My source is a PhD professor at Regent University who teaches ancient history, various theology courses, and is an archaeologist. His native tongue is English, but he is fluent in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Latin, German and French. It was during one of his lectures.
He is not fluent in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Aramaic. Why? Because these (at least as they relate to anything written in the bible or antiquity) are dead languages. To the extent they have been preserved, they have been preserved artificially. That is, the Hebrew and Aramaic dialects spoken in antiquity, as well as those dialects of Greek, and of Latin, no longer exist, but a form of the literary language was preserved as a secondary language. It was always taught (never native) and always partially a reconstruction. Modern Hebrew was largely constructed out of biblical Hebrew, and although Semitic languages have been continuously spoken for 3,000 years with changes less dramatic than English (and more akin to the Hellenic languages), the Hebrew and Aramaic of today is not that of antiquity (nor was that of antiquity one type). Likewise, Latin was the "language" of Western scholarship and scholars for centuries, such that even
in 1942 there were some capable of writing a PhD dissertation in Latin ("De consonantibus quae laryngophoni vocantur, praecipue quod ad linguam antiquam Graecam attinet"), but it was still an "artificial" Latin. Greek, on the other hand, was forgotten in the West (preserved by and in the Islamic empire, which is where much was recovered).
It was a class on the book of Mark. The earliest manuscripts available for study do not have Mark 16:9-20.
The earliest manuscripts available for study do not have Mark at all, really. The earliest is a scrap of John from the 2nd century. Apart from p45, Mark is rather poorly attested to by our Greek papyri witnesses.
They stop with verse 8. The rest expanded from there, but without a written source explaining why (plenty of theories though).
It is true that our earliest manuscripts (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) which include "all" of Mark stop at verse 8. However, it is also true that this is hardly the reason scholars generally believe that the longer ending was appended to the original. It is much more because, while the "full" ending of Mark is attested to by important early witnesses (A, C, D, L W, theta, and according to Jerome existed in his day), the variations in the other witnesses
and more importantly the language of the longer ending attested to make it most likely that this ending was not originally part of Mark. However, Matthew and Luke, unlike Mark, do not simply stop where Mark does, nor does Mark leave out the resurrection of Jesus. Paul's letters, written before Mark, and attested to by some of the earliest manuscript witnesses we have, include the earliest version of a "passion" narrative we possess.
I found it hard to believe he was fluent with all those languages as well but some people have a passion for it
People whose specialty includes fields like classics, N.T. studies, early christianity, near Eastern studies, and Jewish studies, etc., not only need to learn the ancient languages which make-up the primary sources of that period, but also the languages of modern scholarship. As biblical studies is just about the oldest of "modern" disciplines, the scholarship goes back several hundred years, and continues to be produced in languages other than English (by contrast, non-native speakers in even the social sciences tend to write in English). German is perhaps more important than English here, and thus in addition to languages like Hebrew, Syriac, Latin, Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, Hittite, Sanskrit, and other languages of the ancient world, people who study antiquity are typically required to learn at least German and usually either French or Italian (or both). Not all equally, of course (N.T. scholars, for example, if they know Syriac, Hittite, or Aramaic at all, usually are more acquainted with Latin).
