First thing this morning I happened upon Vridar concerning Michael Duncan's brilliant 2022 book, Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem. The Gospel take on Christ's famed tomb, absent Christ, intrigues me.
The Baghestan is Tertullianist in its approach to Christ's biography - it holds to the Dissimilarity Principle. We should entertain a gospel claim when said claim is ineptus against the Gospel, of Jesus as the Christ and living Lord. I hold three such claims as troubling for historic Christianity: the virgin-birth, the baptism by John, and the Cross itself. On reading Duncan one might be tempted to add the empty tomb - for Mark and Matthew, anyway.
Since Duncan has disclosed his biases, I shall do likewise: unlike Duncan, I am a Christian. I am "however" also a Catholic who does not necessarily agree with every word of the canon text. I will exercise my right to bring in Patristic evidence, starting with Ignatius and Jerome (setting aside for now the Epistula Apostolorum).
Matthew is a pro-Peter gospel. Duncan sees Mark as instead pro-Paul. But Evan Powell back in the 1990s found that Mark, like Matthew, supported Peter; namely against John 1-20, or against John's source (Evan's already un-spliced one chapter, the rest of us may as well go all-in). A direct Petrine witness to Jesus' resurrection should serve Mark's purpose best. Inasmuch as Mark doesn't claim this, the scene of an empty tomb with said tomb discovered by Mary of the Tower and maybe other women (who aren't Peter by definition) is ineptus to Mark. Epistula Apostolorum's account even refutes Mark, if we believed it.
Powell might claim Duncan's reading as vindication: if someone not Peter (like Mary) claimed to meet the risen Lord first, this forced all the Petrines into the fallback position: of denying direct access to this first post-resurrection appearance, from anybody. Mind, Powell would have to explain John 20's infamous footrace between Peter and the Beloved Disciple, which only exists due to the assumption of an empty tomb. Recall that Powell recognises only a diatesseronic Christian transposition upon John 1-20, not any Johannine redaction of a prior now-lost gospel. Duncan can explain this footrace as John reacting to Mark [UPDATE 2/28 or, er, to canonical Luke]. But this just makes Powell's problem into Duncan's problem: who came up with the tomb first, and why?
Maybe Powell would allow Paul's ἐτάφη. To that there are burials and there are burials. John 19:41-20:1 / Mark 15:46 depict a μνημεῖον: hewn from the rock and intended for someone else, not dug from the ground as if to dispose of rubbish.
Another possible subtext presents itself: claims that Jesus had no μνημεῖον. In parallel Ignatius offers his own pro-Peter take, in his letter to the faithful in Smyrna. Jerome will flag this as a citation of the "Gospel of the Hebrews". Ignatius cares that Jesus came in the flesh, after his body was nailed to the cross. We care that Ignatius, whether Christ was ἐτάφη or not, doesn't mention the tomb. Ignatius was responding to a docetic narrative, which docetism may - like John 3:14+12:34, and Sura 4 v. 157 - imply only an Ascension. But before all that, must have been talk that the Romans (and/or Jews) simply took Jesus' body away for the ravens, stray dogs and buzzards.
If this Ascension tradition be earliest, then the empty-tomb is no more ineptum for Mark. The four canon evangelists' shared problem is the lack of a chain-of-custody for the crucified Christ, prior to his appearance before Peter or Paul or even Thomas. (Evans argued that John 21 is this chapter missing in Mark; Duncan might bring Paul's claims in the epistles.) The empty tomb is how they keep Jesus' body safe from their rivals, which rivals start with the ... well, with the Jews.
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