Telling the Tale
Reflections on the Resurrection 1
Tanche (Quintidi), 25 Prairial, CCXXXIII
It is an old and unanswerable question whether the original Gospel of Mark ended at the eighth verse of chapter 16 or whether instead a longer narrative followed, no doubt describing post-Easter appearances of the risen Lord to his disciples, which was lost, prompting later copyists to supply the distinctly unsatisfying alternative endings found in the Majority Text and elsewhere. I have no especially firm convictions on the matter. There are also debates, I should mention, regarding the possibility that we no longer possess the original beginning of the Gospel, and these too defy resolution, if only because one cannot disprove a negative. If I were to declare my own suspicion, however—which seems to be precisely what I am about to do—I would have to say that I think it very possible that neither beginning nor end of the Gospel as originally written has been lost. I believe that the book’s narrative properly begins with John the Baptist’s annunciation of one who is yet to come, greater than he, followed by the baptism of Jesus and the voice from heaven declaring either Jesus’s eternal identity or his adoption as God’s Son; and I also believe, with slightly less conviction but still pretty firmly, that it ends with the women who have discovered the empty tomb hastening away in fear and astonishment. My only hesitation in the latter case has to do with a small matter of consistency: if indeed the women told no one what they had found, then it is unclear how the evangelist came upon the story. But that is probably to read too much into the Gospel’s final words (there was no editor from The New Yorker available to burnish away the flaws).
This is not to say that I imagine that the evangelist was unaware of stories of encounters with the risen Christ; as far as we can tell, testimonies regarding such miraculous appearances constituted the principal substance of the Easter kerygma in its most original form, at least if Paul’s account of the matter is typical of the early decades of the faith. I have no strong beliefs regarding what the evangelist may or may not have omitted from his story or what he may or may not have expected his readers to know or believe about the days following Easter Sunday. My true reasoning on the issue is one of literary form, in two senses. First, for all the roughness of the Gospel’s Greek and all the small errors with regard to geographical places and names and so forth, the book has a fairly elegant narrative structure, beginning with a mysterious arrival and ending with a mysterious departure, in the interval rising to a dramatic climax in the story of the Transfiguration before reaching its dramatic conclusion on Golgotha. And then, second, there are all the ways in which the earliest of the canonical Gospels appears to draw upon literary conventions and motifs common in the age in which it was written, among which an inexplicable disappearance or the discovery of a vacant tomb or coffin serves as a sign of some man’s divine or, at any rate, supernatural status. Romulus and Apollonius of Tyana both supposedly simply vanished from human history, the latter most certainly (or so Philostratus would have us believe) by being rapt up into heaven. King Numa’s coffin was supposedly empty when it was opened long after his death. Enoch was understood in Hellenistic Jewish literature to have been assumed into heaven as well, as a divinized and ‘angelized’ mortal, as was Elijah after him. And so on. Richard C. Miller has produced a catalogue of around thirty examples of such tales in Graeco-Roman literature, some of which are admittedly a bit of a stretch as analogies to the Gospel’s story, but most of which give evidence of a very real pattern in the late antique cultural imagination.
