‘They went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and panic had seized them. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’ Thus Mark (16:8), in what has become one of his most famous lines in modern study. A book of dark mysteries, we are told: secret revelations, flashes of light amid the gloom, the challenge of faith without sight, and finally trembling, panic and silence.1 A perfect ending for a book like this.
Or is it? I sometimes wonder if the reason scholars have read Mark this way is their boredom with the obvious alternative, for so long a staple diet of biblical teaching in both church and academy: that Mark was the first gospel, the simplest gospel, telling the basic facts about Jesus, leaving it to others to embroider them, to add extra teaching, to turn them into a work of art. This kind of thing has been deeply counter-intuitive to scholars in the second half of the twentieth century, wrestling with faith and doubt amid the storms of secularism and postmodernism, and only too eager to warn against ‘happy endings’.2 Much better—so much more sophisticated, after all—to see Mark as a kind of first-century Kafka, or perhaps R. S. Thomas. Thus, where Mark used to feature on the first-year syllabus because he was easy, straightforward and basic, he now belongs there because he is hard, cryptic and intellectually demanding. This will shock the undergraduates, thinks the teacher, and make them realize that things are harder than they imagined!
The debates about the ending of Mark thus reflect the varied perceptions of conservative modernism and radical postmodernism, with no doubt several stages in between; but that does not mean there are no real arguments to be made. There are historical questions here, and they demand historical discussion, not simply rhetorical position-taking. Did Mark mean to break off at 16:8? Did he really intend his whole gospel, admittedly in rough Greek, to end with ephobounto gar, ‘for they were afraid’? Where did the two extra endings come from, and what would Mark have thought of them?
I argued briefly in The New Testament and the People of God that Mark did indeed write a fuller ending, which is now lost, and for which the two extra endings supplied in some later manuscripts were lame substitutes. Nothing in the overall argument of the present book hangs on this argument; but the fact that the argument can be made, and will be made here slightly more fully, demonstrates an important negative: that Mark cannot be used, as he has often been used, as a sign that the earliest Christians knew nothing more than an empty tomb, trembling and panic. It has been all too easy for scholars in search of a straightforward tradition-history to place the resurrection accounts in a chronological order and produce an apparent QED: first Mark, short, dark and perfectly formed without any resurrection appearances; then Matthew, slightly fuller, with some appearances; then Luke/Acts and John, longer, fuller, with more details about the risen Jesus.3 The argument of the previous chapter is designed, among other things, to undermine the apparent force of this progression, by showing that even the fuller accounts of Luke and John demonstrate features, positive and negative, for which the best explanation is that they go back to very early oral tradition. The argument of the present chapter is designed, among other things, to undermine the apparent force of the starting-point. If it is at least a serious possibility that Mark really did have a fuller ending which is now lost, it is simply unsafe to proceed as though ephobounto gar were his final word to the waiting world. Lovers of dark, mysterious texts need not worry; plenty of hidden secrets remain, in Mark and many another early Christian text. But we must not project our contemporary fondness for certain kinds of narrative on to a historical problem which demands not prejudgment but analysis.
We must therefore begin by examining the question of the ending, before proceeding to ask the other necessary questions: what historical value can be assigned to Mark at this point, and what is he trying to tell us as he lays out his brief narrative?4
The problem is well known. Stated simply (those in search of the full complexity can find it in the critical commentaries and monographs) it appears like this.5 The earliest manuscripts of the gospel, the great fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, conclude with 16:8. They are followed by several later manuscripts, and some of the early Fathers of the church either show no knowledge of the longer ending or show, even while reproducing it, that they know it to be dubious. (Unfortunately, none of the many earlier papyrus fragments of New Testament material contains Mark 16; we can always hope for a providential accident of archaeology.) But the great fifth-century manuscripts, led by Alexandrinus, include the ‘longer ending’ (verses 9–20), and most subsequent manuscripts follow this lead. In addition, four manuscripts from the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, and some later ones, insert the so-called ‘shorter ending’, in effect verse 8b; and all except one of these then continues with the ‘longer ending’ as well. A good many of the manuscripts that do contain the longer ending, however, have marks in the margin (asterisks or obeli) to indicate that the passage is regarded as of doubtful authenticity.
The apparently independent omission in the two fourth-century manuscripts, coupled with all the other scattered evidence, makes it highly likely that the longer ending is not original. In addition, though the content of verses 9–20 contains some apparently Markan features (e.g. the disciples’ lack of faith in 16:11, 13, 14), in other ways it looks suspiciously as though it is derived from elements of the resurrection accounts in the other gospels.6 Thus, for instance, 16:12–13 is an obvious summary of Luke’s Emmaus Road story (24:13–35); the appearance to the disciples as they were eating (verse 14) belongs with Luke 24:36–43; the commission in verse 15 is parallel to Matthew 28:18–20; and the ascension in verse 19 is taken from Luke 24:50 and Acts 1:9–11. And, as is often pointed out, the command about the necessity of baptism for salvation (verse 16) and the the list of wonderful deeds the apostles will do (verses 17–18) look as though they are a summary of some aspects of later church life.7 All of these have led the great majority of contemporary commentators, of all shades of opinion, to agree that, though the longer and shorter endings are extremely interesting, they are almost certainly not by Mark.
Actually, the ‘longer ending’ looks, from its opening in verse 9, as if it might even have originally been a separate account altogether, since it begins in parallel to Mark 16:1–2/Matthew 28:1/Luke 24:1/John 20:1, not in sequence with Mark 16:1–8:
9When he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. 10She went out and told the people who had been with him, who were mourning and weeping. 11But when they heard that he was alive, and that he had been seen by her, they did not believe.
This might imply that verses 9–20 were not simply composed by somebody wishing to provide a fuller ending for Mark, but may have originally been a separate summary of Easter events which was then used to plug the gap, even though it actually overlapped with some of the material already present. But this observation, though it opens fascinating possibilities (could it have been originally a separate account? part of a lost gospel?), is not relevant to our present task. There is broad agreement that the author of the gospel did not himself write either verse 8b or verses 9–20.
This is the point at which contemporary criticism has hastened to assure us that we should be content with 16:8 as the proper conclusion. To look for a different ending, perhaps even a ‘happy’ one, we are told, betokens literary or theological naivety.8 The book, like its parables, is deliberately open-ended, enticing readers to complete the story for themselves.9 Similar remarks can be multiplied from recent scholarship, careful to rehabilitate Mark as a grown-up piece of writing, not a naive happy-ever-after book. How much this insistence on ending the book at 16:8 has been motivated by a desire to keep what is normally accepted as the earliest gospel as free as possible from actual resurrection appearances it is difficult to say. Watching the way in which these themes interplay inevitably raises that question.
There are, however, powerful reasons for questioning this theory, and for proposing that Mark did indeed write a fuller ending which is now lost, and for which verses 8b and 9–20 are replacements by later scribes not altogether out of tune with Mark’s intentions.10 We may note, to begin with, that the beginning and ending of a scroll were always vulnerable. A glance at any edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular at facsimile photographs, will reveal that even the scrolls which are preserved almost in their entirety are in many cases damaged at both ends. One recalls, too, the scroll of Jeremiah’s book being steadily whittled away by the king with his penknife.11 But, while this suggests that lost endings (and beginnings) are very much a physical possibility, it proves nothing.12 Nor does the fact that it is unusual to end a sentence, let alone a book, with gar get us very far.13 What counts is an understanding of the book Mark was writing, and a sense of what would have been an appropriate ending for this kind of book. Ultimately, of course, making a case on this subject would require a whole commentary; here, inevitably, we can only summarize.
I argued in the earlier volume that Mark is best understood as an ‘apocalypse’, designed to unveil the truth about who Jesus is through a series of revelatory moments.14 The famous Markan parables function within this as stories of how Israel’s god is fulfilling his strange purposes; one of them uses imagery which, in its Jewish context, might well have been heard as a hint of death and resurrection.15 Within this apocalyptic scheme, Mark has organized a careful sequence of predictions in which Jesus tells his followers, as they head towards Jerusalem, what is going to happen to him. The son of man must suffer many things, be rejected and killed, and after three days rise again (8:31; 9:31; 10:33–4). The predictions get longer in regard to the suffering, but they all end with ‘and after three days he will rise again’. These predictions shape and punctuate the narrative of the second half of the gospel, and belong closely with Mark’s telling us that Jesus really is Israel’s Messiah (8:29; 14:61–2). Mark’s gospel has a stark and simple structure: chapters 1–8 build up to the recognition of Jesus’ Messiahship, and chapters 9–15 build up to his death. But always, in looking ahead to his death, they look ahead as well to his resurrection. (Thus, even if the gospel did end at 16:8, there is no doubt that Mark believed that Jesus really had been raised bodily from the dead.) Since part of Mark’s point as the story draws to its climax is that Jesus is a true prophet, and that what he has said about the Temple, and about Peter, will come true,16 the detailed fulfilment in chapters 14–15 of Jesus’ earlier prophecies about his rejection, suffering, handing over and death would naturally lead the reader to expect that there would also be a reasonably detailed description of the fulfilment of the other part of the prophecy as well.
In particular, the first half of the gospel reaches its climax with Peter’s confession in 8:29, which issues in the challenge to follow Jesus to suffering, death and vindication (8:31–9:1). The confession is confirmed by a remarkable event (the transfiguration) in which a voice from heaven declares, in effect, that Peter has been correct in his judgment (9:2–8); but nothing must be said about the event until the son of man is raised from the dead (9:9). This seems to point definitely towards a final account, not just of an empty tomb and frightened women, but of a similar event, following the climactic revelation of Jesus as the suffering, crucified Messiah, within the frame of Caiaphas’ ironic statement in 14:61 and the centurion’s declaration in 15:39—a final event in which Israel’s god would declare, in effect, that they were right, indeed more right than they had known or intended. There is thus good reason, within the structure of the gospel, to suppose that the author intended to give his work a fuller, more complete ending. He sets up plenty of hints of what is to come. Having explained in such detail how true a prophet Jesus was in relation to his death and the circumstances surrounding it, it is unlikely that he would stop short of explaining the truth of his prophecy about what would happen next.
The same point can be made negatively in terms of the rebuke to Peter in 8:33, and the immediate challenge to follow Jesus, confess him boldly before the watching world, and not be ashamed (8:34–8). This points forward, of course, to a catastrophic moment (14:66–72) in which Peter does exactly the opposite. Is it then likely that the gospel would end with women ‘saying nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’? Opinions will differ here, but my opinion is that it is unlikely. The fact that the disciples and others have been afraid on several previous occasions (4:41, after the storm; 5:15, after the healing of the demoniac; 9:32, afraid to ask Jesus about his prediction of suffering; 10:32, afraid as they follow him on the road) does indeed create a context where we are not surprised that the women, too, are afraid at the extraordinary events of the empty tomb. But the point of fear, throughout Mark, is that it should be overcome by faith: ‘Why are you afraid? Haven‘t you got faith yet?’ (4:40); ‘Cheer up, it’s me! Don‘t be afraid’ (6:50).17
The closest parallel to the picture of the women running away from the tomb is in 5:33, where the woman who has touched Jesus in the crowd comes ‘in fear and trembling’ and falls down before Jesus. Her fear had rendered her silent, speechless; but now that power has gone out from Jesus, and he has challenged her, she tells the whole story. He replies, ‘Daughter, your faith has saved you; go in peace, and be healed from your illness’ (5:34). That story is itself ‘sandwiched’ within the framing story of Jairus’ daughter, who is dead at the moment of this conversation but whom Jesus will shortly raise to life; the parallel between the stories is highlighted by the fact that the woman has had her ailment for twelve years, the same as the age of the dead girl. Immediately after the healing of the woman, messengers come to tell Jairus that his daughter is dead, and Jesus says to him, as to others, ‘Don‘t be afraid; only believe’ (5:36). Mark, it seems, is highlighting precisely the message that will then be needed by the women at the tomb. They may pass from our sight at 16:8, saying nothing to anyone because trembling and panic had seized them; but if the multiple forward references from chapter 5 find any fulfilment at all, we must assume that Mark does not intend to leave them in that condition, any more than Jesus left either the woman or Jairus in their state of fear. True, after the girl had been raised, ‘they were amazed with a great amazement’ (5:42),18 and Jesus told Jairus to say nothing to anyone (5:43); but when he gave similar orders to the disciples he made it clear that the command to silence would be rescinded precisely when the son of man was raised from the dead (9:9).
This is not, of course, Mark’s only reference to resurrection.19 We have already examined the strange saying ascribed to Herod Antipas in 6:14–16; in Mark’s story, this forms part of the build-up to Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi (compare 6:14–15 with 8:28). Jesus, Mark is hinting, is not someone else raised from the dead; he is himself the one who will be raised from the dead (8:31; 9:9). This will demonstrate that he really is the Messiah, the king of Israel, the reality of which Herod is a poor parody.
Just as the larger structure of the gospel, and the hints within it, suggest strongly that Mark intended his gospel to end with an account of the resurrection of Jesus, not merely of the empty tomb, so the build-up towards the crucifixion in chapters 11–14 points in the same direction. Jesus’ Temple-action precipitates a sequence of disputes between him and the Jewish leaders, which work steadily towards large, imposing statements that Jesus will be vindicated, that his action in the Temple will be seen to have been justified as a prophetic act by its outworking, and that, whether or not he spoke of the rebuilding of the Temple as well as its destruction, he himself, as John would later interpret that saying, was to be ‘destroyed’ and ‘rebuilt’.20 In the middle of the sequence of disputes we find the Sadducees’ question (12:18–27), which we have discussed in chapter 9 above. Mark, placing it in this sequence of riddles which explain what Jesus had meant by his Temple-action, must have realized that, in the context of several prophecies about Jesus’ own resurrection, it too must have functioned to point ahead to a final moment of truth, of Jesus’ vindication. Then, within the conversation with the disciples on the way to the garden, Jesus warns that they will all be scattered when, like Zechariah’s shepherd, he is struck down; but he declares that ‘after I have been raised up, I will go ahead of you to Galilee’ (14:28). This, of course, is picked up in the angel’s word at 16:7. It implies that Mark intends to describe, not just a promise that Jesus will meet them there, but the fact of his doing so.
All this suggests that it is highly likely that Mark intended to continue beyond 16:8. What did he intend to say? Something, we may surmise, about Jesus’ followers, not least Peter, meeting the risen Lord in Galilee, being commissioned to tell people at last what they had seen earlier (9:9), and to take the gospel to all the nations (13:10; 14:9).
This is not to say, of course, that Mark did write such an ending. Perhaps he died before he could finish the book (as may have happened to John); perhaps he was prevented from completing his task. If that had been the case, however, and if he had been in any way following an account of Jesus’ life and death known in the oral tradition of his church, or indeed of the wider church, it is likely that someone else would have finished the job for him soon afterwards (again, as seems to have happened with John). Another option is that, writing at a time when at least some of the ‘five hundred at once’ (1 Corinthians 15:6) were still alive, he left the ending blank with the intention that, when the text was read out, someone present would tell their own eye-witness story. Neither of these is particularly convincing. The better answer is that Mark did indeed write more, and that what he wrote was lost—by accident most likely, by the fire in Rome possibly, or, just conceivably, by malicious action (perhaps by some early textual critic, bent on causing problems for later readers—or, more seriously, by someone, in the church or outside, who disapproved of what Mark was doing).21
So what did this lost ending contain? Here the field is, to say the least, wide open. One can only marvel at the reticence of those who, flushed with the success of reconstructing several different recensions of ‘Q’, detecting early strata in Thomas, ‘discovering’ a ‘Secret Gospel of Mark’, and producing a hypothetical and very early version of the Gospel of Peter, have not so far given themselves the far more rewarding task of working out what Mark’s own ending might have contained.22 Indeed, so strong has been the fashion for discovering hitherto unknown texts that one might feel quite comfortable about suggesting that Mark had a lost ending—were it not for the fact that fashion is a sub-branch of a specifically anti-canonical movement within the study of early Christianity, so that this suggestion, probably the most likely of them all, is ruled out before it can start. But if others are allowed to invent early Christian texts on the basis of fragments and hints, filling in lacunas and sketching out possibilities, I too may claim the right to do so—while recognizing, like Paul in 2 Corinthians 11, that such foolishness achieves rhetorical effect but little else.
I would not wish to construct an actual text. But since (on the mainstream view of synoptic relations) Matthew has been following Mark reasonably closely up to this point, especially in developing 28:5b–8a out of Mark 16:6–8a, it is not impossible that he continued to do so, and that we have in Matthew 28:9–20 an outline at least of what Mark 16 might have gone on to say.23 Of course, just as Matthew 28:1–8 displays several major differences from Mark, we would expect the same to be true in the closing passage, and there are several characteristically Matthaean themes which we must assume that Matthew has added, not least the mountain (verse 16), the teaching of commandments (verse 20a), and the final ‘I am with you’ (20b), which so obviously echoes the Emmanuel prophecy of 1:23 and thus provides a neat Matthaean conclusion. But the outline may well be secure: initial meetings with the women and/or Peter; journeying to Galilee and seeing Jesus again there; final teaching and commissioning for worldwide mission. This shows, in fact, that the existing ‘longer ending’ may well not be too far, in outline, from what originally stood there, though in quite different language and with emphases for which Mark himself has not prepared us.
Naturally, we cannot know what might have come next. If Luke had broken off at 24:12 we should never have imagined the marvellous Emmaus Road story. If John had stopped with chapter 20 we should never have thought of the scene by the lakeshore. Perhaps Mark had treasures to reveal which are now lost for ever—unless, once more, for a happy archaeological accident. But the main point has been made: not that we know what the real ending of Mark contained, nor that we can be absolutely certain that there was such a thing, but that we can not be certain, by any manner of means, that there was not such a thing. Nor can we know, if the book really did end with 16:8, whether this was because Mark knew nothing more, or because he knew of stories and wanted to divert attention away from them, or because he knew that someone in the church would at this point tell the story they themselves knew. We must therefore resist the regular argument, all the more powerful for remaining mostly unspoken, to the effect that, since Mark has no ‘appearance’ stories, they have been made up at a later date. We know from 1 Corinthians 15, of course, that that is not the case. But it is good to be reminded that Mark, as it stands, cannot and must not be used to prove a negative. Mark’s gospel and its ending remains an enigma. Part of the enigma is precisely whether he intended it to be as enigmatic as it now appears.
So what are we to make of Mark’s story? For one of the most influential critics of the twentieth century, the answer is emphatic:
The story of the empty tomb is completely secondary … the point of the story is that the empty tomb proves the Resurrection … the story is an apologetic legend … Paul knows nothing about the empty tomb, which does not imply that the story was not yet in existence, but most probably that it was a subordinate theme with no significance for the official Kerygma … That is finally established by the fact that originally there was no difference between the Resurrection of Jesus and his Ascension; this distinction first arose as a consequence of the Easter legends, which eventually necessitated a special story of an ascension with heaven as an end of the risen Lord’s earthly sojourn. But the story of the empty tomb has its place right in the middle of this development, for in it the original idea of exaltation is modified already.24
Bultmann has been followed by a host of lesser lights, who have added other points, among them the following. Paul does not mention the women. The original belief in the resurrection was a spiritual, in other words not a bodily, matter; Mark is starting to pull the idea of resurrection away from Daniel 12 (thought to refer to a ‘spiritual’ and disembodied existence) and towards the more physical interpretation of 2 Maccabees. Q makes no mention of the empty tomb. Nor does Acts. Therefore it is unlikely that the empty tomb has any earlier basis in history.25
These points cannot be answered from Mark itself. Mark, at this point, merely provides the playing field for a much larger contest. But the points that have been raised affect how we read Mark, and particularly whether we are likely to dismiss Mark’s story of the women at the tomb as a mid-century legend, invented to support a recently invented idea of bodily resurrection, or whether we are prepared to consider that Mark tells us something at least about the historical events which gave rise to the belief of the early Christians. This part of the present chapter thus points beyond the immediate task—to understand the role of Mark in both witnessing to and contributing to the belief of the early Christians—and towards the task of our final Part.
First, the idea that there was originally no difference for the earliest Christians between resurrection and exaltation/ascension is a twentieth-century fiction, based on a misreading of Paul. Actually, Bultmann’s account is slippery at the crucial point: though he says there was no difference between resurrection and ascension, what he means is that there was no early belief in ‘resurrection’ at all, since as we have seen the word ‘resurrection’ and its cognates was not used to denote a non-bodily extension of life in a heavenly realm, however glorious. Plenty of words existed to denote heavenly exaltation; ‘resurrection’ is never one of them. (One cannot at this point drive a wedge between Daniel 12 and 2 Maccabees 7; in the first century, as the rabbinic evidence bears witness, Daniel 12 was understood to mean bodily resurrection.) Bultmann therefore has to postulate—though he has covered up this large move—that at some point halfway through the first century someone who had previously believed that Jesus had simply ‘gone to heaven when he died’ began to use, to denote this belief, language which had never meant that before and continued not to mean it in either paganism, Judaism or Christianity thereafter, namely, the language of resurrection; and that, quite soon, other people who knew, as well they might, that resurrection meant bodies, and bodies meant empty tombs, began to invent and then transmit convenient apologetic stories about the empty tomb, of which Mark’s is one. What is more, Bultmann has to assume that, though this theory about a risen body was a new thing within the already widely diverse Christian church, it took over almost at once, so that all traces of the original view—that Jesus was not raised from the dead, but simply ‘went to heaven’, albeit in an exalted capacity—have dropped out of historical sight.26 Of course, one could easily invent a conspiracy theory to explain this in turn (‘The wicked orthodox church suppressed this belief, but it re-emerged in the exciting, radical Nag Hammadi texts’27). But at this point the historian must protest. This theory is neither getting in the data, nor doing so with anything like simplicity, nor shedding light on any other areas. Why should we pursue it further? As with many other Bultmannian constructions, the sequence of moves required to support the hypothesis takes far more historical imagination than the thing Bultmann is trying to avoid.
But there is more. Bultmann and his followers are wrong to say that Paul knows nothing of the empty tomb.28 They are wrong, too, to regard that motif as secondary. As we shall see later, it was always essential. Without it, however many appearances had been witnessed, and however many angels had said remarkable things, there is no chance that even the most devout of Jesus’ former followers would have said he had been raised from the dead, or that any of the striking early Christian developments in resurrection belief would have taken place, or that anyone would have thought of Jesus as Messiah. Nor is it significant that Paul does not mention the women.29 As for Q, since its most skilled and seasoned interpreters believe it had neither a passion narrative nor a resurrection narrative, the absence of an ‘empty tomb’ story is about as significant as the absence of a trombone part in a string quartet. But, as we saw earlier, if Q did exist, one of the things it knew about was a parallel between Jesus and Jonah. And, if I am right about the significance of that parallel, the point is this (more explicit in Matthew than in Luke): Jonah’s ‘resurrection’ from the monster’s belly set a pattern which Jesus would follow in his resurrection from ‘the heart of the earth’.30 As for Acts, its resurrection preaching has such a robust and bodily character, emphasizing the Psalms which speak of God’s holy one ‘not seeing corruption’, and making a contrast between Jesus and David, who died and was buried and whose tomb can be checked, that it is hard to think that the empty tomb was not simply taken for granted. And, while on Acts, if Mark 16 is a late, apologetic invention, why does it not feature in the preaching in Acts itself, so often taken to reflect a more developed perspective?31
In particular, this theory asks us to believe something more or less impossible as we read Mark 16 and the other accounts which are supposedly derived from it (Bultmann says ‘in reality there is but one story’).32 It asks us to swallow the idea that a key story was invented, some time in the 40s, 50s or 60s, whose purpose was apologetic, explaining the new-minted belief in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, and that those who invented it for this apologetic purpose decided to call, as the principal witnesses, two or three women, led by Mary Magdalene of all people. I have written about this already in the previous chapter. Gerald O’Collins has pointed out that this theory actually marginalizes the women from the account, since, if it drew attention to them, its own serious weakness would emerge.33
The ruling theory, then, is full of improbabilities. However strange a story Mark may be telling, it cannot be explained as a mid-century legend. This does not mean that its every word is automatically proved; merely that the arguments used to suggest that the story is automatically disproved fail at every turn. This conclusion is strongly supported by a study of the central emphases in the way Mark has told the story.
4. Easter Day from Mark’s Point of View
There are many small points that could be made about the way Mark has told the story of the first Easter day. Our purpose here is to look at the general thrust of his narrative and highlight certain features which indicate what sort of a story Mark thinks it is.
First, we note that the complete story is told from the perspective of the women. This is so in all the synoptic accounts, and granted the content—where the women are the only, or in Matthew’s case the principal, actors—it could hardly be otherwise. But it means that if the story is fiction someone has taken the trouble to think into the situation of the two or three women and describe the whole incident, including their worries about rolling away the stone, from their point of view (had they been three men they would presumably have been strong enough to roll it away; according to 15:46 Joseph of Arimathea rolled it there by himself, and even if somebody helped him it does not sound as though it was too heavy for two or three men at most). Thus the women’s reason for going (to anoint the body), their anxieties about the stone, their alarm at seeing the young man in the tomb, and their terror, panic and silent flight—all are narrated from their point of view. We see the whole scene through their eyes. This is sufficiently unusual in the gospel tradition to be considered remarkable.
Second, the emphasis throughout is on the unexpectedness both of the event as a whole and its different segments. Granted the various versions of the ‘apologetic legend’ theory, it is striking that the story bears no sign of anyone saying, ‘Ah yes, we should have expected this.’ Just the opposite. This failure to recognize the event as falling into an expected pattern fits with what we should expect, granted the Jewish hope of the time (resurrection being something that would happen, if at all, to all the righteous at once). It does not fit with the idea of a story being told as a careful explanation for a belief that has begun to be adopted in some quarters of the church.
Third, the discovery of the empty tomb is not presented as the historicizing ‘explanation’ of a belief in Jesus’ resurrection, but as itself a puzzle in search of a solution. It is not that someone believes in Jesus’ resurrection and now finds an empty tomb to confirm that belief; it is, rather, that they have found an empty tomb and are offered the startling and totally unexpected explanation that Jesus has been raised. The resurrection interprets the empty tomb, not vice versa. Nor, in the eight verses that we have (which, in the view of most who have advanced the argument I am opposing, are all we have), does Mark provide any further corroborating evidence. If one were writing this story to convince a sceptic, as the argument requires, not only would one have substituted a well-reputed man for the ‘hysterical women’ (as Celsus saw them); one would either have removed, or explained more fully, the strange young man in the tomb.
Fourth, the role of this young man is itself striking. Mark does not call him an angel, but Matthew does, and the role he plays in Mark is the equivalent of the role played by angels in apocalyptic visions. Mark, as we have seen, is writing an ‘apocalyptic’ type of book; but his point is that this is no vision, but startling reality.34 The angel has come out of the dream and on to the stage, or rather into the tomb. To someone used to apocalyptic visions (reading accounts of them, not necessarily experiencing them) this scene has the effect you would get if a man who regularly watches a particular television programme were suddenly to find one of the actors from the programme sitting on the couch beside him. The angel is interpreting the apocalyptic event. But the interpretation, in the verses we have, does not give Jesus the titles ‘son of god’ and ‘Messiah’ which he receives in the earlier interpretative moments, at the baptism, Caesarea Philippi, the transfiguration, the trial and the cross. The angel’s explanation that he is risen, though, is perhaps meant to tie in with those earlier moments. If Jesus has been raised, as he had said, all those earlier words have been proved true.
Fifth, the story implies that the disciples are to be rehabilitated (16:7). The singling out of Peter for special mention seems obviously designed to go with the tragic story of his denial of Jesus in 14:66–72, not, at the moment at least, to suggest anything about his leadership in the movement that was about to begin in a new way. This mention of Peter, with reference back to his denial, ties in closely with 14:26–31; there as here there is also mention of Jesus going before them to Galilee. At the end of verse 7 the angel declares that ‘you will see him, as he told you’, but nowhere in Mark’s predictions of the resurrection has Jesus said explicitly ‘you will see me’. This must be taken to be implied in 14:28 and the other passages; though Mark does not describe the disciples seeing Jesus, he recounts a promise that this will happen. Even within this brief and probably truncated account, then, the two elements emerge (the empty tomb and the seeing of Jesus) which we shall note as the key, non-negotiable historical bedrock required to explain why the early Christians believed what they believed about what had happened to Jesus (chapter 18 below).
Sixth, the narrative grammar of 16:1–8 indicates that it cannot simply have arisen as a separate unit of tradition.35 It appears to be a separate unit on the surface, because the women’s names, noted in 15:47, are repeated in 16:1—unless indeed the point is that Mary Magdalene was accompanied by one Mary on the Friday night and by a different one, and by Salome as well, on the Sunday morning. But in any case, with the women as the principal ‘subjects’, the narrative as it stands does not conform to normal story-patterns. The women, we are told, come to the tomb to anoint the body. That, it seems, is the object of the whole action. The problem of which they are aware (the ‘opponent’ in narrative-analytical language) is how to roll away the stone. This then turns out to be no problem at all, but a different problem presents itself instead: the body has gone. Now we realize that their original intention (to anoint the body) was itself a ‘problem’, an ‘opponent’ in the technical sense, within a larger implicit narrative. Jesus’ body had, after all, already been anointed for burial (14:8); they did not need to do it again.36 The story we find in these verses only works as part of a different, larger one; the women are summoned to be ‘helpers’ in someone else’s drama. Mark 16:1–8, analysed in terms of its narrative grammar, reveals itself not as a free-standing unity, but as part of a larger story. When we enquire what larger story this might be, the answer is obvious: it is the story in which the ‘subject’ is, at one level, Jesus, and at another level, Israel’s god. The women are to be ‘helpers’ in this drama. It is vital that the male disciples find out quickly both that Jesus has been raised from the dead and that they will see him in Galilee, and they will not find this out unless someone tells them. This confirms what we have been arguing all along, that the story cannot simply have arisen as an apologetic legend to support a newly invented belief in Jesus’ resurrection. It also suggests strongly that whoever wrote it down did not intend to leave the readers supposing that the women never said anything to anyone. This opens a final possibility.
The implicit story within which 16:1–8 finds its meaning cannot, for these reasons of narrative grammar, be intended to end in failure, in a silence with nobody telling anybody anything. After all, even at a common-sense level, the hearer is bound to ask how, if the women remained silent, anybody ever came to know what happened that morning. Two possible conclusions, which are not mutually exclusive, suggest themselves. Either, as we argued in the first main section of this chapter, the story did indeed carry on, with the women recovering their nerve, telling the disciples, and sending them on their way to Galilee and to a meeting with the risen Jesus. Or the final sentence of 16:8 has been systematically misread. Supposing this is the apologetic point in the story. Supposing Mark is faced with the question, not, ‘How do you know Jesus is risen?’ (answer: the empty tomb), but ‘If the women found the tomb empty, why didn’t all Jerusalem hear about it at once? Surely a group of hysterical women rushing about in the early morning would have had the news all over the city within minutes?’ This is every bit as likely an apologetic scenario as those envisaged by Bultmann and his followers—in fact, more so. If nobody proclaimed Jesus as risen for a month or two, as Luke suggests, the question might very well arise: why did people not hear about this sooner? And Mark answers: they said nothing to anyone (implying, ‘as they were making their way back into the city’), because they were afraid. Afraid, of course, because empty tombs and explanatory angels are enough to scare anyone. Afraid, too, because they had secretly been to the tomb to anoint the body of a condemned would-be Messiah, and they would rather this were not widely known.
Perhaps, after all, Mark is a gospel more of revelation than of concealment; or, at least, of a concealment designed to lead to revelation. But this does not make his story easy, straightforward or basic. There is no need for the sophisticated critic to worry that studying the shortest gospel is in danger of becoming boring. Precisely because of what is concealed, and what is then revealed, this remains a dangerous book, revolutionary even, for the philosophies and politics of the twenty-first century as well as those of the first.