The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Did GosMark's Author Possibly Invent the Empty Tomb? (Nope)

I just got finished posting up a 9 part article series discussing an idea common among internet sceptics (and a few scholars, Burton Mack in the 90s being the chief example), that the author of the Gospel According to Mark (not usually acknowledged to be John Mark by such sceptics) invented the detail, not only of the emptiness of Jesus’ tomb, but of Jesus’ tomb at all, when writing GosMark.

The series starts here. Part 9 just so happens by a convenient total coincidence :mrgreen: to feature some remarks about how the cosmic themes of the cross related among the Fathers to the evangelical power and scope of Christ to save all sinners from sin, and this relation to Christological disputes about the divine identity of Jesus. (The topic comes up as a digression on how a fringe theory of Jesus Mythicism, which argues that Jesus never existed historically to begin with, tries to make use of Pauline material to argue that Paul, or whoever originally wrote the ‘Pauline’ material, only knew about a mythical non-historical cosmic Christ.)

Thank you very much for that series of articles, Jason. It’s a good point that so much of the scriptural accounts of the resurrection were not used by the Church in her creeds and apologetics, that it would make no sense to make-up stuff and then basically ignore it. Ergo the stuff was not made-up.