Why Doesn't the Gospel of Mark Include Any Resurrection Eye Witness Accounts Like the Other Gospels?

Why doesn't the Gospel of Mark contain any resurrection eye witness accounts when the other three gospels do? This question about the gospel of mark resurrection eye witness problem has fascinated biblical scholars for generations. In this episode, New Testament professor Kristofer Phan Coffman from Luther Seminary tackles this complex issue, explaining why Mark - considered the oldest and potentially most historically accurate gospel - ends so abruptly without Jesus appearing to his followers after the resurrection.

Through expert analysis of ancient manuscripts like Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, Coffman reveals how the "longer ending" of Mark was likely added later to address this very concern. He explores the literary context of ancient Greek writings, the relationship between Paul and the original disciples, and what Mark's unique ending tells us about early Christian communities. Rather than undermining the resurrection, Mark's approach may actually invite readers into the ongoing story of faith in ways that make the Gospel of Mark resurrection eye witness question less problematic than it initially appears.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• The Oxford Handbook of the Synoptic Gospels (2023)

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And welcome to another episode of the Enter the Bible podcast where you can get answers or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible but were afraid to ask. I'm Katie Langston.

And I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker. And today we have ⁓ a returning guest and a friend of ours, Kristofer Phan Coffman is a professor of New Testament at Lutheran Seminary and a wonderful colleague for both of us. So thank you Kristofer for coming back to answer another listener question. Yay. So our listener question for today that we wanted to

Kristofer to help us answer or to answer for us is why are there no witnesses to the resurrection in the Gospel of Mark? And the longer question, and maybe Kristofer you could kind of explain the background of this, but the longer question is this, what does it mean that Mark, the oldest gospel, and so maybe the most historically accurate, is the only gospel with no eyewitnesses to the resurrection?

not counting the longer ending. So can you explain first of all what New Testament scholars think about the Gospel of Mark, why they think it's the oldest of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and what is the longer ending, what is meant by that?

Yeah, so this is a fascinating question because it gets into some of the nitty gritty of the local scholarship. And as you pointed out, there's a couple layers to this. So we'll start with the sort of historical layers in terms of the manuscripts of Mark. And then I think it's really important to talk about this actual question about witnesses to the resurrection. But starting with the history of

how we've thought about Mark. for a long time, and this goes back at least to Eusebius, who was a church historian and St. Augustine, Mark was thought of as a summary of Matthew. It's shorter than Matthew. was first in the canonical order. so the assumption was, Mark was like, folks may be familiar with Reader's Digest used to do these abridgment of long books so you didn't have to read the whole thing. This is kind of what

they surmised was going on. Later in time, so, and this is in the beginnings of modern biblical scholarship, so in the 19th and then into the 20th century, biblical scholars began to turn that question on its head and instead to wonder whether it was actually that Mark was the earliest of the gospels and that Matthew and Luke had used Mark as a model for their own writing.

There has been a lot of pages and a lot of ink spilled on this particular question, but the strongest evidence is the fact that for the most part, all of the material in Mark appears in Matthew and Luke in almost verbatim fashion. And so because the wording is so close and we have two gospels using this wording, it's

doesn't make as much sense to think that Matthew and Luke somehow had the same wording and then Mark borrowed the wording from Matthew. But in other words, to think that Mark is the one that first put the story down and then Matthew and Luke use that and that's why there's such similarities between the three of them. So that's sort of the, to answer that first part or to think about that first part of the question about Mark being the oldest of the Gospels.

Can I ask a follow up on that? There's sort of an implication here in the question and I think in general, you know, that the oldest is the most accurate. So how might you respond to that? You know, the questioner says, what does it mean that Mark the oldest gospel and so maybe the most historically accurate is the only gospel with no eyewitnesses. So is that a safe assumption? Should we think about it in those terms or, you know, is there some nuance there?

Yeah, and you know, I think that the listener did a great job of putting that maybe in there because I think that maybe is an important...

The way that I like to think of it is in two ways, and we're going to get into one much more when we talk about the witnesses question, which is that all of the gospels, regardless of how old they are, are written with particular intents in mind. Even Mark, which is the oldest, is not a strict historical narrative. It is a proclamation. It is a gospel. And so we have to consider that when we think about historicity. But then the other thing we also want to think about is that we're talking here about layers of tradition.

So that Mark, even though it is the oldest written gospel, the relationship between the written gospels and then the traditions, the oral traditions, the spoken traditions that go into all three of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is really unclear because we don't have any writings to try to clarify it or so forth. And so from a written standpoint, yes, Mark is the earliest, we're pretty sure about that. But in terms of kind of

all the layers of tradition that go into the Gospels, it is not clear whether Mark contains at all times the earliest layer of tradition or not. And so we want to hold that a little bit lightly as we think about this. Yeah, and I think that takes us into the second part of the question. Unless, Kathryn, did you have another follow-up?

That makes sense.

No, I was just gonna say, that longer ending. Can explain what that is?

And so again, to give a really brief history of this, for the longest time, the text of the New Testament that we used as the basis for translations was the text that was preserved in the Greek Orthodox Church. This is the text that is behind the translation that Jerome did into Latin, the so-called Latin Vulgate. This is the text behind Luther's German Bible.

The only true Bible.

Hahaha!

As a joke listeners, in case you're...

We actually, yeah, the King James version is beautiful poetry. mean, beautiful language, perhaps not always the most up to date.

No, so it's a lovely translation, but it belongs to its time, which is 1611, which now is a long time ago. And so when you look at these texts, so the Vulgate, the Deutsche Bibel, Luther's Deutsche Bibel, the King James Version, they all mark chapter 16, which is the last chapter of Mark, ends at verse 20. So it has 20 verses in it. Again, going back to the 19th century when

right right right right

the sort of science or the discipline of biblical studies really emerged out of the German university, they began to discover manuscripts of the New Testament that were older than the Greek Orthodox version. And these manuscripts, there's two of them in particular that are really important. One is called Codex Sinaiticus because it was found in a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. And the other is called Codex Vaticanus because it was found in the Vatican library.

These are both from the fourth century, maybe the third century, it depends on how you date them. And what's very interesting about them is that they end Mark at verse eight, which very famously is, they fled and said nothing to no one for they were afraid. And that's where Mark ends. And so people were very, and it's not as though there's a page missing or like something's been ripped off or something like that.

It's that they end right there, and then the next page is the next gospel. so, ⁓ biblical scholars took a look at this and surmised that it meant that these other endings, and we now call them the longer ending of Mark, were added at a later date. And principally, to address, we think, the question that's being asked in this podcast, why are there not

witnesses to the resurrection like there are in Matthew and Luke. And again, this is the sort of thing where even third, you just heard, as I said, third and fourth century manuscripts. So we're still quite a bit of ways past when we think the writing of Mark took place. Could we discover a different manuscript and it will change the way that we think about this question? Certainly. But as of right now, our best guess is that Mark originally ended at 16:8.

and that 9 through 20 were added at a later date.

And just to help our listeners kind of orient themselves, what – so at the end of verse 8, the women who come to the tomb run away and they say nothing to anyone. And actually, when I preached on Easter a couple of years ago, I said – and so yeah, that's it. That's the end. I'm sorry there's not much more here for you. I wish I could give you some happy news since you're here on Easter Sunday.

Yeah, so when you see, and this is what gets very confusing about Mark, is there's actually multiple longer endings. So if you open up, for example, an NRSV and look at the end of the Gospel of Mark, there will be all sorts of brackets and footnotes trying to tell you kind of where it ends and where it doesn't. The longer, the traditional longer ending, which is the nine versus nine through 20, has a resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene.

and then also has an appearance to the disciples and a very abbreviated version of the Road to Emmaus story, so it appears to two men on the road. And it contains the somewhat infamous pronouncement of Jesus about his disciples. One of the marks of discipleship is that they will drink poison and be unharmed, that they will handle snakes and tread on scorpions and these sorts of things. And so this is again part of that.

longer ending of Mark. And I think there's one ending, one of these multiple endings, where he just appears to Peter or something like that. So again, there's just different ways of these putting it together.

Yeah. think it's worth noting that even in what we think is probably the original ending to Mark, there's no resurrection appearance of Jesus, but there is the young man dressed in a white robe sitting in, you know, there's still the empty tomb, right, in Mark and the declaration from presumably the heavenly being and the angel, do not be alarmed. are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here.

look, there is the place they laid him. So go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him just as he told you." So it's not that there's no resurrection in Mark, right? There is still an empty tomb, which is kind of the primary thing in all of the gospels, this declaration that Jesus has been raised. And maybe you were going to talk about that too, Kristofer, but I think it's important to say that

There's still Easter and-

Right, Easter still happened.

And I think that that's really spot on. And one of the things I would like to do is kind of nuance the question a little bit, because I think there is certainly a witness to the resurrection in the gospel of Mark. is this angelic figure. There are no, I guess what we would say, no bodily appearances of Jesus to the disciples in Mark. That is what distinguishes Mark from Matthew and Luke, is in Matthew and Luke,

we get very, very distinct accounts of Jesus appearing first of all to the women and then second of all to the disciples themselves after the resurrection, which we don't have in Mark. And I think when we're looking at that ending and kind of asking ourselves why exactly Mark ends there as opposed to Matthew and Luke, I think there's two sets of things we have to consider. And the first one is just looking at Mark's ancient literary context.

And what I mean by that is that we, and this is the funny part, of course, the reason that we think Mark is quote unquote, lacking an ending, of course, is because we have Matthew and Luke that have it. And so it seems as though Mark then is missing something. But again, if we think Mark is the earliest, he can't be missing anything if there's nothing else to compare it to. And second of all, the important thing too is that Mark is not speaking this story into a vacuum, but that Mark is

recording a story that is already well known to the people who he's writing to. So I think that's an important thing. But the other thing is in terms of ancient literary context, we as modern people, and this is especially true after the rise of the modern novel and movies make this even worse, really expect our media, our stories to wrap up.

That is, we expect at the end of it, and that's what's nice about Matthew and Luke, we get a tidy story that ends with the ascension of Jesus and now the history of the church begins. Mark, of course, famously does not have this. One of the interesting things though is if you look at Greek literature around Mark's time period and beforehand, I would say the majority, and we'd have to actually count it to be, we'd say a lot of them, and many of the most famous examples of Greek literature end in similarly

quote unquote, disappointing places for the modern reader. The very first piece of Greek literature we actually have, which is the Iliad of Homer, which is the story of the Trojan War. And everybody knows that the Trojan War ends when the Trojans get inside of a horse and go inside of the city of Troy, et cetera. The Trojan War ends before any of that happens. It ends with the funeral of Achilles. So you have to supply that from your background knowledge of the Trojan War.

The Odyssey also by Homer ends with Odysseus being given a task to complete that he never completes in the story. And you can go on and on through Greek literature to see that they often end in these places where we don't expect them to. Another one from the biblical text that I think is so interesting is the Book of Acts. Acts, of course, the whole lead up of the end of the Book of Acts is to Paul's appearance before the Roman emperor.

He makes a big deal before Festus that he wants to appeal to the emperor. And the ending leaves us in an inn on the side of the road on the way to Rome. We never get to that point. so I think that part of it is just our expectations as modern readers of where something quote unquote should end versus not.

That's a really interesting, yeah, that's a great point. I think another biblical example from the Old Testament would be the book of Jonah, which ends with Jonah sulking outside the city of Nineveh and God saying, shall I not have pity on this city, including the animals in it? And that's it, right? It ends with the question.

And again, I think we've already talked a little bit around this, but in all these instances that we're talking about, the Iliad and the Book of Acts and the Gospel of Mark and so forth, the audience of this literature already knows the whole story. So it's not that you need to tell them from start to finish. And of course, Mark begins right in the middle of Jesus, right in the middle of Jesus's life, not with his birth.

And so they already expect you to know where it's going, but what they're doing is they're artfully telling you a portion of it in order to influence you in a particular way. And I think that, understanding also helps us to see why there are no bodily resurrection appearances. Because when we look internally at Mark, and this is what I think is really interesting about the contents of Mark.

And my doctoral advisor, Stephen Ahearne-Kroll has done a lot of work on this, is that Mark does a lot to help you as the reader feel like more of an insider than the disciples and the other followers of Jesus. So Mark throughout the, so we see this at the very beginning of Mark in the parables of Jesus in Mark chapter four.

where the disciples, this is kind of the first instance where the disciples really don't understand what's going on with the parables. But the audience gets it explained to them. And at the very beginning of Mark, Mark tells the reader, this is the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God. So the reader knows at the beginning, but everybody else in Mark has to figure that out as it goes along. And the disciples are constantly, they're, you know, they're kind of bumbling in Mark.

They don't get what Jesus is trying to tell them. They're constantly confused. They fight with each other. Peter especially comes off somewhat poorly in Mark. And at the end of Mark, I think the same thing is happening, right? Where the disciples, the last thing we hear about the disciples is this angelic figure's rebuke of them. He's going to Galilee like he told you.

⁓ Per my last email.

Exactly, exactly. But the audience, the people who are reading Mark or who are listening to Mark already know the end of the story. And so they have this knowledge that the disciples don't get within the story. And so what Dr. Aaron Kroll argues is that this is part of Mark's way of including the audience, of helping them to see that they are part of the ongoing story of Jesus Christ's resurrection.

in some ways more than the original disciples are, at least within the context of this narrative. And so again, I think whenever we ask these questions, we always have to ask, what is Mark trying to do here? Because as we said with the historical part, he's not just recounting things, this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and here's how it was. He's trying to craft a story. He's trying to craft a proclamation that is a gospel.

This

ending invites the readers or the heroes of this gospel then to ponder how they would react or to think about how they heard about the story and how that faith was passed down to them. Or how would you characterize this ending and what the invitation is to the readers or the heroes?

Yeah, so I think that's a really good way to put it, that it invites them to ask how it is that they heard the story of the resurrection if, as Katie pointed out in her sermon, the women of the tomb said nothing to nobody. And I think in the first century context, in the context of emerging Christianity, there's something maybe a little bit more pointed going on than we as modern readers pick up on, which is that

there is a conflict in early Christianity between Paul and the apostles over whose revelation of Jesus Christ is the one to follow in some ways and or whether to put it more from Paul's perspective whether Paul's revelation and Paul's apostleship is valid and Paul's argument is that his revelation of Jesus Christ is equally as valid as the resurrection appearances to the disciples.

The disciples, of course, argument is that it's not. And we see this conflict, especially in Galatians. And I think the way that Mark is written, and especially the vocabulary of Mark, is very Pauline in some ways. And so there is the possibility, and this is speculative, so I want to alert our listeners to that. But I think there is a possibility that Mark is written to a Pauline community, that is a community who has heard the gospel not through the disciples.

That is, the disciples who experience the resurrection accounts in Matthew and Luke, but through Paul. And that this is part of Mark's program of inclusion of his audience, is to set them apart from the disciples who don't get a resurrection appearance, who don't get to hear the good news at the end, but they as an audience do. And so I think that that may be, and again, this is a, we don't know this for sure, but this is, I think, part of, explains for instance, and this will be my last plug for this,

Why Mark calls what he calls a gospel, right? We think of gospel as a self-evident genre. It's a story about the life of Jesus Christ. But in fact, Mark is the first author to call his story a gospel. And the apostle Paul is the first person to use the gospel in the singular to describe the preaching that he's doing. And so think that's a very interesting connection there between Paul's gospel and the gospel of Mark and the presentation of the disciples, especially Peter.

We see, especially in Galatians, that Peter and Paul don't always get along. And so I think that this is a through line that we can trace through these early books.

Amazing. Yeah.

That's really interesting. I have not heard that theory before that Mark has written to a Pauline audience, but there's some, yeah, there's some reason for that, something to ponder. Well, thank you, Kristofer, for answering this question and particularly addressing that kind of assumption that I think that lies behind it about whether that witness to the resurrection is reliable, right? And I hope that our heroes and our viewers come away with the understanding that

that yes, this proclamation of the good news of Christ crucified and resurrected is a reliable witness. Even if we don't have the stories that we have in the other three gospels about Jesus' resurrection appearances to the disciples and to the women on that first Easter, still an eyewitness account of the empty tomb, of the proclamation of Jesus risen, and obviously of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.

If I could make a Pauline point or a Lutheran point with this, think part of what Mark also shows us and what Paul really talks about as well is that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not a historical event that happened to someone else, that it is a lived reality that Christians are baptized into Christ's death and raised in Christ's resurrection in your everyday life. Christ has resurrected for you every day. And that

there is a little bit of a tendency with Matthew and Luke's account to restrict the resurrection appearances and make the resurrection appearances the resurrection that are historical proof at a time in the past of the truth of Christianity, as opposed in some ways to how Paul is thinking about the resurrection is the power of Christ in the every day of your Christian life. And so I do want us to be a little bit cautious, especially because we've been talking about history and historicity around this question.

of sort of why we're asking that question about historicity or why we're asking that question about the resurrection.

That's very profound and super helpful, Kristofer. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us today on this episode of the Enter the Bible podcast. And thank you to our listeners and viewers for being with us today. Of course, you can get a whole lot more awesome content and exploration of the Bible at our website, enterthebible.org. We've got more podcasts, we've got videos, maps, glossaries, commentaries, reflections, all kinds of cool stuff, and a newly launched newsletter.

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