#mark 16

This year the lectionary gives us Mark's account of the Resurrection, with its fearful cliffhanger ending — an empty tomb, but Jesus's body missing. And isn't that unresolved note fitting?

In the face of so much suffering across the world, it feels right to be compelled to sit — even on this most jubilant of days — with the poor and disenfranchised in their continued suffering.

Mark's account:

Just days before, the women closest to Jesus witnessed him slowly suffocate to death on a Roman cross. Now, now trudge to his tomb to anoint his corpse — and find the stone rolled away, his body gone. A strange figure inside tells them that Jesus is has risen, and will reunite with them in Galilee.

They respond not with joy, but trembling ekstasis — a sense of being beside yourself, taken out of your own mind with shock. They flee.

The women keep what they've seen and heard to themselves — because their beloved friend outliving execution is just too good to be true. When does fortune ever favor those who languish under Empire's shadow?

Love wins, yet hate still holds us captive.

I'm grateful that Mark's resurrection story is the one many of us are hearing in church this year. His version emphasizes the "already but not yet" experience of God's liberation of which theologians write: Christians believe that in Christ's incarnation — his life, death, and resurrection — all of humanity, all of Creation is already redeemed... and yet, we still experience suffering. The Kin(g)dom is already incoming, but not yet fully manifested.

Like Mark's Gospel with its Easter joy overshadowed by ongoing fear, Trans Day of Visibility is fraught with the tension of, on the one hand, needing to be seen, to be known, to move society from awareness into acceptance into celebration; and, on the other hand, grappling with the increased violence and bigotry that a larger spotlight brings.

The trans community intimately understands the intermingling of life and death, joy and pain.

When we manage to roll back the stones on our tombs of silence and shame, self-loathing and social death, and stride boldly into new, transforming and transformative life — into trans joy! — death still stalks us.

We are blessedly, audaciously free — and we are in constant danger. There are many who would shove us back into our tombs.

And of course, the trans community is by no means alone in experiencing the not-yet-ness of God's Kin(g)dom.

Empire's violence continues to overshadow God's liberation.

The women who came to tend to their beloved dead initially experienced the loss of his body as one more indignity heaped upon them by Empire. Was his torture, their terror, not enough, that even their grief must be trampled upon, his corpse stolen away from them?

The people of Gaza are undergoing such horrors now. Indignity is heaped on indignity as they are bombed, assaulted, terrorized, starved, mocked. They are not given a moment's rest to tend to their dead. They are not permitted to celebrate Easter's joy as they deserve. They are forced to break their Ramadan fasts with little more than grass.

Those of us who reside in the imperial core — as I do as a white Christian in the United States — must not look away from the violence our leaders are funding, enabling, justifying.

We must not celebrate God's all-encompassing redemption without also bearing witness to the ways that liberation is not yet experienced by so many across the world.

This Easter, I pray for a free Palestine. I pray for an end to Western Empire, the severing of all its toxic tendrils holding the whole earth in a death grip.

I pray that faith communities will commit and recommit themselves to helping roll the stones of hate and fear away — and to eroding those stones into nothing, so they cannot be used to crush us once we've stepped into new life.

I pray for joy so vibrant it washes fear away, disintegrates all hatred into awe.

In the meantime, I pray for the energy and courage to bear witness to suffering; for the wisdom for each of us to discern our part in easing pain; for God's Spirit to reveal Xirself to and among the world's despised, over and over — till God's Kin(g)dom comes in full at last.

He said to them, “Don’t be amazed. You seek Jesus, the Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him!"

-Mark 16:6

No, it’s not historically accurate. There are some real places and people described in it, but that doesn’t make it accurate.

https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/reasons-humanists-reject-bible/

https://religions.wiki/index.php/The_Bible_is_not_a_reliable_historical_source

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/science/long.html

I’m going to skip over the fact that Genesis is historically inaccurate. Everything we understand about the world contradicts special creation, a worldwide flood, and people living to 900+ years. Instead, I’ll give you a few simple examples that are based on history, rather than science that she might reject and/or not understand.

1. We know the Exodus never occurred. If about two million people (Exodus 12:37: ”about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children” if we grant each man, on average, a wife and one child) migrated from Egypt to Israel, it should have been noticed. Egypt’s economy should have been decimated by this huge manual labor force leaving. There should have been a record of all the dead firstborn. There should have been a huge cultural shift in Egypt as a result of both. There should be traces of this huge migration throughout the region. There should be stories of two million people wandering around lost in the 429km between Cairo and Jerusalem - that you can traverse on foot in two weeks - for 40 years. One estimate suggests that if they walked ten-abreast, with comfortable distancing between each row, complete with animals, etc, the parade should have reached half the distance of the direct route. That is, by the time the last ones left, the first ones should have reached the halfway point.

Instead, there is nothing. No physical evidence, no local tales. Jewish scholars recognize this as myth.

2. In the “Cleansing of the Temple,” Jesus goes all rampagey through the temple, disrupting the money changers. This is a story that could only have been written by someone who didn’t know anything about Jewish worship practices.

Jewish tradition held that you were to make a sacrifice at the temple. Pilgrims would travel from afar, but it was impractical to drag a sacrificial animal with them the whole way. Instead, they’d bring their money and buy one locally to be sacrificed. As any traveller knows, money in one location can be different from that in another. And that’s what the money changers were there for. To exchange foreign currency for local currency, so that pilgrims could buy an animal for their offering. The money changers were absolutely crucial to Jewish worship.

Jesus should certainly have known this, if he existed at all. This supposed “anti-capitalist” gesture would actually be regarded as one of the most anti-Semitic scandals for decades to have reverberated through Jewish culture. But, again, nothing.

Only someone who didn’t understand how all this worked would invent such a story.

3. Crucifixions weren’t conducted in the manner described. The Romans only crucified the absolute worst criminals. As far as the Romans were concerned, he was a crackpot blasphemer, which was not a crime that earned crucifixion. Even if we accept that the Romans were scared of Jesus, he was said to have been crucified alongside two men who were merely thieves. And who were, conveniently, unidentified. Thieves would not have been crucified. So, that’s nonsensical in itself.

Even if we leave that aside, the Romans left the dead bodies strung up to act as a warning and deterrent to others.

“When we crucify criminals the most frequented roads are chosen, where the greatest number of people can look and be seized by this fear. For every punishment has less to do with the offence than with the example.”

- Quintilian (first-century Roman rhetorician)

If he’d been crucified, Jesus would never have had a tomb in which to kick back for a day and a half. The Romans wouldn’t have given a shit about Jewish sensibilities, and Jesus would have decomposed on the cross where he was nailed, as a warning to others.

To say nothing of the in-story inconsistencies of how many of who went where, when, and what they saw, which is irreconcilable from one Gospel to the next. And that the Gospel of Mark ended (Mark 16:8) with the women running away when they saw the empty tomb; Jesus is never actually seen.

“Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” - Mark 16:8

Everything beyond this point in Mark is an addendum a forgery from a later author. And Matthew and Luke, which “borrow” from Mark, simply absorb and replicate this retcon, as if it was always there.

Bonus: There’s tons of lots of little things. According to the bible:

The first ever rainbow didn’t occur until after the worldwide flood, so there was no water cycle for all that time.

Fictional versions of actual people such as Herod and Pilate; actual historical records describe them very differently than their scriptural fictional counterparts. Herod even died before Jesus’ supposed birth.

Every human spoke the same language, until the Tower of Babel episode.

Literal giants (Nephilium) existed.

The Sun and the Moon stopped moving for an entire day to allow Joshua to finish his killing.

Dragons exist.

You may enjoy some books by David Fitzgerald, Michael Paulkovich or Richard Carrier.

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There’s bigger problems though.

Any amount of historical accuracy is not the problem. Any number of “hits” doesn’t address the plethora of “misses.” The problem is how a book that cannot get basic human events correct could be regarded as reliably conveying an accurate understanding of the celestial creator and ruler of the entire universe. Or that it exists at all. Defending the bible on the basis of translation errors, oral history, metaphors or pretty any other reason casts a shadow over how valid the literally supernatural notions are. Why would we trust a map that has all the landmarks on it in the correct places, but all the roads are wrong? Or vice versa?

Worse than all of this is why is the bible even relevant at all? Why should we care what it says? Isn’t this just arguing about who can and can’t pick up Thor’s hammer?

Even if James Cameron had avoided all the inaccuracies in Titanic, this still doesn’t mean Jack and Rose existed and sailed on it.

Historical stories can have fictional characters. Take Forrest Gump or Gone With The Wind. Xtianity doesn’t live or die by whether or not so-and-so was Pharaoh of Egypt, or such-and-such was Emperor of Rome. It doesn’t even live or die based on whether a man named Yeshua existed and traveled around preaching love, division and killing pigs. We can concede that such a man may have existed without any pain. Even though there’s no reason to think such a man did exist, beyond a composite of the Jewish prophets roaming around at the time.

What matters is whether we have any reason to think he was literally magical. Or “divine” if you prefer. If he wasn’t, then Xtianity is false.

We don’t have to prove that he wasn’t, but if there’s no evidence to support this requirement, then we don’t have to worry about Xtianity, let alone how historically accurate the bible is or is not.

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What’s most interesting about this line of argument is what it reveals about the believer: they don’t believe in their god. They believe in their bible as primary, not their god. They believe their bible, the bible says the god exists, therefore the god exists. The bible bootstraps the entire process.

“Weird how no one ever hears from Jesus before they hear about Jesus.” - MrOzAtheist

The other option is that they believe in their god, which can be verified without the bible, and therefore they believe in the bible. That is, you can start with the god as primary, then refer to the bible and verify, yes this is the same guy.

But as far as I can tell, almost none of them seem to believe in their god as primary. If they did, they wouldn’t spend so much time fixating on the bible.

♬ I know the Good Book’s good because the Good Book says it’s good. ♪ - Tim Minchin

We don’t have to “believe” in evolution solely due to On the Origin of Species. We can - and do - ignore Charles Darwin’s book entirely, and still understand evolution. Other scientists around the world and throughout history had previously noticed this phenomenon as well.

In the case of the bible, they seem to have placed their “faith” in these unreliable humans, who got history and science wrong, who claim that a god exists and that they’ve captured “god’s word.” Aren’t all the attributes and qualities and properties their god supposedly possesses only supplied by the bible? When you’re told “god is love,” isn’t this only because the bible says so? Isn’t literally everything about this god ultimately defended by citing a bible verse?

https://bornagainagain.co/podcast/episode-26-which-came-first-god-or-the-bible

I think that would be a fascinating question to ask her: does she believe in the bible OR does she believe in god. Which one is the starting point for belief in the other? I think, like many, she only believes in the bible, which is where she finds her god, which then authenticates the bible, in nice circular affirming-the-consequent “logic.”

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whether I should be a Christian, or Agnostic.

You don’t have to “be” anything. You either believe a thing or you don’t. Decide that first. If you had to make a list of all the things you believe exist, are you willing to put “a god/gods” onto that list? This isn’t a question about gods, and whether or not they exist, whether or not we can know they exist... it’s a question about you. If you’re not willing to write “a god or gods” as a positive belief on your list, then I’d call you an atheist; a belief in a god or gods is not a thing you possess.

Agnostic isn’t a middle-ground between belief and non-belief. Agnostic is an adjective, not a noun, and relates to knowledge, not belief.

An agnostic atheist doesn’t believe (atheist) a god exists, but doesn’t claim to know (agnostic).

A gnostic atheist doesn’t believe a god exists and claims to know one does not.

Ditto theism. An agnostic theist believes a god exists, but doesn’t claim to know for sure, or claim that it’s even knowable at all. A ghostic theist believes and claims to know that their god exists.

https://religion-is-a-mental-illness.tumblr.com/tagged/agnostic

1 And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices, that they might come and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, they come to the tomb when the sun was risen. 3 And they were saying among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the tomb? 4 and looking up, they see that the stone is rolled back: for it was exceeding great. 5 And entering into the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, arrayed in a white robe; and they were amazed. 6 And he saith unto them, Be not amazed: ye seek Jesus, the Nazarene, who hath been crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold, the place where they laid him! 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, He goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you. 8 And they went out, and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them: and they said nothing to any one; for they were afraid.

9 Now when he was risen early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. 10 She went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept. 11 And they, when they heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, disbelieved.

12 And after these things he was manifested in another form unto two of them, as they walked, on their way into the country. 13 And they went away and told it unto the rest: neither believed they them.

14 And afterward he was manifested unto the eleven themselves as they sat at meat; and he upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them that had seen him after he was risen. 15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole creation. 16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that disbelieveth shall be condemned. 17 And these signs shall accompany them that believe: in my name shall they cast out demons; they shall speak with new tongues; 18 they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall in no wise hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.