament is damning. Schaff, P., & Schaff, D. S. (1997). History of the Christian Church
For the Lord, through means of suffering, "ascending into the lofty place, led captivity captive, gave gifts to men," and conferred on those that believe in Him the power "to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and on all the power of the enemy, that is, of the leader of apostasy. Our Lord also by His passion destroyed death, and dispersed error, and put an end to corruption, and destroyed ignorance, while He manifested life and revealed truth, and bestowed the gift of incorruption. But their æon, when she had suffered, established ignorance, and brought forth a substance without shape, out of which all material works have been produced--death, corruption, error, and such like. Irenaeus in “Against Heresies”: Book II, Chapter XIX - 3
Bruce Metzger’s One of the contributors to the UBS GNT, in his “The Text of the New Testament” states:
[Regarding the last twelve verses of Mark] Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Ammonius show no knowledge of the existence of these verses; other Chruch Fathers state that the section is absent from Greek copies of Mark known to them (e.g. Jerome, Epist. Cxx.3, ad Hedibiam, ‘Almost all the Greek copies do not have this concluding portion’). …Not a few manuscripts which contain the passage have scholia stating that older copies lack it (so, for example, MSS. I, 20, 22, &c.), and in other witnesses the passage is marked with asterisks or obeli, the conventional sigla used by scribes to indicate a spurious addition to a literary document.
The long ending…is present in the vast number of witnesses (including several which also contain the intermediate ending), namely A C D L W [FONT="]Q[/FONT], most of the later uncials, the great majority of the minuscule’s, most of the Old Latin witnesses, the Vulgate, Syr-c, and Coptic-pt. It is probable that Justin Martyr at the middle of the second century knew this ending; in any case Tatian, his disciple, included it in his Diastessaron. (p. 226-227).
On the other hand, Norman Geisler writes: “It is admittedly difficult to arrive at the conclusion that any of these readings is original. But, on the basis of known manuscript evidence, it seems likely that the position of I. Howard Marshall is most plausible: either Mark 16:8 is the real ending or that the original ending is not extant.” Norman Geisler & W.E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible (p. 487)
In the opinion of this amateur, the textual evidence is a wash and not very helpful toward clarifying the problem.
This leaves us to examine the internal evidence.
Rob
