If they were fixed very early on before any harmonisation took place then yes, they would.
The existence of contradictions has nothing to do with the possibility of later harmonizations that point to an early date before these hypothetically later harmonizations would have taken place.
There's no logical relationship there. Also, by the time the gospels were written, why wasn't such an early story fixed so as to alleviate the contradictions yet? (see further below about the Passion/Resurrection narratives).
The point is that in both Jewish and pagan cultures women are worse than useless as witnesses - so nobody in their right mind would invent women into the story as first or only witnesses of anything, and if once one can get away with telling the story without women no compilation of the story after then would include them. In other words it's highly likely all four stories were pretty much fixed earlier than AD50.
I wax tired of this often parroted apologetic rhetoric. There's simply no way to test this assumption, and you would do well to read up on the status of women in so-called pagan cultures. The earliest gospel was written to gentiles, possibly in Rome, where we don't find this alleged suppressed status of women to the point of not being in one's right mind to invent a story about it (cf. the wife's right to divorce her husband in Mark x.12).
The women are not mentioned by Paul, our earliest source, and this can hardly be chalked up to the sentiments of Jews on the status of women as witnesses. Paul wrote to gentiles, and on ethnic, social, and sexual concerns, he wrote:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
--Galatians iii.28
See also what he says about a prominent woman in Romans xvi.7. There was no reason for Paul not to mention these women.
Your case is weak.
That's exactly my point - the lack of OT prooftexts show the resurrection accounts to have been fixed much earlier than the passion narratives. Note that the resurrection is the founding event of early Christianity, not the passion. It's the resurrection that throws the necessary light to understand everything else, from the passion all the way back to Genesis.
That's totally non-sequitur. The contradictions and lack of OT prooftexts could just have easily arised from the authors taking a core story invented by Mark in different directions since Mark is, as you say, truncated.
It also wouldn't make sense for a later story (the Passion narratives allegedly) to have been harmonized so quickly with minimal contradictions between the gospels while the earlier story (the Resurrection narratives allegedly) suffers from contradictions. According to your logic above harmonization should have already taken place for the earlier Resurrection narratives before it took place for the Passion narratives.
There's no method to this madness. You just link a number of speculative hypotheses so that it
will agree with and suit your purposes. Your case would be more convincing if you hadn't overlooked the fact that the gospels were written decades later, not in the 50's, so the minimal contradictions and presence of OT prooftexts characteristic of the Passion narratives should have already taken place for the
earlier Resurrection narratives.
The resurrection accounts look much less like this than the rest of the synoptic gospels - they show every sign of having drawn on separate traditions for their resurrection stories. Of course because Mark's is so trucated it's hard to be certain.
Exactly. It could just as easily be each successive author composing their own version of these narratives based off of an oral outline (provenance unknown) or off of what Mark set off with the appearance of his gospel. Notice that where he left off, the following gospels flail off in their unchecked inconsistencies.
That they're different doesn't mean you have to conjecture yet
another hypothetical source/tradition.
No, but it fits. The resurrection accounts look like they are the earliest bits of their respective gospels, and that's a reasonable thing to expect in a church where the resurrection is the central event that re-defines everything else. What we see and what we might expect are compatible.
ELB: 'There's no method to this madness. You just link a number of speculative hypotheses so that it will agree with and suit your purposes.'
There's no logical reason to assume your conclusions about what we should 'expect'.
Everything in John's gospel has a theological purpose, usually several. On the other hand there is no reason to suppose that John was interested in describing a precise chronology and quite a lot of reason to think he wasn't.
I don't like to dialogue about vague generalities and unsupported assertions, such as 'quite a lot of reason'. Bring some substance to the table or don't waste our time.
In any case, John xiv.26, unless Jesus never said it (no surprise there), stands in contrariety to the several discrepant and irreconcilable Resurrection accounts.
Not at all. John's gospel alone is an extraordinarly rich document, sufficient to keep one learning indefinitely. But neither John nor The Spirit is in the business of satisfying a 20th century obsession with factual detail over significance. The gospels are exactly what is needed - but not necessarly exactly what everyone thinks they want. We don't need to know everything Jesus said and did in infinite detail and precise chronological order (and, as John said, it would take more than all the books in the world to record it if we did) - rather we need to understand what he did and said. We need books that tell the story to bring out what it means. The evangelists are theologians, not chronologists [is such thing ever really exists]. Like any story teller, they tell the story to make a point or points, not to transmit historical data.
These subjective thoughts about what 'the Spirit' wanted to do (as if you could possibly know) does not help us reconstruct what actually happened, i.e., what he 'did and said'. You're letting your theological presuppositions guide your inferences, and I'm not interested in that.
Thanks,
E.L.B.