That's how we know they are independent. Independent accounts do contradict each other at the kind of level that the resurrection stories do. If they didn't , we would be certain that they weren't independent.
Nobody's hanging anything on the longer ending to Mark.
now you are stating as fact what you cant say as fact, and you are also implicitly claiming that oral tradition is unreliable against which you need to look not at the outdated theories of German historians of a century ago but the work of people like Ken Bailey who have studied how middle-eastern oral storytelling preserves the story.
(FWIW, there is an Australian Aboriginal story that has recognisably preserved a mythologised account of a real event for over 10,000 years - compared to that 40 years is a piece of cake).
We practically never have the original of an ancient text.
We have far more - orders of magnitude more - manuscripts for the NT close in age to the original than for any compatible ancient text. There are a handful of instances where we don't know quite what to do with a significant passage (eg John 8:2-11). And there are a few instances where we don't know the exact original wording. But nothing that affects the overall picture. The standard you are applying would exclude ALL ancient documents from consideration. We would know nothing of first century Palestine (our copies of Josephus are much less good than the NT) and almost nothing of the first century anywhere.
I have. Historians don't divide texts into reliable and not reliable discarding the latter and trusting the former in the way you assume. They recognise that all texts, without exception, are written with an agenda and that all texts, without exception, represent data to be evaluated.
