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By Root 2127 0

for the Ascension Day and the Book of Common prayer. It seems to contain within it some of the traditional material of the later Gospels, which argues that it was written after the other Gospels were already written. Eusebius and Jerome (fourth-century, Church Fathers) both knew the tradition but raised doubts as to its authenticity by saying that it was missing in many Greek manuscripts known to them.5 It surely represents another justification for the gentile mission: “And he said to them, ‘Go into all the world and proclaim the good news [Gospel] to the whole creation’” (Mark 16:15). Perhaps it also represents the quickening of apocalyptic sentiment following the Second Jewish War against Rome:

The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” (Mark 16:16-18)

It separates the ascension from the resurrection by three days and explicitly demonstrates that the risen Christ is the Son of Man enthroned next to God in Daniel 7:13 (v 19), invited to do so by Psalm 110:1:

“So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that accompanied it.

It also shows that Christian proselytizers were healing and performing miracles in Jesus’ name. Most of all, it provides a solution to some problems posed by the abrupt, shorter ending of Mark. It is a later reflection on the primitive Gospel tradition, demonstrating that we are dealing with important and deeply felt religious documents but ones that will hardly hold up to our contemporary notions of historiography.

THE SHORTER ENDING AND THE BURIAL

The shorter ending is more historically credible and far more enigmatic. Yet, one cannot demonstrate that even the sparse tradition of an empty tomb in the shorter ending is authentic to the time of Jesus. Paul gave us the earliest form of the resurrection tradition, and he was silent about the empty tomb. The shorter ending argues for a physical resurrection because the body was missing. Yet, the shorter ending does not necessarily contradict Paul because Paul believed in transformed flesh. In other words, the shorter ending did not of itself establish the physical resurrection of Jesus.

One might argue Paul’s testimony that Jesus was buried implies an empty tomb and although his notion of resurrection is spiritual, it implies transformed flesh. In that case, one would argue it was the empty tomb itself that provided an alternative interpretation of a resurrection. That is very rational, but it does not correspond to the facts as I understand them. The early tradition is solid about the experiences of the women on the Easter morning, less solid on the antiquity of the empty tomb. So the issue hinges not on what might be the most logical hypothesis but on what evidence is the most ancient.

Religiously, we are confronted with a mystery, the source of the faith of a large section of the human race. The narrative itself is designed to stimulate that faith. The absence of the empty tomb in the writings of Paul suggests that he did not know about it, although it is always possible that the tradition existed already, that he knew it and merely did not mention it, or even that he did not like it. Lack of confidence in the empty tomb tradition might follow from Paul’s silence. Furthermore, it calls into question the burial itself, on which it depends, which was neither a likely outcome of a Roman execution nor was it credible in its own right. It is so manifestly polemical as to raise the issue of credibility immediately. Dom Crossan has pointed this out in his characteristically dramatic way by suggesting that the