The implications of Mark 16.8

There is almost unanimity among scholars that the original text of Mark, the earliest gospel, ended at Mark xvi.8, whether the author of Mark intended to finish it or not (however, Bruce M. Metzger has observed that Greek compositions never end with the word 'for' [The Text of the New Testament, 4th ed. 2005, p. 326]). The oldest and generally most reliable witnesses to Mark lack the 'longer ending' found in most English bibles (verses 9-20), which is sometimes accompanied by textual notes on the later 'shorter ending' and other addendums to the incomplete text of the Marcan Gospel over the early Christian centuries.

I have a question for Christians regarding the implications of the ending as it stands, with the women discoverers of the 'empty tomb' legend afraid and remaining reticent about their discovery. Notice that this reticence is the exact opposite disposition wrought in the women as narrated in each of the three other Gospels, Matthew, Luke, & John (where only Mary Magdalene discovers the tomb), after they encounter the messenger/s of the Resurrection event. In each of these, the women immediately run to apprise Jesus' male companions.

Whatever the author of Mark would have written afterwards, if he ever intended to finish, the story clearly indicates that the women stayed quiet even when they came into contact with the disciples again. There would be no need to write that 'they said nothing to anyone' for the short interim before they found some one to actually tell, so this also implies their reticence for quite some time after they rejoined their male companions.

There are several contradictions (both major and minor) between the Gospel accounts of the Easter tale, which I intend to discuss later, perhaps in another thread; but how do Christians reconcile the ending of Mark with the other Gospels and what does this import for the historicity of the empty tomb narratives?


Thanks,
E.L.B.

ephraimanesti said:

MY FRIEND--
ALL accounts contain eyewitness accounts of the empty tomb;
ALL accounts contain eyewitness accounts of encounters with our risen Lord;
End of story.

Straining at gnates and swallowing camals does nothing to help you escape the darkness.

A BROTHER/FRIEND/BOND-SLAVE OF CHRIST,
ephraim

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I hope you are aware that ignoring my points won't simply make them go away.


Thanks,
E.L.B.

P.S.,
Accepting the eyewitness affirmations of conservatives and apologists are more devastating to the Easter story than the critical scholars dismantling these affirmations apart. Eyewitness borne narrative should not diverge the way the Gospels do, especially considering the nature of what they allegedly witnessed in this case (i.e., miraculous resurrections and appearances).

P.P.S.,
What the heck is a 'gnate' or a 'camal'?!

ephraimanesti said:

What you are perhaps missing is the fact that the eyewitness to "miraculous resurrections and appearances" willingly gave up their lives--in very unpleasant ways--refusing to recant the Truth of what they had seen and written about. No one i know of would willingly die for a lie they themselves concocted.

Are you willing to be martyred for your state of unbelief?

A BROTHER/FRIEND/BOND-SLAVE OF CHRIST,
ephraim

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I appreciate the visitor message, but perhaps what you are missing is that your claims are another matter of debate and have no immediate relevance to the content of the OP. I would like a genuine and direct discussion here with Christians willing to actually tackle the issue.


Thanks,
E.L.B.

drich0150 said:

I do honestly think there can be a valid point found here. Even though there maybe some minor discrepancies in the details. the "gospel" of the message is intact.. Who would be so willing to be martyred for there beliefs, if in fact they themselves did not believe fully?

These discrepancies I believe, are proof that the gospels were not a collaboration of works put together by the early church to sell a new religion.. It's like any event witnessed and retold, it will have the story tellers own brand of spice or spin. The accounts of Mark are accurate in that they retell or proclaim a gospel of salvation, but as far as being a mirrored work of the other gospels? It is not, and I suspect if it were you or someone else would have pointed it out by now.

This fact only effects those who worship scripture as God, and not a Holy Spirit inspired work. For those who are working on a relationship with God through scripture or the infallibility of it, tend to sometimes loose sight of who or what they are supposed to be worshiping, and get the two confused.. So as a Christian with a standing relationship with God, that doesn't depend on what others interpret in scripture, my faith is fully intact.

Because the truth of any or of all of the accounts of what the first people that discovered the empty tomb, did or did not say or do, has little to no bearing on the truth of the "good news." (The tomb was empty and that Jesus over came death!)

I think one element you maybe missing is that the bible and the "gospels" are just a starting point.. Once you have gone though the written word and you except Jesus as your savior, The Holy Spirit (The one who was responsible for inspiring scripture and had it assembled,) comes and lives in your heart. the bible is just the beginning.. I know this all seem a bit naive or foolish or at least it can all sound that way, but truer words can not be spoken.

Once you and God have established a relationship, a true religious free relationship, then martyrdom or anything else you can give, you will want to freely give to the glory of God.. Why? Because at some point, all of it becomes very real and true.. Despite minor discrepancies that an independent story teller may have made compared to another's manuscript he may have known little to nothing about.

"Their" deaths, bought and sealed the contents of the gospel in all of the books that accurately record the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.. No other document(s) have been bought with so much blood.

I know you are looking for a more academic discussion, but you being an academically natured person seeking a christian perspective will have to be the one's to make concessions to try and understand the nomenclature, and"feeling" being used to describe what a true relationship with God is like. Because it is going to be difficult to say the least for us to explain something that has to be experienced, to someone completely closed off to the experience itself.. Let alone to put in an acceptable format for your eager dissection.

So if you want this conversation to move forward please ask questions, and don't judge us too quickly for all of the "preachy" terms we may use. Even though they maybe a little worn out, it often times is the best way we know to describe something..

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While there are more than a few 'minor' discrepancies between the gospel accounts when read as literal history (major ones including the day of the Resurrection [16th or 17th of Nisan?], the location of the appearances [Jerusalem or Galilee?], et al); while I doubt you have any official/reliable documents of any of the tribunals of those 'eyewitnesses' who allegedly died for refusing to deny their faith; while I can say with certainty that you can hardly accurately diagnose the states of mind of men living 2000 years ago; and despite the straw men arguments presented in this thread about whether the original followers lied or didn't 'fully' believe (which I never asserted), your comments here also bear little relevance to the content of the OP and simply dodge the question.


The dilemma of the ending of Mark xvi.8 still stands (you can reckon it with the 'major' discrepancies).


Thanks,
E.L.B.

ebia said:

Eyewitness accounts diverge widely - especially when the event is significant. Read up on Wittgenstein's Poker. If the four accounts were any less different we would be certain that they weren't independent accounts.

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Come now, my friend, can you seriously argue that such life changing events (hardly analogous to anything that occurs in this natural world) would have, as a rule, conduced to mutually incompatible accountings of such a phenomenon as whether the women at the tomb told the disciples (who are presumably directly reponsible for these accounts under inspiration) of the empty tomb after their experience with angels?


Thanks,
E.L.B.

ebia said:

Many (most?) scholars agree that the ending we have for Mark is not original, but a notable number of those suspect or believe that there was originally a different ending, or at least acknowledge that as a possibility. "The ending we have is not original" does not imply "the original ended at what we call verse 8"

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My friend, I have dealt with this:



Thanks,
E.L.B.

ebia said:

Yep. I think studies of events like Wittgenstien's poker, and of court evidence, indicates that kind of discrepancy is exactly what one would expect if the event was genuine, rather than a concocted story.

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With due respect, I seriously doubt these examples are sufficient to explain, e.g., why one version of eyewitness testimony records the appearances of Jesus in Jerusalem while another, also eyewitness testimony, records them on the polar opposite end of the map in Galilee, especially considering the nature of such an event, for which, if true, we have no event in all history that could possibly amount to it by comparison.

In court, would a judge consider a case of eyewitness testimony of a car accident in Florida while another eyewitness allegedly testified of this same accident but said it occurred in California?

What do you think any reasonable judge would do with this case?

Thanks,
E.L.B.


P.S.,
I would argue (and most would think justifiably) that these kinds of discrepancies are 'exactly what one would expect' if there is something mysterious going on other than what the gospels themselves would have us believe...

ebia said:

Real independent eye-witness testimony really does have huge levels of discrepency. In the real world both judge and historian have to live with that.

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See postscript above.

If the gospel narratives didn't include discrepencies of the magnitude we find then we would be certain that they were not independent at all

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Well, the Synoptics count as one witness. Mark served as a general outline for Matthew/Luke for them to play with and add to and detract from according to their purposes (not mental distortions or hazy recollections).

- that they were at least harmonised (which the early church could easily have done if it wanted to)

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And they did (cf. the Diatessaron, or the vague/cryptic and wholly implausible rationalizations of church fathers, e.g., for the discrepancies between the Synoptics and John, such as John was a 'spiritual gospel'), and have been ever sense.

But I believe most people would not have recognized the contradictions anyway because they read the gospels vertically (i.e., reading them one after another) rather than horizontally (i.e., reading the narrative flow and common material side by side in each of them).

or at worst concocted.

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You seem to assume that the gospels authors envisioned their separate compositions to one day form a collective witness in a canon. That is hardly the case.

The discrepances actually add to the credibility for anyone who is actually interested in what reliable witness evidence actually looks like rather than an idealised version of what they think it should look like.

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We have no comparable examples in all the world to these miraculous events, recorded by men under the inspiration of God. Your appeal to 'what reliable witness evidence actually looks like' is simply not adequate enough to explain these discrepancies away. In this case, it looks like the gospel authors, if they were the reputed 'eyewitnesses', are either lying or apparently given to flights of fancy.

As I said, read up on Wittgenstein's poker.

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Ibid.

Anyway, that's my response - what you make of it is up to you.

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Well, just for the record you've hardly made your case here. And again, 'I would argue (and most would think justifiably) that these kinds of discrepancies are 'exactly what one would expect' if there is something mysterious going on other than what the gospels themselves would have us believe...'


Thanks,
E.L.B.

Lukaris said:

St. Irenaeus quotes Mark 16:19 in his work Against the Heresies book 3 chptr 10 vs. 5-6. This was in the late 2nd century so part of the alleged disputed scripture was known prior to the various 4th c. codexes that do not include it.

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Certainly, though that is irrelevant to why the ms. evidence and the internal probabilities are decisively against verses 9-20 as authentic. No one disputes that the ending was tacked on early in transmission (see the opening sentence of your link).

It must also be noted that a severe persecution of Christians was enacted by Diocletian at the end of the 3rd century & many churches demolished, scriptures burned, arrests, & executions resulted. It is not unlikely that a portion of scripture was not in every scribe's hands. see also http://av1611.com/kjbp/faq/holland_mr16_9-20.html

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I'm willing to explore that possibility...nevertheless it is irrelevant (see this post above). But even if there was a lost ending, it certainly was not the 'longer ending', which just occassions you more trouble anyway (e.g., the obvious tension between verse 8 and verses 9-10; the contrariety between verses 12-13, apparently taken over from Luke, and Luke xxiv.33-34; and the doctrinal problems of verses 16-18).



Thanks,
E.L.B.

drich0150 said:

These accounts weren't recorded as the events were taking place.

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Of course not, assuming these events did take place, that is.

Most of them were recorded, at the end of the generation of people who witnessed these events, because some of the stories were becoming legend.

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You have a point there...

So when you look at what was written 30 or 40 years after the events, by different men who obviously didn't collaborate their efforts,

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You're right, they didn't. The copied and borrowed from one another with relative freedom (Mark--->Matthew/Luke) or ignored one another altogether (John - Synoptics). They had no intention to collaborate even if they could.

what you have left is a stellar account of the events that had taken place...

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Precisely like Jesus said would happen (see John xiv.26)...but wait!

Perhaps John had forgotten what it was exactly that Jesus promised them as well.

This at best is overstated. The discrepancies you point out are better represented with the following change:

One eyewitness claims that the first person to free themselves from their car cried out for help, and another eyewitness said the first person to free themselves remained silent and spoke to no one..

These discrepancies don't change anything, The accident did happen, cars were damaged, people may have been injured, all of these things remain the same, to the people who want to know what happened...

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I think you've been lost somewhere in the discussion. Notice the example I used and its accompanying analogy to show its absurdity (click), which isn't a matter of hearing problems and is hardly 'overstated'.

I think you had the ending of Mark in mind, but a closer look and common sense just highlights the presumptuous, imperfect, and desperate quality of your argumentation. Aside from the fact that car accidents are simply incomparable with people coming back from certain death and appearing again three days later from thin air, some onlooker not paying full attention to a common car accident can easily miss or forget what person x may have said when they freed themselves from the car while it may have been retained in the memory of another onlooker.

The case of whether or not the women said anything after the Resurrection according to the gospels is the fulcrum of the story. If the women said nothing, when did the disciples find out and how? If they did tell them as Matthew/Luke/John say, how is this something they could have forgotten seeing as how the disciples were direct objects of the message (not indirect onlookers as with the car accident analogy) and this was crucial to obeying Jesus' commands about what to do and where to go as relayed by the messengers? How would they have ever known their story if the women said nothing in order to include it in an 'eyewitness account'--namely, Mark (which according to tradition was written on Peter's authority) in contrast to Matthew/Luke/John--that stands out as saying they did the exact opposite of what they must have done in order for the 'eyewitness' to be able to write about it? This cannot be chalked up to mere amnesia (and if it were, we can hardly rely on its credibility or inspiration).

Neither Matthew or Luke respected this authority and therefore altered Mark's account to say what they think it should have said. None of this is credible.

If I were in the same room with 10 other people and some one barged in and started firing a gun at us and was arrested, do you think the judge would accept my deposition that while I was in the same location with everyone else, I didn't recall the event? Can you honestly say he would consider that...or would he more plausbily either consider any ulterior motives on my part or call into question whether I was there at all? (or whether I had some memory deficiency and was therefore unreliable as a witness?)

Now just because there is a discrepancy in two different accounts as to what the person did or did not say, doesn't change the fact that there was an accident. Or is it like you say, all of the wittinesses testimony have been invalidated Even the parts that do agree, because some of the minor details don't mirror each other? Or better yet because of a few details the events never happened?

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Despite your continued use of that phrase, these discrepant 'details' are hardly 'minor'.

Let me restate you question since, in your bait and switch you have forgotten what you has originally asked of us.

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Sorry, but no. I simply find your answers to be inadequate and full of holes, and therefore not directly relevant to answering the OP. Tangential comments on who allegedly died and why was never part of the question.

We don't always see eye to eye and although I think his case is feeble and altogether just plain weird, ebia was the only one who gave a relevant answer that is subject to scrutiny.

Again, you somewhere got lost in discussion.

The first few posts as well as the others, even though they may look and speak with different levels of education are still valid and direct responses to this question.

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False, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to banter back and forth with you about it.

Although you do not seem to be interested, or have been trained to respond to the first few posts in any other way, other than to try and discredit the efforts made.. It is more than obvious that you have a plan, or direction this discussion should take, so why don't you save everyone the time and effort, and just post both sides of your argument, so we can be converted by your missionary efforts to "free the saved."

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Such cynical remarks deserve no serious response. None of you have any objective way to distinguish these accounts from being the hazy memories of eyewitnesses or the accounts of later non-eyewitnesses taking the legends they've heard off in wildly contradictory directions. It seems as if you all are just striking the same tired chord of the apologists before you.

Trust me, you would stand on firmer grounds if you did not make the assumption that the gospels were written or immediately influenced by eyewitnesses.


Thanks,
E.L.B.


P.S.,
You know, I bet that if the gospels recounted the events of Easter almost verbatim, with just enough difference to betray the actuality and perspective of separate authors, you would instead be appealing to this fact as proof of inspiration. There is no falsifiability to be had for any defense apologists contrive, for everything, no matter how speculative and unbelievable, is proof of your religion. Somehow the very nature of the unbelievability of eyewitness accounts disagreeing so thoroughly, including in devastating fundamentals, is still evidence for you. I hope some one wakes up and realizes the ramifications of this whimsical use of the evidence we have.