Mark's Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity

Struggling under the weight of contemporary, socioreligious demands, prevailing scholarship regarding Mark's enigmatic ending may prove nothing short of delusional. Several factors, in my view, conspire, prohibiting a clear understanding of how such a text would have likely performed in the ancient Mediterranean world. First, scholars tend to subsume Mark under a Judaic literary domain, thus seeking its primary semiotic indices and cultural conventions within early Jewish literature. There appears, however, to be little basis for this appetence, except a rather non-scholarly insistence on a "pristine," "non-pagan" well from which the academy ought to draw nearly all cultural, literary, and ideological antecedents. Such aversion combines with what one may best describe as a fundamental misapprehension of the processes and principles governing Hellenistic literary production; that is, a given story, when juxtaposed with the array of analogous Mediterranean fabulae, must either match uniformly or the classification be summarily dismissed as nonapplicable. This not only comes as a false choice but betrays a gross misconception regarding the phenomena of syncretic adaptation in the Hellenistic Orient. Third, and perhaps most obstructive, the persistent sacred nature of the narrative, for many in a field overgrown with faith-based scholarship, has typically confused subject and object, yielding a paucity of effective historical, literary- critical treatments.1 With special attention to the second of these formidable obstacles, that is, pertaining to the composition of Levantine Greek literature in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, some measure of reappraisal may be in order. Though variously reconstituted, Hellenic convention invariably governed the Greek literary domain from the Hellenistic period through the Second Sophistic and late antiquity, not merely in early Christian instances. One indeed errs to consider Hellenism in the ancient Greek East a matter of mere influence, as though passively achieved through indirection and diffusion. The writer of Greek literature in the Hellenistic and Roman periods creatively and consciously applied a variegated pastiche of Hellenic conventions and cultural codes, often drawn from the Greek classical canon.2 Read as part of this broader cultural-literary domain, Mark applies indigenous cultural coloring, while artfully adapting his work, weaving it with Near Eastern motifs and nimble mimetic transvaluations; or, at other moments, Mark has with ingenuous superficiality assigned Palestinian nomenclature and cultural flourish (as though foreign decals placed upon a model).3 Such Judeo-Oriental dress thinly draped over the marble body of another modulates the directing interpretive signals of the text, that is, a signification by abstraction and association.4 Any item, then, from the array of Romano-Greek literary works (i.e., Greek literature composed during the Roman period), by means of generic reconstitution, conventional variation, and superficial regional attire necessarily varies from its Hellenic predecessors and disparate Hellenistic contemporaries, while wholly relying on and varying on the established Mediterranean cultural codes and semiotic conventional inventory, the then current semiotic grammar of Mediterranean cultural history.5 One ought first to read the Gospel of Mark within this broader systemic literary context and not another. Mutatis mutandis, what likely process of signification would have directed the earliest readings of Mark's concluding episode? Mark 16:1-8 foregrounds not an evincing, postmortem appearance of a risen Jesus but a cenotaph with a missing body. This ending has seemed so strangely unsatisfying and unresolved that many scholars have supposed a missing ending for the narrative, lost early in the process of textual transmission.6 Given, however, the implications of the topos of the "missing body" in classical and late ancient Mediterranean literature, this supposition appears all too hasty. …