GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 11:26
Missing But True
Our youngest son, David (now 56!), played the tuba in the high school band. One day, he said that music is “organized sound.” In a later conversation, I mentioned that definition to David, and he did not remember saying it. He said someone must have told him that definition. David was right on both counts: the definition and the fact that much knowledge comes from someone telling us.
I remembered that conversation when I was studying Mark 11:26: “[But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.]” If one looks in the NIV, NLT, ESV, or other modern translations of the Scriptures, this particular sentence is missing. Searching through over 5,000 ancient Greek handwritten manuscripts, textual historians have found that this sentence is not in the earliest documents. They theorize that in the normal—normal for the time—process of hand-copying Mark’s Gospel, a copyist inserted this sentence. Assuming that theory, an early copyist found this principle to be true in his own experience and in accord with the teaching of the rest of Mark’s Gospel, and so he added it as an appropriate summary. This sentence is almost an exact copy of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 6:15: “But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
Without untangling this Gordian knot, contemporary teachers, psychologists, and scientists agree that harboring anger, bitterness, malice, or animosity harms the individual, not its object. While some modern scholars, based on good evidence, remove this verse from Mark’s Gospel, its lesson remains.
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