The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE NARRATIVE OF THE RESURRECTION IN MARK AND THE PARALLEL SYNOPTIC PASSAGES As was said in the Introduction, the result of modern criticism is to emphasise the close connexion between the Synoptic Gospels, and to explain it as due to the use of a common source. This fact has to be taken into...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE NARRATIVE OF THE RESURRECTION IN MARK AND THE PARALLEL SYNOPTIC PASSAGES As was said in the Introduction, the result of modern criticism is to emphasise the close connexion between the Synoptic Gospels, and to explain it as due to the use of a common source. This fact has to be taken into account in considering any narrative which is found in more than one gospel. Many of the details still remain in many ways doubtful, but it is now generally held to be proved that the first and third evangelistsi made use of a document which was, both in language and contents, so closely related to Mark that the only question is whether it was or was not quite identical with it. Mark 1 As a matter of convenience, I have adopted the custom of writing St Matthew, St Mark, etc., when I mean the persons, and omitting the St when I mean the books, independently of their authorship, or the redactors who produced the canonical text. xvi. 9-20 is an undoubtedly later addition, which has to be considered separately. It seems probable that this document was already in existence about the close of the seventh decade of the first century, and it was used by the two other synoptic writers, probably before, and certainly not long after, the beginning of the second century. When, therefore, we find a narrative which is given in all three gospels, we have no right to say that we have three separate accounts of the same incident; but we must take the account in Mark as presumably the basis of the other two, and ask whether their variations cannot be explained as due to obscurities or ambiguities in their source, which they tried to clear up, though they did not do so always in the same way, or in ways which were consistent with one another. Thus, since Matthew and Luke, so far as they a...