Being as how it’s his feast day, I thought we’d discuss the odd fact that Mark’s gospel famously has a resurrection narrative without a Risen Jesus.
And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb when the sun had risen. And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?” And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back; for it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them, “Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid. (Mk 16:1–8)
Some people think this means Mark does not believe in a resurrection in the only sense that either Pharisaic Jews or early Christians ever talked about resurrection: namely, as a corpse somehow coming back to life. Instead this is allegedly a mythic narrative.
I am unclear what mythic is supposed to mean here. What I am not unclear about with my highly useful English major, is Chekhov’s Gun.
I refer not to the phaser of the helmsman of the Starship Enterprise, nor even to this famous firearm but to the famous dictum of storytelling: “If you show a gun in Act One, it must be fired by Act Three.
When Mark bangs away on this theme of rising from the dead again and again as his hero pursues his rendezvous with destiny (on the Third Day no less and not in the Vague Mystic Other Time of eternity) ….
And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter, and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men.” (Mark 9:30–32)
They went on from there and passed through Galilee. And he would not have any one know it; for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.” But they did not understand the saying, and they were afraid to ask him. (Mark 10:32–34)
And they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. And taking the Twelve again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles; and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise.” (Mark 10:32-33)
….a reader can be forgiven for reading Mark to mean that just as the passion, crucifixion, and death guns he mentions in Acts I and II of his story were very plainly fired, so he now means to tell us that the resurrection gun has been plainly fired as well. And since crucifixion is not a mere metaphor for some disembodied spiritual reality in Cloud Cuckoo Land, but the literal, brutal Roman form of execution trailing the stink of ignominy and shame after it, it looks rather like Mark also means, when he tells us the tomb was empty, not “The tomb still had Jesus’ corpse in it but his spirit marches on!” but rather, “The tomb was empty and the mysterious stranger meant business when he said Jesus was not there and would meet them in Galilee.”
Given that this is substantially the same story the other gospels tell, my conclusion is that the last page of Mark is likely missing, leaving us with his peculiarly truncated ending: an ending that somebody tried to patch up with a quick and dirty summary that repeats the basic tradition found in all the gospel and one which is clearly as almost as primitive as those accounts.
Why primitive? Because like all the gospel accounts, it tells the story of witnesses nobody would invent–women–as the first eyewitnesses to the Resurrection. It also, like all the others is weirdly barren of Old Testament commentary and embroidery. No “Thus was fulfilled the word of So and So”. Likewise, almost no commentary on what the Resurrection means for the believer. No “Because he died, you have died. Because he lives you live”. Just the stories as they have been handed down. They have not even had the rough edges buffed off to assume the official creedal form Paul recites in 1 Corinthians 15 (which focuses on the respectable witnesses and does not bother with what Celsus will later call “hysterical women”).
In short, the “silence” of Mark on the Resurrection betokens, at most, I think, a missing page (a common problem with the physical medium of ancient MSS). It is certainly not “proof” that Mark either disbelieves or mythologizes into the ether the Resurrection that the rest of the New Testament emphatically asserts to be bodily. Mark is not that bad a storyteller. His whole story is leading up to this as he has methodically brandished, loaded, and cocked Chekhov’s Passsion, Death, Resurrection Gun. And Resurrection means an empty tomb, a missing corpse, and the promise that his friends will see him, alive and kicking, in Galilee. That his account of the meeting does not survive does not mean he rejects everything he has set his story up to reveal. That somebody else supplied a quick and dirty summary of the same story all witnesses told suggests, I think, that everybody knows Mark told it as well.
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One Response
My thought is that Mark left this Chekhov’s gun, still smoking, to deliver a final narrative, maybe a hymn or a poem, that would be a closing bracket to his Gospel, but perhaps that scroll end was unwound so frequently that it eventually disintegrated, perhaps being remembered in oral tradition as a hymn disembodied from the gospel itself until eventually somebody remembered that there was a proper ending to it, but nobody remembered the exact words, so they were scribbled in without due care, from other accounts.
And happy namesake’s day! Mine also.