CADRE Comments

The Gospel of Mark is often puzzled over: while often accepted as the earliest of the four gospel accounts in the New Testament (written c. AD 66-70, or potentially earlier), it ends abruptly as the women who had discovered the empty tomb “went out and fled … for terror and amazement had seized them” (16:8). It is widely believed that, since the shorter and longer endings to Mark after 16:8 were not present in the earliest manuscripts, they were not original to the text; this is a consensus to the extent that most modern Bible translations make this clear by bracketing off these sections. This means that the original version Mark makes no direct reference to seeing Jesus raised from the dead. Does this imply there was a legendary development of a Resurrection narrative from the basic Mark narrative to the more detailed accounts in the other gospels? If this were the case, two concepts would need to be true: Mark must be the earliest source available referring to the dea...

see Metacrock's Blog , today, for my original NEW essay "Did Mark Invent the Empty tomb?"   The purpose of this argument is merely to establish that the events described in the four canonical Gospel resurrection accounts can be construed as a coherent event. Atheists are always harping on the many differences in the accounts. They seem to feel that these amount to insurmountable contradictions, marking a totally contradictory story. But I will argue that we can pull together the events described in all four Gosples to create a unified haromny which shows that there was a single coherent event taking place.This may not mean that call differences vanish away, but most of them can be explained by the process of eye witness testimony and story telling based upon the accounts of eye witnesses. There may be a couple of loose ends, but I will argue that these are not important when one considers the over all agreement and ensuing harmony, (for ...