 It's a two-part question. Does Mark 16 verse 9 through 20 deserve to be treated as Scripture or just a footnote? And why is drinking poison and being bitten by snakes listed with things like healing, deliverance, and speaking in tongues as evidence of believers? Yeah. Well, I'm not a textual critic, but I'll say that, but I'll also say this. I've never seen a good defense of the longer ending of Mark, that is, verses 9 through 20. And for that reason, I'm in the camp, which most, I don't want to say all, but certainly most textual critics, I'm in the camp with them that does not think verses 9 through 20 are authentic. The only reason it really matters is because of what the question alluded to, that you have snake handling preachers living in different parts of the world, parts of the country. They've made use of this material and they've died or been responsible for somebody else's death. So, yeah, it does matter in that respect. But again, I'm in the camp that really can't find a good defense of the authenticity of verses 9 through 20 when it comes to Mark 16. Now, by way of textual evidence for the longer ending of Mark, again, verses 9 through 20, which is pretty weak, I'm going to read a little excerpt from Omonson's book. This is from Omonson and Bruce Metzger, a textual guide to the Greek New Testament. And this is an adaptation of Metzger's textual commentary on the Greek New Testament. So they write this. They have several manuscripts, including four Greek unsealed manuscripts of the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries AD, continue after verse 8 as follows with a few small variations. And here's the verse. But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him and all that had been told. And after these things, Jesus himself went out through them from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. Amen. So you have four manuscripts, what this amounts to four manuscripts from the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries. So this is 700 to 900 years after the days of the apostles, okay, that after verse 8, they add that little statement that I just read. Okay. And then that's where in those manuscripts, that's where Mark ends. It ends with what we have as verse 8 and then this little addendum. Now all of the manuscripts that have this reading, okay, except for one old Latin manuscript continue with verses nine through 20. Now what that means is that the longer ending of Mark, verses nine through 20, this is the best manuscript support for it, 7th, 8th, 9th century AD. Stuff that's older is not going to have, they're not going to have the verses in it. So here you are in the New Testament text, text critical debate about, you know, priority manuscripts, the older manuscripts, you know, does it, if they're older, you know, should they be counted as better and all that kind of stuff. We did a whole episode on this, but you don't really have very strong evidence for the longer ending of Mark. It's centuries, you know, 7th century is what you're dealing with here. A second source, RT France in his commentary on Mark says this, this is a little bit longer. And I like France's commentaries. He's done a couple of them. I just like them. He's pretty good. He writes a number of later minuscule manuscripts. These are medieval and beyond. Give the longer ending, but mark it off with marginal signs or comments to indicate that its textual status is doubtful. So even the scribes themselves are making little notes in what they're copying. They're faithfully copying the longer ending, but they're putting these little marks in there. The 5th century Codex W, one of the earliest manuscripts to have the longer ending. So now you get, you know, in our text stuff, now you move back to the 5th century. You know, it's one of the few, one of the earliest. The other ones are going to be seven, eight, nine. Has a substantial addition of 89 words at the beginning of verse 15. So it's even different than what we have in verses nine through 20. This is described by Metzger as having an obvious, quote, obvious and pervasive apocryphal flavor, these 89 extra words, which consists of a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples concerning the ending of the period of Satan's power and the truth and righteousness now made available through Christ's death. Jerome records the same additional words and said they were found in some Greek manuscripts. Okay, so that's 5th century. France moves on to a little section on literary considerations. And he writes, most of the content of the longer ending, verses nine through 20, echoes usually in abbreviated form, elements in the resurrection stories of Matthew, Luke and John. And it does that as follows. And then he goes on and starts commenting about this or that. I'm going to skip to another section of France. He writes, the parts of the longer ending not accounted for in this list are those which go beyond the resurrection appearances, as such to describe the subsequent preaching and activity of the church. Thus, in verse 16, we have a summary of a basic baptismal soteriology, which has the flavor of Johannine dualism and possibly draws on the baptismal element in Matthew 28, 19 and 20. In verses 17 and 18, some of the signs which are related in Acts are summarized. And verse 20 is virtually a summary of the whole book of Acts in a nutshell. In the whole of the longer ending, verses nine through 20, the only element which is not easily accounted for on the basis of familiarity with other gospels and the book of Acts is the emphasis in verse 18 on handling poisonous snakes and drinking poison. The former perhaps reflects the single instance of, and it was involuntary, snake handling in Acts 28, three through six. But the expectation of these two activities as regular signs is the one distinctive contribution which the long ending makes. In all other respects, verses nine through 20 have something of a second hand flavor and look like a pastiche of elements drawn from the other gospels and Acts. Now that's the end of, you know, France's commentary there. So basically what he's saying is that in the longer ending, which does not have good textual support, everything except the snake handling and the poison, poison, you can find elsewhere in some other gospel or in the book of Acts. You can find some sort of example. And the only two outliers are the snake handling thing and then the poison. And the snake handling thing might be an illusion to the episode in Acts 28. Again, it's not clear because the episode in Acts 28 was certainly involuntary. But it might, you know, be some illusion of that. But then the poison drinking has no, there's nothing you can find elsewhere in the New Testament for that. And for that reason that this, the material you have in verses nine through 20 reads like somebody else just sort of put it in there drawing it from all these other places. In other words, it's a very second hand kind of feel to it. That reason plus the weak textual support, the weak manuscript support for verses nine through 20 are the reasons why virtually all New Testament critics, textual critics, do not consider verses nine through 20 as authentic. It's not as bad of a situation as something like first John five, seven, or the part of the ending of Revelation, like with Erasmus's text and all that. But it ain't good. It's there's it has weak textual support. And I will put a link on the episode page for this to a blog post that I found here from the evangelical textual criticism blog, you know, you could go up to the evangelical textual criticism blog like I did here and just put in, you know, Mark 16. And you're going to find, you know, what that group and they are just what they sound like evangelical textual critics, what they say about the longer ending of Mark and you'll find an essay by Peter Gury. We've interviewed Peter before on this podcast. And it's pretty good. I recommend it. Just looking through it here skimming here. I have read this before. But in this essay, this pot this post, he quotes Dan Wallace, because one of the arguments is that well, you know, the ending of Mark must have been original. And it was lost because of the way that scrolls were rolled up. And the end of a of a, you know, the role would have gotten tattered and lost blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, Wallace is somebody who's pretty much spent a career handling these sorts of things. And he says it's extremely unlikely that Mark wrote his gospel, you know, in a particular way where this is going to be, you know, some sort of explanation. Now, I'll just I'll read the excerpt here. This is Wallace. Now, however, if Mark's gospel is is earlier than this, the end of the first century, again, which is the controversy in and of itself, you know, as virtually all scholars acknowledge, regardless of their view of this synoptic problem, then he would have written his gospel on a roll, not a codex. And the first generation of copies would also have been on rolls. And if the gospel was written on a roll, then the most protected section would be the end. Because when someone rolled the book back up, the end would be on the inside, not the outside, to get tattered and stuff like that. To be sure, some lazy readers might not rewind the book when finished. Of course, they could get find a denarius at their local blockbuster, Wallace says, for such an infraction. But the reality is this sort of thing was a rare exception, not the rule. Consequently, if Mark was originally written on a roll, it's hard to imagine how the ending could have gotten lost before copies were made. So again, Wallace is a guy that has lots of experience with scrolls, you know, the way they were wound and so on and so forth. And you have other books as examples too. If this if this was a common event, well, then you'd have problems with the endings of other New Testament books too, but you don't, you know, it's just it's just this longer ending of Mark. So I'm in the camp, just to wrap this up, I'm in the camp with the, you know, the text of critics, evangelical and otherwise, who just don't really see a good argument for the long ending of Mark being authentic. And so for that reason, I don't, I don't feel like I have to doctrinally defend drinking poison and snake handling, because that's the only place you're going to get that stuff. And it's, it's highly suspect.