Textual variants in the Gospel of Mark are the subject of the study called textual criticism of the New Testament. Textual variants in manuscripts arise when a copyist makes deliberate or inadvertent alterations to a text that is being reproduced.[1]: 251–271 An abbreviated list of textual variants in this particular book is given in this article below.
Origen, writing in the 3rd century, was one of the first who made remarks about differences between manuscripts of texts that were eventually collected as the New Testament.[1]: 200 He declared his preferences among variant readings. For example, in Matthew 27:16–17, he favored "Barabbas" against "Jesus Barabbas" (In Matt. Comm. ser. 121).[1]: 201 InJohn 1:28, he preferred "Bethabara" over "Bethany" as the location where John was baptizing (Commentary on John VI.40 (24)).[1]: 201 "Gergeza" was preferred over "Geraza" or "Gadara" (Commentary on John VI.40 (24) – see Matthew 8:28).[1]: 201
Most of the variations are not significant and some common alterations include the deletion, rearrangement, repetition, or replacement of one or more words when the copyist's eye returns to a similar word in the wrong location of the original text.[1]: 253 If their eye skips to an earlier word, they may create a repetition (error of dittography).[1]: 254 If their eye skips to a later word, they may create an omission.[1]: 253–254 They may resort to performing a rearranging of words to retain the overall meaning without compromising the context.[1]: 257 In other instances, the copyist may add text from memory from a similar or parallel text in another location.[1]: 257 Otherwise, they may also replace some text of the original with an alternative reading.[1]: 257 Spellings occasionally change. Synonyms may be substituted. A pronoun may be changed into a proper noun (such as "he said" becoming "Jesus said").[1]: 254–257 John Mill's 1707 Greek New Testament was estimated to contain some 30,000 variants in its accompanying textual apparatus[2] which was based on "nearly 100 [Greek] manuscripts."[1]: 154 Peter J. Gurry puts the number of non-spelling variants among New Testament manuscripts around 500,000, though he acknowledges his estimate is higher than all previous ones.[3]
A guide to the sigla (symbols and abbreviations) most frequently used in the body of this article.[4][5]
For a list of many variants not noted here, see the ECM of Mark.
Mark 1:4
Mark 1:5
Mark 1:5
Mark 1:6
Mark 1:7
Mark 1:7
Mark 1:8
Mark 1:8
Mark 1:8
Mark 1:13
Mark 1:14
Mark 2:16
Mark 2:26
Mark 3:7
Mark 3:14
Mark 4:19
Mark 4:19
Mark 4:24
Mark 5:9
Mark 5:9
Mark 5:37
Mark 6:3[17]
Mark 6:33
Mark 6:51
Mark 7:2
Mark 7:16
Mark 8:10
Mark 9:49
Mark 10:1[18]
Mark 10:2
Mark 10:47
Mark 11:26
Mark 12:19
Mark 13:32
Mark 14:30
Mark 14:39
Mark 14:68
Mark 14:72a
Mark 14:72b
Mark 15:28
Mark 15:34 (see Ps 22:2)
Mark 15:40[24]
Mark 15:47[25]
Mark 16:8-20