The Priority of Mark: Some Important Implications
Most scholars of early Christianity are convinced that Mark is our earliest surviving gospel, perhaps written as early as 65 AD, which would be 35 years after the death of Jesus in 30 AD. Matthew comes along a decade or so later and makes use of Mark as his core narrative, but adds a birth narrative (chapters 1-2) and a series of blocks of Jesus’ teachings that he inherited in the collection scholars know as Q. If you compare Mark and Matthew side by side in parallel columns it is quite easy to see how Matthew makes use of his basic narrative source Mark. He often shortens and summarizes, but just as often he explains, amplifies, and interprets. For example, where Mark cryptically refers to a prophecy about the defiling of the Jewish temple (Mark 13:14), Matthew lets his readers know that the prophecy was “spoken by the prophet Daniel” (Matt 24:15). Or when Jesus in Mark tells his disciples to “beware of the yeast of the Pharisees,” (Mark 8:15), Matthew explains that this symbol refers to their “teaching” (Matt 15:12). On the whole Matthew is relatively conservative with his source Mark. He is willing to make changes but by and large he tends to follow the story as it is told in Mark. Indeed, 90% of Mark appears in Matthew. That is why readers of the New Testament who begin with Matthew, its first book, often in coming to Mark have the distinct impression they have “read it all before.” They have–but in the revised version of Matthew who relies on Mark so heavily as a source.
Luke is quite different in that regard. Although he too uses Mark as a source, and Q as well, he very freely removes important sections of Mark, and recasts or heavily edits core stories and lines in Mark to suit his own purposes. Luke drops the listing of the names of Jesus’ brothers (Mark 6:3), the death of John the Baptist (Mark 6:17-29), the time when Jesus rebukes Peter and calls him “Satan” (Mark 8:33), Jesus’ secret trip to Tyre (Mark 7:24), the disciples failures in the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:32-50). Jesus’ cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34), just to name a very few random examples. Luke is a composite two volume work that includes the Acts of the Apostles (properly called Luke-Acts) and he is a great champion of the apostle Paul. He is also keen to exonerate the Romans as enemies of the Christians and to present a less politically revolutionary version of Jesus’ Kingdom of God message. For Luke, like Paul, Jesus is the risen Christ, ascended to heaven, in whose name repentance and forgiveness of sins is now preached to all the nations of the world.
The priority of Mark has many important implications. One of the most striking is the way in which he narrates the discovery of the empty tomb into which Jesus’ dead body was hastily and temporary placed the late evening on the day he was crucified. Mark’s short account is as follows:
And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices, that they might come and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb when the sun was risen. And they were saying among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the tomb? And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back: for it was exceeding great. And entering into the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, arrayed in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he saith to them, Be not amazed: you seek Jesus, the Nazarene, who hath been crucified: he has been raised; he is not here: behold, the place where they laid him! But go, tell his disciples and Peter, he goes before you into Galilee: there shall you see him, as he said unto you. And they went out, and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them: and they said nothing to any one; for they were afraid (Mark 16:1-8).
It is difficult to really grasp the rather shocking impact of this stark and bare ending to Mark’s story given the extravagant and elaborated versions we get in subsequent gospel accounts. These verses end the book in our oldest and most reliable copies of Mark. In fact, this ending was considered so “inadequate” that no less than three bogus endings were composed by later scribes and editors in a desperate attempt to bring Mark more in line with a triumphant Christian faith.
Just about everything that people assume, celebrate, and remember about Easter morning is missing from Mark! There is no dramatic earthquake, no soldiers struck dumb, no epiphanies of angels, no appearances to Mary Magdalene, Peter, and the Twelve.
Mark knows of no specific appearances of the resurrected Jesus at all. What he does know is a tradition that he had reported earlier, that Jesus had told his disciples that he would “go before them to Galilee” after he was stuck but raised up (Mark 14:28). Even the word “raised” is not the ordinary word for “resurrection” in Greek, but the common verb that means lifted up, or even carried away. It is the same verb Jesus uses when he tells the paralyzed man to “take up his bed and walk” (Mark 2:9).
I do not mean to imply here that Mark thought that Jesus survived the cross and that he was carried up to Galilee by his followers. That I do not believe. For Mark, Jesus is indeed killed, and after three days he is raised up (Mark 8:31), but the nature of that resurrection Mark seems to leave open. He records no appearances of Jesus at all, though he knows the tradition that the disciples went to Galilee based on the instructions given to them and there they “saw” him, as he had told them.
The implications of this earliest tradition of Jesus’ burial and the empty tomb are enormous. Paul, in the 50s AD, reports the tradition that Jesus, after being raised from the dead on the third day, appeared to Peter, then the Twelve, then to a group of five hundred brothers at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and finally, but much later, to him–Paul (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). Both Luke and John report similar appearances of the risen Jesus to various individuals and groups on several occasions. Indeed, these sightings or appearances are considered by milliions the absolute bedrock of the Christian faith.
So how could it be that Mark knows nothing of any of this? And even Matthew, who does report that Jesus met the women who fled from the tomb, nonetheless knows of none of these specific appearances that Paul, Luke and John record taking place in Jerusalem. He tells us the disciples went to Galilee as they had been instructed and there the Eleven apostles “saw” Jesus on a mountain–but some doubted. It is clear that Matthew has little of substance to add to his basic source Mark, and that what he knows of the “resurrection” is what he expands from Mark, which makes Mark’s account even more noteworthy in terms of its fundamental significance.
The clear implication of Mark’s account of the discovery of the empty tomb and the renewed faith of the disciples in Galilee is that there is a non-Pauline version of the resurrection faith circulating within the Jesus movement that was not built upon the kinds of traditions, tales, and stories we get in Paul, Luke-Acts, and John. Indeed, even though Paul is usually dated ten or fifteen years earlier than Mark, the tradition that Mark reflects could very likely predate Paul. In other words, it is unlikely that Mark could write what he writes for a believing Christian community unless the way he report things is already grounded in the circles within which he moves. It is highly unlikely that Mark was created in a day. On the contrary, one should assume he is passing on and reflecting a way of thinking about the risen Jesus that he finds normative and common, and that Matthew, writing some years later, also passing on with very little expansion or modification. Neither of them know of any tales of appearances of the risen Jesus in Jerusalem in the days following his death. There is no indication that Mark is even aware of any alternative views or traditions. Had he known of such, and agreed with them, he surely would have passed them on. In this case I think we can say that Mark’s silence is “deafening.”
This earliest account of the Jesus story offers us resources to rethink and consider alternative possibilities when it comes to evaluating the significance of Jesus’ death and the nature of the resurrection faith among his earliest followers. Mark offers us a clear indication that Paul’s version of things was not an exclusive way of understanding Jesus and his role as a messianic suffering servant figure and crucified son of God.