Hello Shent-Ta Tsai, thanks for taking the time to respond.

You said:

“There is reason why the short ending is preferred by the majority of critical scholars.

The short ending of Mark is not just supported by manuscripts, but also internal evidence. Mark 16:9-20 is linguistically different from the rest of the Gospel, and it directly contradicts 16:8.”

Every chapter is linguistically unique, depending on its content.

We can prove that Mark 16:9-20 has some interesting linguistic features not present in the rest of the Gospel.

What we cannot prove is why.

We can guess. The most popular guess is that it was added later by someone else. Yet there’s no way to prove such a thing.

The same author can write markedly different content. Differences in content do not necessitate a difference in author.

The history surrounding Mark makes a simple solution apparent.

Mark recorded Peter’s words, as all the historians agree. Peter ended his message at what we know as 16:8. Mark wanted to close it more formally, so he added the rest from what he has heard elsewhere. Mark wrote both, but the differences are due to no longer using Peter as a direct source.

That’s one option, and equally as plausible as the alternate author guess.

Another option is that the longer ending is original, and is from Peter, but Peter himself changed his tone while telling it, and Mark recorded it faithfully.

You said:

“We can imagine that the insertion was earlier than Vaticanus, and there could be different versions floating around for a while. A few patristic fathers picked up the longer version, but shorter versions did not disappear, as evidenced by Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. There are actually more than one version of the interpolation. I am sure you are aware of the unversed shorter ending. That fact supports the theory of later interpolation.”

We don’t have to “imagine.”

The patristic evidence is conclusive: the longer ending was in widespread use and held as fully authoritative at least 150 years before Vaticanus.

The unversed shorter ending is only evidence that the longer ending was missing at some point. Whether the longer ending was removed, or whether it was not original, is not clarified by this.

You said:

“Common sense also supports short ending. It is easier to imagine a scenario in which the short ending comes first, and then people are perplexed by the abrupt ending, so they added extra stuff. It is harder to imagine that the long ending is original, and somehow certain scribes just removed the last few verses. Why would they do that?”

The evidence favors the view that the verses were removed.

Vaticanus and Sinaiticus have room for the verses.

Paper cost a premium. There are no wasted pages in these kinds of manuscripts.

Yet the editors left a perfect amount of room after Mark 16:8 for the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20.

This, combined with the patristic evidence, confirms that the longer ending was known to the scribes who produced Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. They chose to leave the verses off, yet they marked off sufficient room to include them.

As to why they would leave them off, you know exactly why.

The verses contain controversial ideas. Snake handling? People have objected to the verses from the beginning.

What makes more sense: that scribes would remove verses they felt were weird, or that scribes could add in verses that were controversial and weird, and no one noticed that they weren’t original, and they became mainstream despite being so controversial and weird?

You said:

"Greek was fully a part of daily life in first-century Israel."

If that's the case, why do we find no literary work by Jewish authors who lived in Palestine that was written in Greek (if we put aside the New Testament)? The only other author we know is Josephus, but he relocated to Rome some years before he started writing in Greek."

You answered it yourself.

Josephus and the New Testament are first-century Jewish writings in Greek.

You said:

“Jews in Palestine were not the only Jews. Jews in diaspora spoke Greek. Apostle Paul was good in Greek because he was from Tarsus. LXX was translated outside of Palestine, in Egypt in fact, where Greek was normative.”

Of course.

That’s the point.

The diaspora is how the Jewish world became so familiar with Greek.

The fact is that the Jewish community was so accepting of Greek two centuries before Jesus that translating all their Scriptures into Greek made sense, to them. The Jewish community continued moving in Greek-speaking circles for the next two centuries, as Israel itself became more Greek-speaking due to the presence and control of the Romans.

You said:

“It was difficult enough for a person at that time to be literate in their mother tongue. It is extremely rare that a person would be able to write in the second language, except for the nobility.”

All the Gospel authors belong to the elite class.

Matthew was a tax collector, a Jewish man trained by Rome, requiring him to be literate in Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic.

Mark was from a wealthy family, likely the same family who owned the house holding the Upper Room. Again, he was picked by Paul and Barnabas to travel extensively. When you travel, and you only pick one companion, you pick people who are able to communicate with the locals wherever you go. Mark fit the bill. He later lived extensively in Rome, as Josephus did.

Luke was a trained physician, again a highly-skilled and highly-educated position. Being a Gentile, and being trained as a physician in the Roman Empire, he would be literate in Greek.

John was also part of the nobility, such that he was known to the high priest, with enough influence to be let into the inner chambers during Jesus’ trial.