Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Religious Studies – Anthology
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The same idea is developed further in the following passage from ‘The
Narrat ive in Mark’:
‘The burial was watched, probably from a distance, by the little band of
women who had remained to see the last moments of their Master. None of
the other disciples were present, for they had scattered after the arrest of
Jesus (St. Peter had a little later than the rest), and had either already
returned home or were in hiding in Jerusalem until they c ould find an
opportunity of escape.‘Soon all the disc iples found themselves onc e more in their old home, and
prepared to return to their old methods of life. But t o t heir surprise t he Lord
appeared, first to St. Peter and afterwards to others – t o t hose who lived in
Judea as well as t o t he Galileans – and under the influenc e of these
appearances of which the details have not been accurately preserved, they
came to believe that the Lord was risen and exalted to Heaven, and that
they were called to return to Jerusalem to take up their Master’s work.‘In Jerusalem they found the women who had watc hed the burial, and these
told them that they had gone on the morning of the third day to supply the
defic ienc ies of the burial given to the Lord by Joseph, but when they c ame
to the grave, instead of finding it c losed, they found it open, and a young
man terrified them by telling them that Jesus whom they were seeking was
not there. Thus to the already firm belief in the fact of the Resurrection – a
belief which to that generation implied that the grave was empty – came to
be added, on the strength of the women’s report, that the Resurrec tion took
plac e on the third day.’I have given these particular extracts because they seem to me to present,
very c learly and in Prof. Lake’s own words, the fundamentals of his c ase, viz.:
1 That the women probably made a mistake.
2 T hat t hey did not immed iat ely report t heir discovery, because the disciples
were no longer in Jerusalem.
3 That the latter only heard the story when they returned from Galilee after an
interval of some weeks.
I do not propose to attempt here an examination of those subtler points in the
original narrat ives whic h c an only be st udied effec t ively in t he light of t he far c loser
and more det ailed invest igat ion whic h we shall make in a lat er c hapt er.
But there are three broad c onsiderations whic h stand out and c all for
emphasis.
In the first place, the evidence for the supposed absence or inaccessibility of
the disc iples on Easter Sunday (so vital to Prof. Lake’s interpretation of the c ase)
seems to me to be of a very doubtful and precarious character. It rests solely upon
a broken or partly completed sentenc e in St. Mark. Against t his t here is posit ive
evidence of a most direct and demonstrative kind. Not only does St. Mark himself
expressly imply the presence of the disciples^105 but the whole Synoptic tradition
assert s and implies it t oo.