Mortal Man,
With regard to the Gospel of Mark, I pass over the introductory matters for now and turn to your comments on his narrative of the empty tomb.
This is the first mention of the empty tomb in any canonical or non-canonical text.
It is also the first narrative, canonical or non-canonical, of the death of Jesus or the events preceding and following his death. That is, there are no earlier narratives that one would have expected to mention the empty tomb;
this is the earliest narrative in which it might have been mentioned. And there it is.
Mark deftly employs it as a powerful symbol for dramatic effect.
Mark’s narrative may be dramatic, but I see no evidence that the empty tomb is only symbolic, even powerfully symbolic. In an endnote you explain:
By disposing of the corruptible “mortal flesh of Jesus”, Mark enables him to “exchange qualities” and become a god like “Asclepius, or Dionysus, or Hercules”. -- Origen, Contra Celsus, 3.42. It was also necessary to empty Jesus’ tomb because some Christians were ridiculing worshipers of Jupiter by pointing to his tomb in the island of Crete. -- Contra Celsus, 3.43.
I don’t see how Origen’s remarks in the quoted sections have any bearing on the Gospel of Mark. Origen was writing about two centuries later and discussing Celsus’s criticisms of the Resurrection. Nor does Origen say that Mark or anyone else disposed of “the mortal flesh of Jesus”; what he says is that Jesus’ mortal body “exchanged properties” by exchanging the corruption and other imperfect qualities of the mortal body for incorruption and perfection.
Jesus’ body is missing; however, it’s unclear whether it has reanimated, been moved or has simply evaporated (along with the linen burial wrappings).
This is only “unclear” if one ignores what Mark says happened. Mark reports that the young man at the tomb told the women, “He has
risen [
egerthe]; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you” (Mark 16:6-7 ESV, emphasis added). The words “as he told you” recall Jesus’ predictions of his death and resurrection, that he would “be killed, and after three days rise again [
anastenai]” (8:31; also 9:9-10, 31; 10:34), climaxing in his prediction, “After I am raised up [
egerthenai], I will go before you to Galilee” (14:28). The most natural way of understanding the sequence of Mark’s narrative (died, buried,
risen, empty tomb, and the promise of appearance) in the context of these statements is that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead in just that sense that Christians traditionally have understood and that you are rejecting.
There is clear, unmistakable evidence in Mark that he understood Jesus’ resurrection quite literally. He reports that Jesus literally raised a little girl from the dead, saying to her, as Mark translates his words, “Little girl, I say to you, arise [
egeire]” (5:41). Mark then states, “And immediately the girl arose [
aneste]” (5:42). These are the two verbs commonly used in the New Testament to speak of Jesus’ resurrection. We can also see what Mark means by resurrection from the dead from his report that when Herod Antipas heard about Jesus’ miracles, he suspected that Jesus was John the Baptist, whom Herod had executed, “risen [
egegertai] from the dead” (6:14, also 6:16).
Mark also foreshadows Jesus’ resurrection in his account of Jesus’ healing miracles, often rather gratuitously using resurrection language to describe the miracles. When he healed Peter’s mother-in-law of her fever, Jesus “took her by the hand and raised [
egeiren] her up” (Mark 1:31). When some men brought a paralytic to Jesus, Jesus said to him, “Rise [
egeire], take up your pallet, and go home,” and the man was “raised up” [
egerthe], took up his pallet, and went home (2:9-12). Jesus told the man with the withered hand, “Rise up [
egeire] in front of everyone” (3:3). When a demonized boy passed out and went limp “like a corpse,” according to Mark, people said, “He is dead,” and then Jesus “took him by the hand and raised [
egeiren] him up, and he stood up [
aneste]” (9:27). Here Mark again uses both of the standard Greek verbs used in the New Testament for resurrection. These physical miracles, described using resurrection language, foreshadow and anticipate the resurrection of Jesus as the climactic physical miracle of the book.
Indeed, it doesn’t seem to matter, since Mark’s only apparent purpose is to “sow” the “perishable” natural body to enable the “imperishable” spiritual body to rise from its seed.
You are here reading into Mark a misunderstanding of Paul’s language, which Mark in any case does not use.
Of course, by introducing an empty tomb with a missing body, Mark creates the obvious question/objection: why didn’t Peter, Paul, James or any other apostles ever mention these things?
According to early reports from Christian leaders and teachers, Mark’s Gospel is based on the preaching of Peter. For an excellent defense of this tradition, see Richard Bauckham’s
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. In any case, we don’t have narrative accounts of Jesus’ death, burial, or resurrection from Peter, Paul, or James, so the fact that they don’t “mention these things” in narratives they never wrote is completely irrelevant!
Mark solves this problem by only having women present and by having them say “nothing to any one”. The Messianic Secret is thus preserved and the apostles never find out about the empty tomb or the young man in the white robe.
Again, your comment ignores what Mark himself says: that Jesus himself had predicted that he would rise from the dead and see the male disciples in Galilee. Are we to understand Mark to mean that Jesus successfully predicted his death and resurrection but was mistaken in thinking the disciples would see him again? That seems very unlikely. If the silence of the women is Mark’s explanation for how the men disciples supposedly failed to mention the empty tomb, what is Mark’s explanation for how he knew about it?
Mark’s so-called “Messianic secret” theme makes it clear that this “secret” was not kept secret. For example, after Jesus asked the leper not to tell others about his healing except a priest, the man “went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town” (1:44-45). Mark himself explains why Jesus was urging people to keep quiet about the miracles: the crowds were becoming unmanageable. Jesus had no problem with the former demonized man telling people back home in the Decapolis about him (5:19-20).
It is true that Mark says that the women “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (16:8), and that the Gospel, at least as we have it in the best and earliest manuscripts, ends at this point. However, a significant theme in Mark is the fear that both men and women followers of Jesus often exhibited (Mark 4:41; 5:33, 36; 6:50; 9:32; 10:32; 16:8). Mark’s characterization of the disciples (male and female) is not meant to solve a fictional plotting device, but is meant to provoke readers to show some courage in trusting Jesus as the Son of God. It is natural enough to understand Mark to mean that the women did not at first say anything about it to others; this explanation makes far more sense than the supposition that no one else ever knew about it because the women never told anyone, even though Mark himself seems to know about it.
In review: Mark does understand Jesus’ resurrection as the literal coming back to life of Jesus’ dead body, and he does not present the empty tomb as a fact hitherto unknown to anyone except the group of women who had found it empty.