Biblical Literacy #7: How Easter Exists
The earliest account is odd, no matter what you believe.
The first Gospel has no direct account of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. The Gospel of Mark is the second book of the New Testament, but it was written nearly 20–30 years before the other Gospels. Only a few authentic letters of Paul predate Mark or were written around the same time (Paul did not write every epistle attributed to him). How the hell could the author(s) of Mark leave out the resurrection? Is that not kind of the point of Christianity? And to make things more complicated, Mark also leaves out the virgin birth of Jesus at the beginning.
The original manuscript of Mark ended at 16:8, and the direct account of Jesus being alive after the crucifixion in 16:9–19 in most Bibles today was added later. Later does not mean wrong, but it does raise eyebrows. In the original ending Mary Magdalene and other women in Jesus’s little gang are on their way to the tomb after the Sabbath to anoint Jesus’s corpse with oil. This was a common practice for burial, and it was usually done by the women in the group. They saw where Jesus was buried after he died, and they wonder how they will remove the very large stone rolled over the entrance of the tomb, but they go anyway. When they arrive, the stone is gone, and inside the tomb they find a young man dressed in white sitting in the tomb — possibly an angel, but not said to be. There are a couple theories on the identity of this unnamed young man. He tells them not to be alarmed, and he says Christ is alive and going to Galilee. Of course they are very alarmed by this, and they run away. Mark says they “said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.” Then it ends. The Gospel simply ends right there.
The first and only witnesses to the resurrection are a former prostitute and her friends. However, they do not even see Jesus. The Gospel of Mark requires a bit of literary flare. The ending says the women were too afraid to tell anyone about what they say, but presumably they get over their fear, and they tell people, or this account would not exist. The proof of the resurrection requires a belief in the second hand account of a bunch of relatively poor women, one of whom has a very questionable past.
We are having long overdue discussions today about believing what women say about their own lives and experiences. That is apparently very difficult for us today in 2018. Now put yourself in 1st century Roman Palestine. If the original author(s) of Mark are making crap up, they sure left some witnesses that could be easily dismissed. Yet, they were not. In some ways the ending of Mark speaks to the inherent feminism of early Christianity. Much of the Bible is obviously patriarchal — not as much as many people assume, but it remains inexcusably misogynistic in too many places. Still, the egalitarian ethos of early Christianity was very appealing to women in the hyper patriarchal paganism of the Roman Empire. Christianity said that men and women were entirely equal to God. Paul even said that there is no “male” or “female” with God. These were radical ideas.
Women picked up on this and were largely responsible for the spread of Christianity. The faith spread through moms. Constantine may have used the political power of an empire to establish Christianity, but he was converted by his mom St. Helena. The same goes for St. Augustine and his mom. Besides early female leaders of the Church (and there were a number), the powerful men of early Christianity were raised in the faith by their moms, who sometimes enjoyed a greater degree of autonomy and rights under Christianity than some of the alternatives. It seems odd today, now that the inherent equality of early Christianity has become the ubiquitous misogyny of Roman paganism in most churches. This happened fairly rapidly once Christianity became a political force, including the exclusion of women from the priesthood and most leadership roles.
We have no clue of the exact date of the alleged resurrection. It is supposed to coincide with the Jewish Passover, but we do not know what year Jesus was crucified. The Roman Empire and the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem did not keep records of lower class convicted criminals executed under the pretext of political dissent against religious, political, and social hierarchies. The earliest known record of the crucifixion and resurrection from the community around Jesus comes from these female witnesses. This is not to say they are right or other accounts are wrong, but it shows that some early faction of Christianity expected you to believe a second hand story from voices that were seldom heard. In Mark’s account, Easter would not exist without them.
