DOUBTS CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION: MARK

Two Christian doctrines which have caused people over the ages the most trouble grasping are the virgin birth and the resurrection of Christ. I wanted to look at how each of the four Gospel accounts handled the latter issue, beginning with the probable earliest written account, that of Mark.

J.B. Phillips is one of many commentators who has remarked that the biblical narratives are characterized by possessing “the ring of truth.” But since many of us appear to be tone deaf, I would like to explain a little of what that means.

Perhaps the best way to recognize the veracity of the Gospel accounts in particular is to compare them with a spurious “Gospel” written during the the 2^nd century AD, the “so-called” Protoevangelion of James. As with many other later creations of its type, the purpose was to bolster up doctrines in the early church which the authors felt was not stressed strongly enough in the canonical NT writings.

In this particular case, the issue concerned the doctrine of the eternal virginity of Mary. Thus, the narrative has Mary and Joseph camped in a desert cave when her time comes to deliver a child. Joseph goes out looking for a midwife and fortuitously finds one right away. After the birth, the midwife tells her friend Salome the amazing news that a virgin has delivered a baby. Salome refuses to believe the story until she has herself performed a gynecological exam on Mary. Thus, we are conveniently provided with two first-hand witnesses attesting to the fact that Mary continued to be a virgin.

In addition, the text goes out of its way to point out that Joseph's two older children with them are not Mary's but are the product of his earlier marriage. And as if that weren't enough, Joseph also admits that he is too old to have any more children.

Before comparing this rather heavy-handed treatment of Jesus' birth with the biblical accounts of Jesus' resurrection in the Gospels, we need to make sure that we are all on the same page regarding the meaning of “resurrection.” It is to be distinguished from three different religious beliefs:

The first is the idea of resuscitation, meaning a person being brought back from the dead only to die later in the usual course of events. This would apply to those such as Lazarus, who were brought back from the dead miraculously by Jesus during his ministry on earth.

The second related idea is that of the soul or spirit departing from the body and continuing to exist somewhere in a totally disembodied state. The Greek and Roman philosophers favored this view of the afterlife. And when it was combined with Christianity in the early days of the church, it gave rise to the heresy of Gnosticism. The Buddhist doctrine is somewhat similar, only in that case each individual soul is swallowed up with all others into one single entity or world soul.

Thirdly, is the concept of reincarnation, i.e. a person dying but his spirit being brought back to earth in a completely different body, sometimes over and over again throughout the ages. Hinduism ascribes to this belief.

In contrast to all these concepts, resurrection means having a brand new body after death, but one that is in one way or another related to the old body in the same way that a seed and a plant have the same DNA while not resembling one another in other aspects. See Jesus' explanation in John 12:24-26 and Paul's discussion in I Corinthians 15:40-48.

Mark 16

If we turn first to the earliest Gospel for its description of Jesus' resurrection, we run into an immediate roadblock in that the best and earliest manuscripts stop at verse 8 at the point where the three women visiting the tomb have been told by a presumed angel that Jesus had risen. But instead of obeying his message to tell the apostles, they are afraid and keep quiet instead.

Since this is not all a satisfactory ending in most people's minds, later scribes felt they had to flesh out the story a little further. Thus, we have the wealth of later manuscripts which have various tacked-on conclusions to Mark's Gospel. The most common of these, the so-called “Longer Ending” consisting of verses 9-20, can be found in most modern translations, usually in smaller print or accompanied by a footnote stating that this ending was probably not original to Mark.

The most reasonable scenario explaining both (1) the truncated nature of Mark's Gospel and (2) the blatant contradiction between Mark's “they said nothing to any one” and the unified witness of the other three gospels that the women immediately reported to the Apostles is as follows:

    1. The original manuscript of Mark's Gospel had very little time to circulate and be copied for the benefit of those closest to Jesus before the final pages were accidentally separated from the rest of the scroll and lost to posterity.

    2. Those few early complete copies were utilized by some of the other Evangelists in the preparation of their own narrative accounts. Therefore Mark's information can be recovered from those other Gospels.

    3. But simply leaving Mark's Gospel incomplete where the narration broke off accidentally caused a major problem for scribes copying the document. If the women went off to tell the apostles (as we can assume the original document read, in total agreement with the other accounts), then the reader would demand to know what happened when those men heard the news. So the easiest fix was to simply change that last verse 8 slightly to say that the women told no one. In that way, it would not appear to be as obvious that something was missing in the story.

    4. Later on, the incomplete form of the Gospel of Mark was seen to still be lacking, especially in comparison with the three other accounts published by then, and so a variety of attempts were made to finish off the story by using a summary of the events narrated in the other three accounts.

I have attempted to explain and defend the above scenario in my rather lengthy blog titled “The Ending of the Gospel of Mark” for those who are interested.

The most interesting thing I see regarding the very early “Long Ending” is that even it does not exactly give us a ringing endorsement to the idea of Jesus' bodily resurrection in that three times the text (verses 11-14) mentions that someone “did not believe.” This is something that a writer of a fictional or strictly apologetic account would have had absolutely no reason to even mention since it gives critics of the resurrection abundant evidence to question whether Jesus really did come back to life. The only possible motive for including those three occasions is that they were factually true.

Since those three negative episodes happen to be recorded in the other Gospel narratives, I will discuss them in subsequent blogs.