The Long Ending of Mark in the Book of Mormon
Original Air Date: 2022-07-28
This video features John Dehlin of the Mormon Stories Podcast and Mike from LDS Discussions analyzing a specific textual issue within the Book of Mormon: the inclusion of the "Long Ending of Mark." The hosts argue that this inclusion provides significant evidence that Joseph Smith relied on the King James Bible (KJV) when composing the Book of Mormon, rather than translating an ancient record 1, 2.
Here is a detailed summary of the arguments and evidence presented in the video:
The foundation of the discussion is the near-universal consensus among biblical scholars regarding the ending of the Gospel of Mark.
The central issue raised in the video is that this later addition to the Bible appears nearly word-for-word in the Book of Mormon.
The video reviews and rebuts common defenses offered by Mormon apologetic groups like FairMormon and Book of Mormon Central.
4. Conclusions and Implications
The episode concludes that the presence of the Long Ending of Mark in the Book of Mormon is a "smoking gun" against the book's historicity 20.
Analogy: The situation is likened to a game of "telephone" where a story changes over time. Mark represents an early version, while Matthew and Luke represent later versions where the "fish story" grows. The "Long Ending" is a much later addition to the chain. The problem for the Book of Mormon is that it claims to be an ancient, independent source, yet it includes the specific embellishments added at the very end of the telephone line hundreds of years later 25.
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hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dulin we are in the middle of an amazing series with lds discussions or my friend um oh what name are we using mike with my friend mike from lds discussions we have talked uh several episodes about the book of mormon and now we're kind of knee-deep into the bible and mormon truth claims we've covered adam and eve global flood tower of babel and sermon on the mount in the book of mormon and today we're going to be talking about a subject i literally know zero about literally zero the topic is the long ending of mark and the book of mormon and uh with us today as always on this amazing everybody is the host and author and founder of the lds discussions.com website we're calling him mike hey mike hey how's it going everybody thanks for joining us again this is such a great series yeah i hope like i said i i feel like i said every time i i hope it's helpful and um we're getting into through the bible stuff and then i know a lot of people want to hear about the more historical stuff with mormonism so we'll be getting there soon but these are definitely important ones to uh to cover to kind of give more of an insight into the the scriptures of mormonism well today's gonna be uh a quicker one and so let's just dive right in we'll we'll break a record for the shortest episode we'll do the long ending of mark in the book of mormon tell i don't even know what this is so give us an explanation so this is really cool this is um another one that i did not know about until i was in the middle of the overview project and it was a radio free mormon podcast where he was talking about i think it was the back dating prophecy one and he mentions this kind of at the end of the at the episode and i was kind of like what is he talking about and this is really cool but what it is is that the um the gospel of mark and the new testament has an ending to it that scholars now um have pretty much a universal consensus that was that the ending of mark that we know in the king james bible was actually a late edition and if you see the if you're watching this the image on the right says this is from a bible and it says the most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have mark chapter 16 verses 9 through 20. and so like we've talked about in some previous episodes about like the global flood and in dna this is um solid enough to the point where in this case bibles are putting this notation in there so they still have the verses in but they're telling the reader of this bible that these are um not part of the early manuscripts and it's likely a late edition um by a later scribe and we'll get into some apologetics from people who who disagree and think that this was an original ending um but there are a lot of reasons why scholars can show that these verses were late additions to the gospel of mark okay um i want to learn i'm already ready to ask questions but i know you've got another slide on this you have um a reference or a quote from bart ehrman who is a new testament scholar who we've had on mormon stories but he is one of the he knows more than almost anyone in the world about kind of how the bible especially the new testament was put together so i guess you're going to read from bart ehrman to tell us more about the long ending of mark yeah and so bart ehrman kind of goes through and um talks about the clues that the text gives us to tell us it was not original to the text and so bart ehrman says the evidence that shows that these verses were not original to mark is similar and kind to that for the story of the woman taken in adultery it is absent from the two oldest and best manuscripts of mark's gospel along with other important witnesses the writing style varies from what we find elsewhere in mark the transition between this passage and the one preceding it is hard to understand an example of that is mary is introduced in verse nine as if she had not been mentioned yet even though she is discussed in the preceding verses um and then there's another problem with the greek that makes that transition even more awkward and then bart ehrman says and there are a large number of words and phrases in the passage that are not um elsewhere found in mark in short the evidence evidence is sufficient to convince virtually all textual scholars that these verses are in a late addition to the gospel of mark okay and just to back up a tiny bit is is bart ehrman taught on his mormon stories episode um i think of the we think of the gospels especially matthew mark luke and john as having been written by matthew mark luke and john while they were alive and without really going into it go back and watch the bart ehrman episodes what we learned is that you know not only were matthew mark luke and john not written by matthew mark luke and john but they were written like sometimes many generations after the time that matthew mark luke and john would have lived and they contradict each other and conflict in all sorts of ways and um and so this is called historical criticism or biblical criticism and it's a really important uh approach to help you understand why why there are so many problems with the bible and why you need to take almost everything in the bible with a grain of salt and if you still want to believe in the bible you can so having said that to drill a little bit deeper if i'm understanding you correctly mike we all know what the gospel of mark is but now we're finding out that there's this chunk that was added later that um and and that's important why because it it calls into question whether it's legitimate it calls into question whether it's reliable so for the purpose of this episode it's going to relate into how it's going to fill into the book of mormon um but to back up to what you said so for anyone who has not done any research on the new testament um textual scholarship you know we have the four gospels and the earliest written one is mark so mark was written they believe about 60 60 60 80 i believe matthew and luke are written after and so mark matthew and luke are known as the synoptic gospels they all fit together and then john is kind of off in its own little world they believe that was the last one written and so the reason it's important is because one of the things you see in matthew and luke in a lot of ways and one of them actually says and i think it might be matthew they're actually kind of referencing mark and basically saying we're correcting some of the things that were said there because um john hamer pointed this out i think one of the episodes with you but um he points out that the authors all of the gospel writers are anonymous there's not matthew mark luke and john but matthew and luke seem to hate the ending of mark because the ending of mark doesn't have this grand resurrection story and so in a lot of ways matthew and luke are trying to fix that and then it would appear that this was a widespread kind of worry because this christology evolves after jesus dies and is crucified um as that evolves the the the gospels are going to have different meanings to different communities and so mark's not going to be written down for 60 years i think matthew and luke are like 75 to 80 or 75 to 90 somewhere in there and in that time the christology is changing and people want that resurrection story in there and mark doesn't have it and so the reason that's important is because using that textual analysis is going to fill in to the book of mormon and that's going to be our next slide and that will kind of answer that question as to why we're talking about this today yeah and just to kind of say one more thing about what you're saying for those who know again know nothing about historical criticism or the bible of the new testament if you don't look at matthew mark if you don't look at them as all harmonizing and just filling in holes respective holes if you look at them in the sequence in which we know they were written it's kind of like uh a fish story right the fish grows over time and in the same way this is something you just mentioned people won't know what christology means uh if they haven't studied this what what you mean tell me if i'm right mike what you mean by christology is that that the story about who christ was gets bigger and bigger and more significant um the later the account is and so in the in the first written um gospel and i don't remember which one it is jesus is more just like a wise you know um more of almost like just a wise rabbi or a really important prophet not necessarily the son of god sitting on the right-hand throne but then the next gospel the story gets a little bit bigger jesus gets more powerful and by the end jesus is what you know gospel jesus is the son of god and yeah i mean resurrected and yeah dies again and all that right well the resurrections isn't isn't all but what's what's really cool about the different gospels is you can see a little bit of the evolution of how people perceived him and so i might bungle this a little bit but i think in mark mark's the first one um i believe jesus isn't really considered a divine being until he's baptized i think and then i think in matthew it's when he's born and then when you get to john he's divine from the beginning of beginning of everything you know and so it just shows that you know in the beginning they viewed god or sorry they viewed jesus's divinity a little differently then also when you get to john which john is the least is not historical really it's more theological um but in john jesus is divine from the creation of the world whereas in the other ones it's when he's baptized and then once he's born and it's why mark does not have a nativity scene but matthew and luke have a nativity scene um and so those differences are a lot have a lot to do with the fact that the communities that their these stories are being told to have different developments in their beliefs and also have different needs that they're trying to address with these teachings and so that's why there are discrepancies and as we've mentioned these are not going to be written down for you know many decades after jesus would die and so you know imagine a game of telephone that you play on the playground we have 10 kids the first kid tells a sentence and by the time you get to the 10th kid it's a lot different well these stories are being retold and retold and retold and so that's why you have the discrepancies because this is like a game of telephone through different communities through many decades before they're written down and so these stories develop in different ways um and so while there are a lot of similarities there's also a lot of discrepancies and that's a problem especially when you get into um issues within within mormonism because of the fact that joseph's going to pull these as if they were written contemporaneously and that they're um kind of free of problems do you have an essay on new testament scholarship i mean not really we have so we've got the long ending of mark and then we did our last episode was on sermon in the mountains so those things kind of uh i think cover a lot of it but i don't really have one just to new testament stuff just because i for the most part everything i was doing was kind of looking at through the lens of mormonism but like i said it's absolutely fascinating and i would recommend anyone who is interested especially in new testament um bart ehrman has a blog and he i know he referenced it on the episode day with you it's like i think it's like urban blog but just start google bart urban blog and um it's like 25 a year he donates all the money to charity but he puts up like four or five things a week and i um signed up for a few years ago you know i don't read it that often but it's just amazing because you could search for literally any topic and he will go through what the scholars say he has people on his blog who disagree with them um and so it's just really cool because you learn all these little tidbits as to why they were writing certain things like why you know i never i always grew up thinking the book of revelations was about the future and then you learn no no the book of revelations is about like you know nero and the roman empire and it's just so cool because it really gives a much better meaning to the texts it also helps you understand why they were written when they were written but on the flip side it also is going to force you to rethink some of the beliefs that we had especially when we talk about literalism in the bible yep and we'll also put a link to some of his books is uh is jesus interrupted is that what is that one of his books um so we've got the triumph of christianity misquoting jesus reinventing jesus um we'll we'll put a list to several of his books up there as well anyway yep yeah anyway so and that's why this is and so um we go to the next slide this is why it matters for the book of mormon and so the problem with regards to the book of mormon is that language from these verses of mark which we now know were attached to the gospel of mark by an unidentified scribe likely a couple hundred years after it was originally written down appears in the book of mormon and so um mark uh chapter 16 verses 17 through 18 which are part of the late edition says and these signs shall follow them that believe in my name they shall cast out devils they shall speak with new tongues they shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover now this is in mormon 9 24 in the book of mormon and these signs shall follow them that believe in my name they shall cast out devils they shall speak with new tongues they shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover so almost word for word in the book of mormon is part of a text in mark which was not authentic or original to the gospel which the book of mormon people would have no access to anyway so we have like um layers upon layers of anachronistic problems here and that's why this is so important for the book of mormon did you read the mormon verse i did okay okay all right so if i'm just and i i need to go slowly on this one because i i know nothing about this so we've got the the two verses in mark that are considered late editions and they're appearing almost word for word in mormon in the book of mormon yep okay all right and so if you go to the next slide this will kind of explain so we've talked about this before but it's incredibly anachronistic by any definition for the book of mormon to have king james wording within its text because the kgb was not produced until 1611. and then you add to that how anachronistic it is for the book of mormon to have new testament material and a really frequent reliance on it and it also carries a 19th century christology which we talked about which is a problem because these are supposed to be books of an ancient people um who have a 19th century understanding of how we believe about jesus christ um and so to think that they would have access to any of this material when lehi leaves um with the brass plates it makes no sense because he'd have no access to the new testament he would have no knowledge of jesus christ yet in the book of mormon they know all of these things even though they don't have access to it and so the long ending a mark because it's not an original part of the gospel it's kind of like you know an anachronism on steroids because not only is an anachronistic to have king james language in the book of mormon not only is it anachronistic to have new testament material in the book of mormon but now we have new testament king james material that was not authentic to the original gospel of mark which tells us that joseph smith is using a very late script for a text that's purportedly ancient and again this is probably coming from the bible that we know joseph smith had right yes and so the ver the the phrases match the king james version pretty much identically as we did the last slide but yeah so he's pulling in you know a king james version which obviously has issues with the translation and the the phrasing as we've talked about before then new testament material which book of mormon people could not have accessed and then have material that is not authentic to the gospel mark appearing in another ancient text that's highly problematic because you know we'll get into the apologetics but yeah it's like an anachronism on top of anachronism on top of a huge one because it's like you know again we talk about kind of foundational stuff this is what is considered to not be a text that would be authentic to the original gospel of mark so how is it in a text that's supposed to be happening in the americas that they would have never known about and it just it really illustrates the problems that come from joseph smith relying so heavily on the king james bible because he doesn't necessarily he wouldn't have known at this time no one i don't think at this time knew that this would be a late edition because they didn't have the the um the textual you know desire to to criticize you know david bakoy talks in his episode about how how the bible is a privileged text and so people didn't criticize it in a textual way until you know i don't know exactly when so joseph smith probably is not going to have access to people who are like yeah this is likely a late edition and so he includes it in the book of mormon because he just assumes it's it's authentic to the text and also we will refer people to our previous episode like you say book of mormon and the king james version for an overview um as well right yep definitely definitely and all right and so we we talk in a lot of these episodes yeah we're talking these episodes about patterns and so we've been building on this theme but the pattern becomes clear that joseph smith is completely reliant on both 19th century text and 19th century ideas when producing his scriptures and so joseph smith is pulling material that would never have been made available to book mormon people that contains the errors of later translations and worst of all in some instances such as elongating a mark text that would not be authentic to the declared author so in this case it's an addition by a later scribe deutero isaiah which we're going to get into is where a second person is writing under the name of isaiah almost like pseudopigrapha and they both make their way into the book of mormon which is a huge problem because now we have patterns where joseph smith is not just sometimes pulling in biblical stuff and making errors such as like believing that adam and eve has a literal story of the global floods literal story but also pulling in text that is not only anachronistic to being in the ancient americas but becomes problematic because it's not authentic to the text and so you just have all of these layers of problems and then you have it happening over and over again which is going to tell you that the writer of the book of mormon was using very late texts and ideas to produce it yeah and again we have if you haven't been watching or listening in series we have a full episode on deutero isaiah and the oh no our next episode the next episode isaiah yeah so that's our next one and it's going to follow some of these yeah it'll follow some of these same problems and that's why this is so important to cover because once you start seeing that it happens more than once it's really hard to just be like oh it's just you know an error or you know we'll get to the apologetic responses but yeah it's just it becomes difficult to use these apologetic responses when it keeps happening in different ways that are all tied back to joseph smith yeah if god and this is to our translation episode of god if joseph's looking at a stone and literally joseph's reading from it why isn't god just giving the pure word of jesus or uh an independent story that's in just regular english why is he happening to channel into the seer stone the text that conveniently is on the bible that's probably sitting right next to joseph at the time it kind of strange credit credulity that god would work that way if joseph's reading off a stone and that's just it you know and we're told in the translation episode that the stone doesn't change until the words are read perfect and so then you have to say well is god giving joseph smith um a text from mark that we know is from a scholarly perspective not authentic and it just makes no sense because it would have no place in the americas regardless and so that's why you start looking and you go well it couldn't have come from it couldn't have come from god unless god is willing to trick joseph smith and then if it's coming from joseph smith and then you have to answer like again because we're trying to tie these back into earlier episodes in the 116 pages episode we're told through revelation that god will not allow joseph smith basically to be proven false or to be you know taken down by lucy harris trying to expose him and yet again and again and again he puts things in the scriptures that we know now today in 2022 are not correct and so then you go why is god allowing him to be proven a false prophet um 200 years later get the 116 pages he puts a stop to immediately you would think there'd be consistency there and again i know calling him a false prophet is going to be hard for a believer but i am saying that when he makes these claims that these these texts are from ancient america and we can show they weren't even authentic to the biblical text that that's a a huge problem that would show that whoever wrote it was pulling from more contemporary sources and not from ancient text all right so what is the apologetic response to this do they acknowledge that it's a problem uh nah not really so this is from fair mormon but they're heavily uh leaning off of a book of mormon central article so that's why i'm putting fair slash book of mormon central just for anyone who's wondering why i'm combining them it's it's fair mormon kind of using them as their kind of their their main rebuttal and so they're they say in recent years several scholars have argued that the text in mark 9 16 9-20 is indeed an authentic part of the gospel of mark and i just want to point out you can always find a few scholars who are going to argue for any position especially in a situation where you're talking about biblical history because we're going to have a lot of religions that are going to want to fight for that position because of the fact that if it's not historical you know it does create some issues as to why it was added and it does that mean that the editions were you know um late you know kind of like late back fitting of stories and so um i i you know again to say several scholars have argued it really ignores the fact that the consensus is saying that's not the case and i think that's really important to note because they're basically saying let's let's listen just to these few people and ignore all of the other people who are working off of a lot of we said with bartorman's thing it's not just you know there's there's different reasons it's the language it's the fact that there's phrasing that's not authentic there's there's issues with the way the greek is written there versus the original part of mark and so they're telling you to ignore all of the evidence we have because there might be a few people who are going against the consensus and i'm not saying you should always ignore people who are going against the consensus i'm just saying you shouldn't present it as if that means the problem goes away because it doesn't it just means that they're giving plausibility and we're obviously going to go through that here anybody with an understanding of how academics and scholarship and science works will realize that that consensus is what you should always go with you can mention outliers but it's disingenuous to to number one not name uh the the several dollars but to cite um anomalies uh or exceptions within the discipline especially if they're motivated by by religious motivations to um to be exceptions and to ignore overwhelming consensus it's just it's just dishonest and they they should know better yeah and i think they do cite one of the scholars i think but you know the point is like i was saying you know you can find some scholars who will tell you that the book of abraham is actually on a lost scroll against all the evidence or you can tell you can find some scholars in the church who will tell us you know that the book of abraham um that joseph smith got some of it right when you know as you had dr robert ritner on he was going through this point by point and showing why it's being misused and so to find several scholars to go against the consensus still doesn't it doesn't necessarily answer the problems that come from the consensus and more importantly they're citing some scholars here and as we go through these these few um slides on apologetics i'm going to kind of point out why they're not actually going to solve the problem for mormonism they might be trying to those scholars might be trying to solve the problem for for a more mainstream christian view but mormonism just like we we've talked about the adam and eve and the tower of babel and the global flood they're cementing this down as literal history and that is when it gets messier than it does for for more you know other christian religions yeah and with the book of abraham it's not it's not just that you know the overwhelming consensus of scholars view it differently than the byu scholars it's that the book of abraham is a laughingstock to the entire discipline it's it's ridiculous to the entire field of egyptology and an insult to to the discipline of egyptology outside of byu yeah and the apologists should acknowledge that sort of thing when they're they're trying to cite scholarship i think well no i mean and we'll when we get to the book abraham episodes we'll talk about that just because there is there's a very interesting way that the the churches two main apologists for the book of abraham handle egyptology because when they when they present peer-reviewed paper papers to you know the greater community of scholars it's never about the book of abraham it's about you know actual egyptian things and then they use those credentials and to push book a book of abraham apologetics under the guise of being an expert in egyptology and that's where you start to get into kind of using your scholarship to push bad apologetics and and um and you see that everywhere but you have to be aware of it when you're doing this because in this case that we're talking about today there and we'll go through it but they're they're kind of using someone else's argument just kind of trying to slap it onto mormonism but mormonism has more problems because of the fact that it brings it into another ancient text yeah all right so now you're asking was there a longer ending in the original uh is it the bible manuscript yeah the original manuscript for mark and so fair and slash book of mormon central will say it is also significant that several scholars who reject mark 16 verses 9 through 20 as part of the original gospel of mark nonetheless believe that the long ending pre-existed its attachment to mark and again we're talking about using several scholars to go over the kind of you know almost unanimous um consensus here but you know one of the things dr bart ehrman states as we mentioned earlier is some scholars agree with the scribes and thinking that 16 8 is too abrupt and ending for a gospel as i indicated it is not that these scholars believe the final 12 verses in our later manuscripts were the original ending they know that's not the case but they think that possibly the last page of the of mark's gospel one in which jesus actually did meet the disciples in galilee was somehow lost and then all of our copies of the gospel go back to this one truncated manuscript without the last page and this is really important because this is saying what book of mormon central and fair women are saying is some scholars think that there was a longer ending and my point is this there might have been a longer ending but the problem is that is the long ending that ends up in the book of mormon so even if there was an original one that a scribe tried to replace hundreds of years later joseph smith is still using the replacement he's not no matter how you want to do this joseph smith is still using an added text so they're basically kind of throwing a little bit of a smoke screen here by saying that some scholars say there was was a a longer ending originally and no one like dr ehrman says no one's arguing that what we're saying with mormonism is joseph smith no matter how you cut it is still using the ending that is a late edition and that's the problem okay and i i'm sorry i'm just not super smart about this stuff so mark has 16 chapters yeah and we're literally talking about the final verses so yeah so the final verses of mark are it's it's an abrupt ending what do you mean so if you read mark um chapter 16 uh it ends basically with them being told you know go and tell no one about what you saw right and so um it is a very um fairly abrupt ending i'm gonna read i'll read the last few verses so um it would end and it says um you know they they go and and they're looking at the tomb and he says um the guy at the tomb says he saith unto them be not a frightened be not afraid ye seek jesus of nazareth which was crucified he is risen he is not here behold the place where they laid him but go your way tell his disciples and peter that he go with before you into galilee there shall you see him and he said unto you and they went out quickly and fled from the sepulcher i always say that wrong step up with her sepulchre i always get that mess up before they trembled and were amazed neither said they anything to any man for they were afraid end that's it so it's a really abrupt ending right and so wait that's that's verse eight you just read that's where it would end but it goes through to 20. so nine nine through 20 is what would be a late edition from a scribe so nine through 20 is is the part of mark that scholars say is a late edition so that's why some scholars will argue that probably was a longer original manuscript because it is a really abrupt ending and that's also why as john hamer pointed out the authors of matthew and luke probably hated it because it's so abrupt it doesn't really give you know the real resurrection story and so yeah it's almost like the verse reboots in the middle i mean the chapter reboots in the chapter and and and that's why jesus is saying and seven i'm sorry this is all just now coming together for me yeah because because in eight he's saying and they went out quickly and fled from the sepulcher for they trembled and they were amazed neither said anything to any man for they're afraid and then nine says now when jesus was risen early the first day of the week yeah he appeared first to mary magdalene okay i you we're repeating what you said earlier but now it makes and when you read it and that's the thing mark eight is clearly an end and then it's almost like in verse nine it backs up and and gives a new new ending and that's just that's like jarring i never of course it is none of us ever noticed this no and yeah and again that's why like um barterman kind of talked about we talked about earlier how it's not just the fact that it kind of seems jarring but the fact that you know they took when they look at the original uh greek there are some issues that tell you that the writer of 9 through 20 is likely a different person because you're using different words that appear nowhere else in mark it's like if you're writing a book you're going to use a lot of patterns and in phrases kind of like it came to pass or we talked about therefore and wherefore you know those things um in the book of mormon and so those clues tell them that this is a second author and so what fair mormon and book of mormon central are saying is saying that because it's so abrupt there are scholars that believe that there might have been addition to that text that was original that got lost and so some scribe down the road was trying to replace it to make it more of a fulfilling gospel to readers the problem is joseph smith no matter no matter how true that might be is still going to use the late edition that we have today and that's the problem for mormonism because joseph smith is pulling from whether or not there was an original lost ending he's still pulling from a late edition it doesn't really matter if there was an original ending that got lost because we know what joseph's pulling from okay so i i'm going to ask for your forgiveness but to explain to me one more time why why this question of was there a longer ending in the original manuscript explain one more time why this is so significant so basically what fair mormon is saying here is to say um that there are scholars who believe that there was originally an ending that goes beyond verse eight there so they're basically saying there was on a time there was something else that came after eight yeah and you know if you think about there are when you talk about documents throughout time there's gonna be documents where pieces get broken off or lost and so just picture this being on a scroll or something and this piece getting kind of torn off on accident and lost and they didn't have tons of scrolls back then so someone uses it for toilet paper right yeah i mean but you know it happens and so yeah what what bart ehrman is saying in that quote below is to say no one's really like there are a lot of people that would freely admit that there might have been a longer ending originally but it was lost and so because it was lost we can still tell that what we have today is still a late edition and so book of mormon central and fair mormon are saying you don't have to worry about it because some scholars say there was there originally was a longer ending but that's missing the point that joseph smith is still using the later one either way so he's still using the inauthentic one no matter what might have happened to any original long ending a mark okay all right but i mean and just just because i'm really thick it could be that the the part that shows up first is the older or the newer and the part that came later is older or newer right like we don't know if if the the long ending predates or follows correct well the only thing they can tell from the text is to say that the person who wrote nine through um 20 is likely a different author because of the the different wordings he uses um they're different they're different and i believe and now i might be misremembering this a bit but i believe in 9 through 20 there's also some some word kind of phrasing that seems to be borrowing from i think matthew as well and so that's another area where they're kind of saying like this is a little bit later of language than mark was and and so it's not just that this could have been like an ending that maybe got lost and reattached it's because of the fact that they can show that it almost certainly is a different writer altogether so then whoever did write the original um gospel of mark if there was an original ending the ending should still kind of match that writing style the phrasings because this doesn't it tells us that it's a different a second author in in the dating it's not that it's irrelevant it's just that even if it's dated to to like 50 years later or 200 years later it's still going to be a second author and not original to the gospel and yet joseph smith is pulling it into the book of mormon as if it would be yeah so it's just kind of weird we've got this frankenstein book in the new testament yeah it's so it would make no sense that somehow a book that was frankenstein together is somehow magically appearing on joseph's peepstone exactly we would expect whatever came through the peepstone even if it was somehow miraculously referencing mark which makes no sense to begin with right you would do so from a consistent intact manuscript yeah and so you know in theory if joseph smith was was channeling an original manuscript of mark at the end we wouldn't even know it because we wouldn't have it to compare to but because he's pulling from the late edition we can see the phrasing are identical and that's how you know where he's coming from yeah and so that that's that's the problem okay all right that's weird okay then fair mormon and book of mormon central continue and say another important detail to keep in mind is that even among those who reject the authenticity of mark 16 9-20 there is considerable considerable debate about how the gospel of mark originally ended and again i just want to point out this is not the problem at all the problem is that the version that we do have which is a late edition is not in the earliest manuscripts yet ends up in the book of mormon um that should not have any new testament material in the first place let alone what is a later addition to mark so this is just again a distraction to say we don't know how it originally ended but that doesn't matter because even if it ended in a way that was similar but written completely different the fact that we have the exact same phrases in the book of mormon tells us joseph smith was pulling from that late edition so this is just a smoke screen to keep you from understanding why the problem applies to mormonism so they're trying to almost solve a problem for christianity except that joseph smith expands the issue in the book of mormon and that's what we're trying to figure out here yeah it's like it's like a red herring or a smoke screen to take you off the scent of the real problem which is the pattern of how a mormon apologetics often acts yeah that's i mean we've been pointing it out and so it's just like i said it's this this is a shorter episode obviously but it's just it's a problem that's really important because this should not be there and yet we can kind of see not just the fact that it's there but also the way the apologetics are working with it which i think is just as important and so um this is the last part from the fair mormon article that i wanted to talk about and they just say it is important to recognize however that even though the english translation of mormon 9 22-24 was possibly influenced by the king james translation of mark 16 15-18 moroni's source was not the gospel of mark rather moroni was drawing on the teachings of christ recorded among the nephites mormon 9 22 thus the authenticity of the words of jesus in mormon 9 22-25 is not ultimately dependent on the authenticity of the long ending of mark indeed belief in the authenticity of these words and the ending of mark may or on the other hand benefit from the testimony of the book of mormon and so what they're saying here is almost it's very circular logic they're saying the long ending of mark is true because the book of mormon is true and that's just a really horrible way to look at it and to argue that the book of mormon is not being directly influenced by the king james translation it's just ridiculous because to say that moroni's source is not the king james bible ignores the fact that we can show directly that joseph smith is using the king james bible throughout the entire book of mormon and so to say possibly there is just a weasel word that is being thrown in to effectively give some you know to try to keep again keep you off the track of the real problem here and so on both of these issues i think they're missing the mark in such a bad way and as a believer i think you can kind of read and just kind of go oh yeah yeah but when you take away that layer it's like oh these are horrible apologetics because you're using the book of mormon which we can show as a 19th century text to try to give authenticity to the long ending of mark which is just a really bad way to do it yeah and again we'll reference people to our episode on king james version in the book of mormon and deuterono isaiah but you know whether it's the italics that goes from joseph smith's bible into the book of mormon or the phraseology or or plagiarized text or all the isaiah in second nephi or the deuter isaiah that shouldn't be there or the sermon on the mount there's just zero question that joseph it is factual that joseph had his you know 17 whatever 100 version of the king james bible there in the room he's reading from it and inserting that text into uh what becomes the book of mormon and anyone who tries to say that he was not doing that these apologists are really deceiving people it's just it's just it's it's a horrible it goes against all the evidence we have and again we've talked about this in previous episodes but this idea that you throw out what you don't know in hopes that maybe what we find out is good is just you wouldn't you wouldn't give the space to any other religion and so if we want to be consistent you cannot say that all of these i mean the book of mormon is screaming that it's taking from the king james bible so if you want to say moroni's um source was the teachings of christ then you have to argue why are there heirs from the king james bible if that's not the source and that's where um obviously their article is going to just completely sidestep that because it's trying to fix one problem while opening up problems elsewhere and that's what we keep talking about in these episodes and that's why going through these things the way we're doing is so important so that once you start seeing these patterns both from joseph smith and apologetics then when you get to these things all of a sudden you'll start you'll start noticing these things before i tell you in these like as we do these episodes down the road you're going to start picking up on before i go to the next slide and tell you why i think it's a problem because you're going to be starting to look at it in a more critical way to see the tricks they're doing to try to deflect from these problems and try to make you think they're not going to be an issue for mormonism because we found a way to make it work elsewhere yeah this is this is really bad apologetics it's it's it's up there with like maybe when they said horse they meant taper kind of thing it's the type of apologetic that has caused so many people to go from questioning the church to reading fair mormon and the maximal institute to feeling like they're being intentionally misled and deceived through dishonest means which then makes them want to leave the church i think it's a fair argument to say that a lot of mormon apologetics actually accelerates people's disaffection for mormonism which you think if i hated the church i would just want to see fair you know i would want to see fair mormon succeed with their deceptions but the truth is i just want people to know the truth and to be able to think clearly and that's why fair mormon just needs to go away because this is hurting everybody this stuff's hurting everybody it does and and that's a good segue into the next one actually kind of talking about the way apologetics work so yeah um i have an article on ldsdiscussions.com called follow the footnotes i'm kind of leaning into that but this isn't in there but so in the article i've been citing from book of mormon central uh they have a footnote and cited as number 13 that claims moroni's source in writing this material was not the gospel of mark and when you should go to the footnote it's not even a source it's an editorial note that says it is unreasonable to believe and there is no evidence that joseph either opened a bible to the ending of mark and read these words or had memorized them and then wove them smoothly into the flow of the translation of mormon nine and this is just a horrible argument because again yeah there's no proof we don't have someone saying joseph had the bible open but textually we have all sorts of proof that joseph smith is using the king james bible and i will tell you guys um we covered this in the book of mormon how the book of mormon was composed episode if you want to see how joseph smith was able to weave text together watch that episode again when we talk about the parable of the olive tree joseph smith absolutely weaves his words from the king james bible into the text and in that case he was weaving two different sources into a text and he was doing it in a way that tells us when he kind of lost track of where he was pulling from so to say that we have no proof or evidence that he did it is just absolutely uh goes against all the evidence we have and so you know again i don't know how more to um we've illustrated this so many times throughout these episodes and so for book of mormon central to state that is fact again it's in a different realm and it goes from being scholarly to just being trying to um you know book women central there's a lot of you know they're they're not my favorite apologies because they do take a lot of liberties with a lot of their material but it's just it does not make any sense and then to stick with their reasoning just for fun uh it leaves you with two options one is that god preserved the gold plates for thousands of years only to give joseph smith a revelation from the stone in the hat which matches the king james bible with translation errors italics and late editions included which is what they're saying or two joseph would pull these long phrases and verses as he saw fit which necessitates the use of the king james bible during the composition of the book of mormon as many of these long passages are nearly identical as we show above with mark and obviously as we've shown before with errors and and italics as well i mean there's no other way to do this yeah and i'm just really tired of this there is no evidence argument right they try to do this with polygamy brian hales will say well there's no evidence that joseph smith had sex with any of his plural wives or any of his underage wives or any of his wives that were married to other men i'm like what do they want a vhs tape do they want like uh do they want video like what do they want and there is evidence there's all these women after joseph smith died who who who signed sworn affidavits that they had sex with joseph in the very deed there's women who wrote in their journals and yet apologists want to say there's no evidence and i just hate this argument if there's no evidence well i will give one thing i will say is brian hales will admit that he had sex with him because he actually has an um he runs the joseph smith polygamy site so he does have a page on it but there are a lot of people who will a lot of apologists will say there's no proof and they'll say that the people who are saying he'll say there's no proof of sex with the underage or polyandrous right yeah he will say that i think i think there's one polyandrous one where he says it's kind of like you could go you could there's some like what i've tried to think of the word like fragmentary possibility and you know and we'll get into this with polygamy you know there's a lot of implications beyond whether or not he actually had sex with the the two 14 year old polygamous wives but um you know i just i think what we see here is just they'll state these things as fact in these footnotes and it's like it's not a source and you are going against all evidence to say to say there's no proof that joseph smith didn't use the king james bible just again it's it's special pleading to such a degree that it just it defies any logic and it would be space that you would never create for anyone else like if you were a professor if whoever wrote this book of mormon central article was a professor and someone was plagiarizing long passages from another book and he that professor figured out he or she from book of mormon central they figured it out and they called the student and the student looked them in the eye and they said you have no proof that i own those books or open them do you think that professors can be like you know what you're right i'm going to give you an a or do you think they're going to be like i don't care these are there's too many you know i mean like you cannot apply this logic one way in with mormonism and then then criticize critics for you know um or criticize any other person for plagiarism you lose that moral ground forever if you're going to make this claim and to do so um in a way that doesn't present all of the evidence that tells us the opposite is where i get frustrated because at least with what i'm doing on the overviews i'm giving you the links to this if you want to read more on what they say the links are on the website so nobody who's reading my stuff can go away and say he's hiding it because i'm literally answering it and putting the links to it yet on the flip side they're putting footnotes to make it look scholarly and then the footnote itself is just basically saying you know a statement of fact which is just not even within the realm of reasonable um thought and so and again i don't want to rant too much about apologetics but yeah this is why it's problem and this is why you have to follow the footnotes and be careful about what you're perceiving as um scholarly references because sometimes they're just not no these are not written it's just like richard bush once said that sunday school is not to educate it's a ritual apologetics mormon apologetics is never to find truth it's to get you to stop thinking right it gets you to think there's no problem or to mislead you uh to provide you with false information so you arrive at an accurate conclusion mormon apologetics is never never about discerning the truth well i mean it's about keeping you in the boat you know and so yeah i mean that's just the only way it tells you that all right so we have we're done let's conclude what's the concluding slide for this episode so just basically to wrap up um the long ending of mark is not in the earliest manuscripts and so while we've mentioned that some scholars debate whether or not there was an original ending the overwhelming consensus is that whatever ending might have existed is not what we have in the bible today and so that is again that's the huge um differentiation between kind of the apologetic response of what i'm trying to to portray is that joseph smith using new testament materials anachronistic by itself but then using text in the book of mormon that we know one way or the other was a late edition it kind of elevates that problem to a whole new level and we've illustrated throughout these overviews that these problems continually point to the author of the book of mormon being someone in the 1820s that's relying on a 19th century view of the bible and christianity and those clues and those fingerprints are telling us not just who wrote the book of mormon how they produced it where they're pulling material from and how we can date the text and in the long ending of mark obviously is not a modern text it was added a couple hundred years after after the original gospel mark was was probably penned down but the fact is these are fingerprints that tell us whoever wrote the book of mormon did not know this kind of biblical scholarship believed it to be literal history and so when you add all of the the overviews we talked about we're just in a situation where as i've said before not only could the book of mormon not have been written before the 1820s but no one else but joseph could have written it and here this just shows us that it cannot be ancient or historical because it's putting into the words of ancient prophets um material that was just simply not authentic to the bible and would have never been accessible by anyone in the americas yeah and just think back to the episodes you've already watched the witnesses to the creation of the book of mormon think of the tight and loose translation episode well and the golden plates episode we're told that golden plates were preserved and given to joseph we're told that he had his stone and a hat and it was telling him word for word you know what should be written down to the scribes it makes no sense that that um an imperfect bible of a specific edition would be channeled through that stone in the hat what if you go with occam's razor what makes much more sense is that joseph had his bible sitting next to him and because there was a sheet between him potentially or he's on the stairs or whatever he's accessing that bible and then reading that and that's why those passages in the bible along with the italics and and everything else that's why it's appearing in the book of mormon yeah arkham's razor uh you you decide but i you know i think you've made a great case here today so thank you mike thanks so much all right um so what's next what's next mike i'm trying to think what we've got next on this list here we've got um i believe deuteros next and that one's going to be a good one because it really is a similar issue to this where we're talking about material that was a later edition um that is going to appear in the book of mormon when it would have no ability to be in there and so these are areas where scholars can now date some of these biblical texts and again these might not be huge problems for people who have more of a general belief in the bible because joseph smith is going to build off it with the book of mormon it becomes a massive problems and so you know as we talked about in our first you know kind of overview with adam and eve these areas of biblical scholarship a lot of times you might kind of glaze over a bit like why does this matter for mormonism but it actually undercuts the historicity of mormonism before you even get into any uniquely mormon things and that's why they're so important to to kind of try to piece out together you know kind of topic by topic yeah and i have to say just objectively speaking every episode we've done so far has has been a smoking gun as far as i'm concerned um i've been impressed with every episode that that it it um it was a every episode has been a big deal and as soon as due to isaiah is one of the biggest deals for for so many people it's up there with the book of abraham and then we immediately are going to start first vision and the priesthood respiration the word of wisdom kinder hug plates yeah changes to doctrine and covenants we've got so many amazing episodes to come so i'm super excited mike i am too it'll be fun you stay healthy uh you know watch out when you're walking on the sidewalk like uh you stay healthy and safe mike because we we want to make it all the way through yeah definitely thanks for having me again all right thanks so much thanks everybody and uh thanks again to everyone for joining us today on mormon stories podcast again this episode is can be uh the the text for what inspired this episode can be found at ldsdiscussions.com mark we have the show notes in the description of this episode as well as time codes so if you don't like our commentary you can always go to youtube watch on youtube and then skip to the parts uh that you want to skip to and skip over our commentary but many of you have given us the feedback that you want commentary you want analysis and that's what you're valuing about these episodes so continue to give us your feedback at mormon stories gmail.com you can also comment on youtube or on facebook or on the blog and um most importantly share this stuff uh with anyone you think might benefit and most importantly finally we um we need your financial support to keep this going so please go to mormonstories.org click on the donate button right now and become a monthly donor and not only will we continue this series with your support but will provide this series to future generations so that people can have informed consent and engage mormonism or not at whatever level they want to having been given all the facts thanks everybody stay tuned for another episode of mormon stories in the coming uh days weeks and months