Why is Mark 11:26 in brackets in my Bible?
Answer:
What an interesting coincidence. I got two questions on Mark 11:26 in the same week. I am copying my answer to the other question below. Actually, he was asking about a different aspect, so I will add a couple of thoughts on your question as well. Like I say below, we have several thousand Greek manuscripts. There are a number of copying errors and even a small but significant number of changes which were apparently made by copyists on purpose in a sincere but unwise attempt to "improve" the manuscript. With the great number of manuscripts, and with emphasis on the earliest ones, we can in nearly every case decide with great confidence what the original manuscript was. In the case of Mark 11:26, this was included in the very early English translations of the Bible, such as the King James because four hundred years ago, when such translations were being made, scholars had more like a dozen that ten thousand Greek manuscripts, and all of them were from about 1000 AD or later. Such lower quality manuscripts included interpolations (a fancy word for additions by a scribe) such as Mark 11:26. What made this confusing is that the verse numbers we use were created hundreds of years ago when the fact that Mark 11:26 is not in the original was not known. For this reason we are stuck with the oddity that in the best translations there is now, literally, no Mark 11:26. There are just a couple of other examples like this. 1 John 5:8 and Acts 8:37 are the two most obvious examples. Here is the bottom line. With the fantastic manuscript modern New Testament scholars have at their fingertips, we can be very confident of the accuracy of our Greek New Testaments, and therefore of the best modern translations from those manuscripts.
John Oakes
Answer:
There are now over 8000 Greek manuscripts available to us. The Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Sinaiticus are entire Greek New Testaments from about AD 350. There are also dozens of manuscripts from the third and even the second century AD. Given all this data, scholars are able to make very solid conclusions about nearly every significant question about the Greek text. If scribes were to change the text for whatever reason, perhaps to make the original more clear or possibly even to add their own theological interpretation, this change would show up by comparison to thousands of other manuscripts. I will admit that we do not have a perfect manuscript of the entire New Testament in Greek, but the number of significant textual uncertainties is very low. You can be quite confident that virtually all the Greek text is the same as the original. There are a few passages with some doubt. Famous examples are Mark 11:26, Acts 8:37, 1 John 5:7-8 and a couple of others. Even in these cases, based on the evidence, we can be very confident about what was the original text. This is a very limited asnwer. A lot more can be said. One resource is my book Reasons for Belief (www.ipibooks.com).
John Oakes
