gty.org/Resources/Sermons/41-47
And now I want you to open your Bible to Mark 9, verses 42 to 50, the last section in this ninth chapter...Mark chapter 9 and we'll pick up the account in verse 42.
This is a very fascinating portion of Scripture. It has some features in it that are somewhat challenging to the interpreter and therefore highly challenging to me. It has been tampered with through the years, since the original revelation came from God. We know that because the early manuscripts that we have are consistent. Later manuscripts add things or change things. So we have additions in later manuscripts and we have alterations in later manuscripts. And that usually happens because there are scribes who want to increase the potency of a passage and so they add something to it, not something different, but they kind of double up on an emphasis. Or if they feel something is unclear, they might try to clarify it.
Well this passage has both of those kinds of additions. There are things here that are so firm, so strong, so threatening, so severe that somewhere along the line people thought they needed to ramp up the message because of its severity. And there are things in this passage that are cryptic and challenging to interpret and so through the years there have been some alterations, maybe by scribes who wanted to clarify a little bit. Not a good thing to do, change the text. But fortunately we have as close to the original as we're going to get and we're going to take the passage at its purest form.
One of the great realities of Scripture is the preservation of the original which God has overseen so that we have a true reflection of the original Greek and Hebrew text. Let me read this to you and if you'll notice it, I'm going to skip verses 44 and 46 when I read. It may be if you have an NAS or one of the newer translations, you see brackets around them. That is because in the earlier manuscripts, these two statements do not occur. However, the statement in verse 44 & 46 is in verse 48. So we assume that some scribe saw the urgency of this and just wanted to pile it on a little bit. So we'll leave them out as we read it....