You may not know this, but I began my college education not as a Bible major at Biola but as a music major at the University of Hawaii, specializing in trumpet performance. Music theory was taught in spades. One day our prof asked us, "What's a 'rule' in music that people have had to unlearn?" After some discussion, he made a statement I'll never forget: "You can always break the rules, but ONLY on purpose." Here are some examples that come to mind:
- Verses do not always need choruses.
- A song doesn't always have to end on a root chord.
- C sharp and D flat aren't always harmonically equal (just ask any trumpet player).
- Secondary dominants and modal interchanges work extremely well (as in Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf").
- You CAN write a sad song in a major key ("Somewhere Over the Rainbow").
- As a bass player at Biola (our group was called Joyous Creed), I often preferred to play the fifth instead of the root note (as in Elton's John's "Someone Changed My Life Tonight").
Let's see if we can apply this to a famous textual variant in the Greek New Testament. We are often told that Mark's Gospel ended in 16:8 -- "for they were afraid."
Others (me included) insist that 16:9-20 are original. Often you'll hear, "Ending a Gospel with such an abrupt ending breaks the rules of writing." And so it would appear. And yet is that really a strong argument against the shorter ending? When you say "Woe is me," you break the rules. When you say, "A friend gave my wife and I a really nice Christmas present," you break the rules. That's why the internal evidence is so slippery. It can often be used to support either reading in places of variation. It's the external evidence that's probative, my friends, not the internal. Even if you take only 2 canons of external evidence into account -- antiquity and ubiquity -- there is NO possible way in my view that the shorter ending has a claim to originality, not when 99 percent of the external evidence (the Greek witnesses) favors the longer ending.
So what should we make of the shorter ending that seems to break the rules of good writing? Can an author have written in such a way? Absolutely! Mark may have wanted to end his Gospel with a cliffhanger. If you feel your "but" rising up, however, I fully identify. There are only two Greek manuscripts that omit the last 12 verses of Mark. Indeed, the shorter reading is almost a singular reading.
Welcome to the wonderful world of textual criticism!😉
P.S. For a contrary opinion, see this essay over at the Desiring God website.