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Telling the Tale Reflections on the Resurrection
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 ... There are also debates, I should mention, that we no longer possess the original beginning of the Gospel, and these too defy resolution, if only because one cannot disprove a negative.
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.
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.
And there has also been a very great deal of illuminating scholarship in recent years on the consonance between early Christian literature, the Gospels in particular, and the literature of late antique pagan culture.
Whatever the case, the fact remains that, if we possessed the Gospels in their present form but Christianity had died out in the early centuries, they would not strike us as noticeably unusual or out of place in the late classical canon, and we might take them as consciously constructed fictions, in much the same way as we now read Philostratus’s
Life of Apollonius. We would find them wholly and charmingly ordinary and typical of a certain ancient milieu. Just another wonderworker, just another sage uttering impenetrable oracles, just another mysterious itinerant holy man harboring secrets he could divulge only to his inner circle, just another divine mortal unfairly arraigned before human judges blind to his glory. So too, we would not be amazed or shaken to our cores by the signs of his divine, daimonian, or angelic prowess: his ability to command the elements, to heal the sick, to multiply bread and fish, to walk upon water, to shine with a supercelestial radiance, to evoke voices from the heavens, and even to raise the dead. Neither would we be especially surprised, let alone convinced, by the story of the empty tomb, which we would take as no more than a conventional trope meant to provide one last, ineffable indication of his special nature and blessedness. In that sense, formally speaking, the Gospels are not a unique literary or religious phenomenon, except in the trivial sense that every story possesses incidental details special to itself.
The picture that has begun to emerge, then, in certain academic quarters is of the Gospel of Mark as a fairly typical late antique novel written not so much as an attempt to gather up and synthesize oral traditions and writings already in circulation within the larger Jesus movement, but as an entirely fantastic confection produced by and for a literate elite. Then, supposedly, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke added to this account not so much by synthesizing it with other preexisting materials from the nascent religion, but by adding yet more of the typical motifs of Hellenistic tales about miraculous and charismatic sages or prophets or demigods: divine impregnation, marvelous tales of infancy and boyhood, wise or mystifying teachings, post-mortem appearances, and so forth.
Dennis R. MacDonald even proposes that Mark’s Gospel was consciously modeled on the Homeric epics, with a particular emphasis on the
Odyssey (which is an enchanting suggestion, I grant, but not particularly persuasive as MacDonald lays it out).
The Gospels do reflect the diegetic and religious idioms of their time and place, and clearly contain elements that are meant to be illustrative of a spiritual claim rather than documentary accounts of events witnessed and recorded by persons present at the time.
Yes, the Gospels are late antique Hellenistic ‘novels’; and yes, they employ any number of common mythic motifs to advance the plot and to make whatever points the authors intended. Nor is it possible to prove one way or the other whether they were written within and for communities of faith or only as the exercises of fabulists, though they certainly seem to me—every one of them—to have a very different tone and urgency from what one finds in the fictions of the period.
Then too, just as it is an anachronism to mistake the Gospels for documentary biographies of the sort we would write today, so too it is utterly anachronistic to assume an absolute distinction between fiction and factual narratives in the minds of late antique readers. Many may indeed have recognized the liberties taken by the evangelists in framing their tales, but they would not necessarily have therefore assumed that the Gospels were pure invention. Neither should we, for that matter. The assumption that the conscious artistry of the narratives is evidence against their incorporation of prior oral or written traditions is an unwarranted one and, in some respects, quite incredible. And the suggestion that the Gospels were not written for a community of believers is diverting, but not compelling.
From the very first in Mark’s Gospel, there is an obvious attempt to place the itinerary of Christ’s ministry within the geography of Galilee and Judaea, rather than within the more fantastic and casually imprecise geography one would expect of a consciously crafted legend, that clearly seems to indicate a real historical memory about who this man was; even the evangelist’s errors on that score suggest an honest effort to repeat information about a region of which he was not a native.
And yet—there is always an ‘and yet’—other aspects of this scholarship cannot be gainsaid. The literary forms of the Gospels do reflect the literary conventions and idioms of the time. How could they not? They do incorporate motifs and tropes and episodes that were part of the common grammar of a kind of literature that aspired not to historical accuracy, as we now reckon such things, but rather to illustrative epitomes of some deeper truth about its subjects. Some stories, such as that of the Transfiguration, correspond so perfectly to the religious expectations of late antiquity regarding deified or angelic men, both pagan and Jewish, that it is perfectly natural for many scholars to see them as nothing but symbols or dramatic narrative developments or even just ornamental fillips rather than stories their authors intended to be taken in what we today would consider a ‘literal’ manner. And this brings us back to the question of the stories of the empty tomb and of the resurrection appearances of Jesus to his followers.
Without question, the accounts found in the four canonical Gospels, even the abrupt and unadorned version found in—or in what remains of—the text of Mark, are inconsistent with one another while being largely consistent with the late antique atmosphere of spiritual longings and expectations. In that sense, they are evidence of nothing, taken in themselves, other than the fixed intention of the evangelists to portray Jesus of Nazareth as what Hellenistic culture would recognize as a divine man—even a son of God. Certain details of the story are unique to Christian scripture, but all fall within a continuum of narrative types and shared religious imagery. If all we had, then, regarding the resurrection of Christ were the Gospel accounts, we might very well say that all we can deduce about the early Christian proclamation of Christ’s Lordship and about the faith of Easter is that these novelistic conventions excited a response far in excess of their intended purpose and that, mostly as an accident of history, they were seized upon by a credulous readership and progressively transformed from fictions into histories.
But, of course, they are not all we have, and the early Christians’ faith in the resurrection of Jesus cannot be reduced to the accidental metastasis of literary entertainments into scriptures. Something more—much more—was at work.
I thought you were a fan of Mark! 
