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Why Does Mark Give Credit to Isaiah for Malachi’s Work?

So what do we do with Mark 1:1-2? There are two possibilities with this text. Some manuscripts read “as it is written in Isaiah the prophet” (reading one). Other manuscripts read “as it is written in the prophets” (reading two). Which one is original?

First consider the external evidence. For reading one the evidence is both early and widespread. Evidence for the second reading is limited to only one text family (the Byzantine—that which was solely used for the KJV). The external evidence would cause us to lean towards accepting the first reading.

Now consider the internal evidence. The shorter reading is the second one. But which is more difficult? The first one is obviously more difficult. Consider that which is cited in Mark 1:2. It is not only Isaiah the prophet but also Malachi 3 and a little influence from Exodus. So by changing the text to “as it is written in the prophets” this little problem was solved. There would be little reason for a scribe to change the wording to “Isaiah the prophet” since this would create a difficulty and not alleviate one.

By weighing the external evidence and considering the internal evidence we can be almost absolutely certain that “as it is written in Isaiah the prophet” is the original.

So Does This Mean Mark Made an Error?

If I was writing a term paper and misquoted as Mark did here I would likely lose points for making such an error. So how can we say that the Bible is inerrant if it has within it an error of attribution?

If we were to weigh Mark by our standards of scholarship, Mark made an error. But inerrancy respects not only authorial intent of a passage but also the literary conventions under which that author wrote. It was typical for an author in Mark’s day to merge together quotes and then give credit to the more well known.

If that sits poorly with you think about the last time you watched a football game. Did you call foul whenever a quarterback threw a pass at the line of scrimmage instead of five yards behind it? Of course not. But you did get up in arms when a defender grabbed your quarterback’s facemask and pulled him to the ground. You expect a 15-yard penalty for that infraction.

Rewind 100 years and your expectation of penalties would have been reversed. One hundred years ago a QB couldn’t throw the ball unless he was five yards behind the line of scrimmage, and a defender could pull down a runner doing whatever it took—including grabbing the facemask (that wouldn’t exist for a couple more decades).

We only balk at Mark’s “infraction” because we have been trained in a different set of rules for attribution. But for Mark he wasn’t breaking a single rule. He was doing what you did in that day. This was how you wrote.

Sorry, Malachi. You should have written a longer book, then Mark might have given you props instead of Isaiah.

I have taught on this material for so long and so many times that I do not know what is mine and what belongs to others. I can tell you that I was heavily influenced by Dr. Plummer’s 40 Questions About Interpreting the Bible. And, yes, I realize the irony of kind of botching any attribution here on an article on the different rules of citing. Let’s just say I’m going old school.

This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.