Hello friends. I haven’t posted much lately because I slowed down my writing to run ahead in my reading. My reading has moved on from the resurrection to the life of Jesus. But I have been slowly finishing up my last two pages about the resurrection, and I actually finished writing about the gospel of Mark’s lack of resurrection appearances quite a while ago. Today I decided to give you that piece as I continue to work on the rest of it. Here it is:
The gospel attributed to Mark, which appears to be the earliest narrative of Jesus’ life and death that we have, ends without depicting any appearances of the resurrected Jesus. Some early copies of Mark do contain material at the end of the gospel that read like condensed versions of the appearances found in the other gospels, but manuscript and stylistic evidence have established “to the satisfaction of virtually all scholars” that this material was not written by the author of Mark. (Croy, 2003: 14) Many scholars have concluded that the author intentionally ended his story with the women discovering Jesus’ empty tomb and hypothesize reasons why he would have done so. But this flies in the face of what Mark clearly leads the reader to expect: as the “young man” at the tomb tells the women (Mk 16:7), and Jesus earlier predicts (Mk 14:28), the risen Jesus was to appear to Peter and his other disciples in Galilee.
In his study of the problem, Croy (2003) examined the arguments about Mark’s abrupt ending and defended the thesis that the both the beginning and ending of Mark’s original gospel were accidentally lost, probably by the outer page of a codex coming loose like the cover of a modern magazine. He notes that Mark is particularly fond of showing prophecies fulfilled and depicts Jesus repeatedly prophesying his own resurrection. The idea that Mark would have deliberately subverted his readers’ expectations is anachronistic; other ancient writers show no sign of such a literary strategy. It might seem like early Christians would take care that a gospel was carefully preserved and the loss of parts of a manuscript would be rectified by consulting other, intact copies. But when Mark wrote his gospel it was not considered sacred scripture or even thought of as a “gospel,” it was very likely the first narrative of Jesus’ life and meant for reading to a popular audience, not to preserve for posterity’s sake. The damage to Mark’s gospel would have happened soon after its creation and before many copies had circulated, as both Matthew and Luke, who adapt Mark’s gospel for their own use, supplement their versions with differing birth narratives at the beginning and different resurrection appearances at the end of their gospels, neither of which are found in Mark. (The gospel of John is once again a case in itself.)
I find Croy’s case definitive; Mark originally contained an account of one or more appearances of the risen Jesus, but we know next to nothing about them because of the lost pages. Likely neither did the authors of the other gospels, who had come up with their own endings without Mark to guide them. What Mark leads us to expect is that the disciples scattered after Jesus’ death (Mk 14:27), but Peter and other disciples later saw the risen Jesus in Galilee (Mk 16:7). Beyond that is pure speculation.
Reference:
Croy, N. Clayton. (2003). The Mutilation of Mark’s Gospel. Abingdon Press.
Jesus Reconstructed 