The Gospel of Mark, a.k.a. Episode I

Two things are strange about the Gospel of Mark: the way it begins, and the way it ends. The latter has spawned centuries of debate and provided unending fodder for higher criticism and skeptics of the Resurrection. But the former is often missed in hurried readings.

What if they are connected?

Much has been made of the fact that Mark's Gospel, as originally written, ends with this statement:

Entering [Jesus'] tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. 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, just as he told you." And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

How can you end a story with an opened grave, a missing body, and a cryptic message from an unearthly being? It's as if the next sentence should read, "To Be Continued..." This story does not merely leave upon the possibility of a sequel, as so many films do these days, it demands one. 

That the earliest Gospel doesn't clearly portray Jesus rising from the dead, but merely missing from the grave, has spawned a cottage industry of academics and crackpot conspiracy theorists (two partially-overlapping groups) generating alternate explanations for the empty tomb. Surely Mark didn't believe that Jesus rose from the dead? Maybe he was confused. Perhaps he wanted to be provocative. Eventually, someone else decided to finish the story with a preposterous return from death, a rabbit, and some pastel-colored eggs; most likely, this was part of their plan to get themselves executed by the Roman Empire.

William Lane Craig explains that I Corinthians 15:3-7 functioned as the earliest creed of the church, written in the style of a Rabbinic "tradition."

that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 

All Christians heard and believed that Jesus had been crucified, died and rose again. But their understanding of what led to those crucial events varied widely. Thus Mark set out to cobble together a prequel; not a biography of Jesus' entire life (those would be written later by Matthew and Luke) but a biopic covering his public ministry and the events leading up to those recounted in the creed.

Mark makes his purpose clear in the first sentence: 

The beginning of the gospel [good news] of Jesus Christ, the Son of God  

Why would someone begin a work with the statement, "This is the first sentence of this book?" Who needs to be told that the first page of a book starts the story? But taken as a statement of purpose, it is clear that Mark is not telling us the entire story of Jesus - merely the beginning. 

Like any good prequel, it ends by overlapping just enough of the story known by the audience to enable them to connect the two parts. Mark's first readers would have read his last line and said, "Oh, I know what comes next! You don't have to tell me." Any more would be redundant.

 

But after the Apostles died, and Christianity spread farther and wider through the Roman Empire - and beyond - more people began looking to the Gospels as primary sources of information about Jesus. Mark's Gospel gradually went from being "The Prequel" to "A Biography." Those reading it without having heard the gospel proclaimed might think that no one knew why his tomb as empty, or what had happened afterward. They might conclude that the Christian faith was based entirely upon one possible interpretation of a strange and inexplicable event. 

So the Epilogue was added - fittingly, in the same hurried style as the rest of the work. It rushes through 40 days of critical events in the impatient manner of someone who is too busy changing the world to articulate his motivation. 

The Gospel of Mark is not the whole good news about Jesus. It's just the beginning. So-called scholars stumble over the ending because they didn't pay attention to Mark's clear statement of what his work was - and wasn't - in the first sentence.