Saturday 29 August 2015

In Search of Mark 7:16

Just getting ready for tomorrow's sermon - and wondering how to turn it round to the importance of the  Beaker Folk saving electricity, by doing the washing-up themselves. And I notice something. There's no Mark 7:16 in the Bible. Or, at least, not in my Nearly Infallible Version, or the Now Rejecting Sexism Version.

Grabbing Drayton Parslow warmly by the elbow as he saunters past, I cop a cheeky look at his King James. And I read:

"If any man have ears to hear, let him hear"
So the King James tells us that men with ears are able to hear. Why are the modern versions keeping this dangeorus knowledge suppressed? I'm perplexed. I'm also surprised, from that use of the verb to have, to discover that Jesus spoke Somerset dialect. One presumes he picked it up while visiting Gkastonbury.

1 comment :

  1. Presumably it was condemned as an interpolation. It's in the Vulgate (si quis habet aures audiendi audiat) but not in the available Greek New Testaments (check it out on Perseus).

    Things could be worse. What was that about a certain edition in the time of Charles I (I think) which somehow omitted the little word not from the 6th commandment? It may just have been a freudian slip, which would be greeted with compassion by Cardinal Kasper, but in those unenlightened days the perps got done by the Star Chamber.

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