I have written on this question in many different places. Here I collect excerpts from, or summarize, several of the most important. You’ll find further material and expanded arguments, with evidence and footnotes and cited scholarship, in my contributions to The Empty Tomb and my books Proving History, Not the Impossible Faith, and On the Historicity of Jesus. I also wrote a FAQ for my work in The Empty Tomb.

The present article is just a handy one-stop place to send people who want to know the best answers to this particular question. Which is not just whether Mark made up the empty tomb story, but why he would do so. What was its function? What was he doing? Where did he get its elements? That’s the subject of the present article.

Yes, Mark Probably Made It Up

It [should] seem blindingly obvious that people invent stories and the sifting of fact from fiction or fiction from fact has been one of the most notable features in the history of critical biblical scholarship. . . . [So] if we are going to take Christianity seriously in its Jewish and pagan contexts then we must expect the Gospel writers to make up stories just as Jews and pagans did. Historically speaking it is extremely unlikely that the Christians behind the Gospel traditions were immune to this standard practice. James Crossley, “Against the Historical Plausibility of the Empty Tomb Story and the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 3 (June 2005)

Crossley is quite correct. In fact, our conclusion must be even stronger than this: for when we look at all faith literature together, most of it by far was fabricated to a great extent, and most was fabricated in its entirety. This leaves us with a very high prior probability that Christian literature will be the same. And we can confirm this to be the case. If we exclude devotional and analytical literature (e.g. apologies, commentaries, instructionals, hymnals) and only focus on purported “primary source documents” relating to earliest Christianity, we find that most Christian faith literature in its first three centuries is fabricated—indeed, most by far (the quantity of agreed Christian fabrication, including hundreds of “Epistles” and dozens of “Gospels” and half a dozen “Acts” is staggering: see Element 44 in Chapter 5 of Historicity). So we need good reason to trust any particular example is not more of the same. And yet there simply is no evidence any part of Mark’s empty tomb story preceded his publication of it a lifetime after the religion began, in a foreign land and language, vetted by no one so far as we can honestly tell. It beggars belief any rational person would think otherwise.

And yet it’s worse than that even. We actually have evidence that Mark fabricated the story; not just a complete lack of evidence that he didn’t. Finding a tomb empty is conspicuously absent from Paul’s account of how the resurrection came to be believed (1 Corinthians 15:1-8). And of course Mark himself gives us a clue that he is fabricating when he conveniently lets slip that no one witness to it ever reported it—evidently, “until now” (see Mark 16:1-8). Always grounds for suspicion. But Matthew’s stated excuse for introducing guards into the story of the empty tomb narrative reveals a rhetoric that apparently only appeared after the publication of Mark’s account of an empty tomb, and this exposes the whole tale as an invention. For Mark shows no awareness of the problem Matthew was trying to solve (and with yet further fabrication—in his case borrowing ideas for this from the book of Daniel, as I show in Empty Tomb and, more briefly, Proving History; likewise, Matthew adds earthquakes to align the tale with the prophecy of Zechariah 14:5, and so on; Luke and John embellish the narrative yet further, though dropping nearly everything Matthew added: Historicity, p. 500-04; Empty Tomb, pp. 165-67).

It clearly hadn’t occurred to Mark when composing the empty tomb story that it would invite accusations the Christians stole the body—much less that any such accusations were already flying! Which should be evidence enough that Matthew invented that story, as otherwise surely that retort would have been a constant drum beat for decades already, powerfully motivating Mark to answer or resolve it—if his sources already hadn’t, and they most likely would have, and therefore so would he. If he was using sources at all. There can therefore have been no such accusation of theft by the time Mark wrote. The full weight of every probability is against it. Mark simply didn’t anticipate how his enemies would respond to his story. But this also means Mark must have invented the whole empty tomb story—precisely because no polemic against it had arisen by the time Mark published it. That a polemic against the tale only arose after Mark published it, evinces the fact that Mark is the first to have told it.

On top of that, is the fact that the earliest Christian history shows no knowledge of there having been any empty tomb story at any point in the religion’s first three decades. Though claiming the body was gone would peg Christians as suspects in a capital crime of grave robbery, an obvious boon their enemies would not fail to exploit, and though the book of Acts records case after case of Christians being interrogated at trial before both Jews and Romans on other offenses (e.g. Acts 4, 5, 6–7, 18, 23, 24, 25, 26), never once in this entire history of the church are they ever suspected of or questioned about grave robbery. It’s as if there was no missing body to investigate; no empty tomb known to the authorities. Which means the Christians can’t really have been pointing to one. If they had, they would have been questioned about it—and possibly convicted for it, innocent or not. Yet Acts shows there were no disputes at all regarding what happened to the body, not even false accusations of theft, or even questions or expressions of amazement.

Worse than that, the Romans would have had an even more urgent worry than body-snatching: the Christians were supposedly preaching that Jesus had escaped his execution, was seen rallying his followers, and then disappeared. Pilate and the Sanhedrin would not likely believe claims of his resurrection or ascension (and there is no evidence they did), but if the tomb was empty and Christ’s followers were reporting that he had continued preaching to them and was still at large, Pilate would be compelled to assume an escape had occurred, and would have to haul every Christian in and interrogate every possible witness in a massive manhunt for what could only be to his mind an escaped convict—who was not only guilty of treason against Rome for claiming to be God and king, as all the Gospels allege (Mark 15:26; Matthew 27:37; Luke. 23:38; John 19:19-22), but now also guilty of escaping justice and continuing to lead a rebellion! And the Sanhedrin would feel the equally compelling need to finish what they had evidently failed to accomplish the first time: finding and killing Jesus.

Yet none of this happens. No one asks where Jesus is hiding or who aided him. No one is at all concerned that there may be an escaped convict, pretender to the throne, thwarter of Roman law and judgment, dire threat to Jewish authority, alive and well somewhere, and still giving orders to his followers. Why would no one care that the Christians were claiming they took him in, hid him from the authorities and fed him after his escape from justice (as Acts 1 pretends), unless in fact they weren’t really claiming any such thing back then? Harboring fugitives would have been accounted a crime. Why were they never charged with it? Think about it.

So either Acts deliberately suppresses the truth about what happened to the body and what was really being argued, said, and done about it (which eliminates Acts as being of any historical value, and supports every suspicion you might have had that the real story was actually embarrassing to Christians, not corroborative), or there was no missing body and no one was claiming there was. The latter is the most inherently probable, being the simplest of explanations, and the most consistent with all the other evidence. So there simply was no empty tomb. Mark made it up.

Against this conclusion, no evidence exists. So we move on.

Whence the Idea?

Where did Mark get the idea of an empty tomb, and what did he intend his empty tomb narrative to mean? The answers lie in Mark’s own thematic agenda, and his surrounding literary and cultural milieu. Mark may have had some inspiration from Homer. Dennis MacDonald made a good case in “Rescued Corpses” (pp. 154-61) and “Tombs at Dawn” (pp. 162-68) in The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (Yale 2000). Mark was transvaluing Greek “scriptures,” creating a superior Judeo-Christian analog meant to replace them, and in the process criticizing their messaging by contrast with his. That’s why he wrote in Greek, to a Gentile audience. It’s telling that only such an audience was first to hear the empty tomb tale.

But Mark needn’t have had so specific an inspiration. Lots of saviors and heroes got empty tomb stories. So of course Jesus should have been given his too. We see many examples from ascension mythology (Pagan and Jewish) that would have been well known to Mark, wherein the absence of a hero’s body is taken as evidence of his ascension to heaven and concomitant deification. Empedocles being a famous example (Diogenes Laertius, Lives 8.67-69, quoting the pre-Christian writer Heraclides), and something akin was claimed of the Roman King Numa. But even some legends about Moses involved a disappearing body as evidence of his ascension (e.g. Josephus, Antiquities 4.8.48).

These and many more examples are collected in the famous work of Charles Talbert’s What Is a Gospel? in 1977 (pp. 27-31, with p. 52 n. 108). Plutarch alone relates four examples (and says there were many more) in his Life of Romulus 27-28. A great many more have since been collected and analyzed by modern expert Richard C. Miller, in “Mark’s Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity,” Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (2010), and his subsequent book, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (Routledge 2014). And of course, most resurrection stories entail an empty tomb even if the story of its discovery hasn’t been transmitted to us—and there were a lot of pagan and even Jewish resurrection stories (and I mean a lot, even predating Christianity): see Chapter 3 of Not the Impossible Faith (and my summary article on Dying and Rising Gods).

But Mark’s most likely inspiration were the Psalms, Mark’s penchant for reversing the reader’s expectations, and the ‘body as tomb’ concept-cluster, which I demonstrate in The Empty Tomb had deep connections in Paul. And as we know, Mark is riffing on Paul, transforming his Epistles into a narrative story about Jesus (see my recent article, Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles). Any one or several of these ideas may have been at play in Mark’s mind, but we can divide all influences into two possible directions: If Mark was a true Pauline Christian, then the tomb represents the corpse of Jesus. If not, then the tomb represents the ascension of Jesus.

There would surely be overlap: a Pauline would find double-meaning in the tomb as symbol of ascension and the earthly tabernacle, while a “sarcicist” (someone convinced, unlike Paul, that Jesus rose in the same body he died in) would find double-meaning in the tomb as symbol of ascension and escape from death. So we should survey the three most likely sources of inspiration Mark drew upon, which his more educated readers would have understood (and which ‘mature’ initiates may even have been secretly told).

The Psalmic Origins

Crucial to any account of the Gospel would be elucidation of the idea that Christ was raised on the third day after his burial, as scripture required (1 Corinthians 15:4). Many Jews held a belief that “until three days” after death “the soul keeps on returning to the grave, thinking it will go back” into the body, “but when it sees the facial features have become disfigured, it departs and abandons it” (Midrash Rabbah Genesis 100:7, based on Job 14:20-22). This is corroborated by the oft-repeated principle that the identity of a corpse could only be legally established by the corpse’s “countenance” within three days, after which it became too disfigured to be identified (Mishnah, Yebamot 16:3a-e), the law declaring “you cannot testify” to the identity of a corpse “save by the facial features together with the nose, even if there are marks of identification in his body and garments” after three days, emphasizing, “again, you can testify only within three days” of someone’s death.

Both facts were explicitly connected in a Midrash on Leviticus:

For three days the soul hovers over the body, intending to re-enter it, but as soon as it sees its appearance change, it departs, as it is written, “When his flesh that is on him is distorted, his soul will mourn over him” … [So] the full force of mourning lasts for three days. Why? Because the shape of the face is recognizable, even as we have learnt in the Mishnah: Evidence is admissible only in respect of the full face, with the nose, and only within three days. Midrash Rabbah Leviticus, 18:1

This third-day motif was certainly widespread, and may be very ancient. In Jewish tradition it could lie behind the prophecy of Hosea 6:2 that “He will revive us after two days, He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before him.” The Jewish belief that corruption sets in on the third day might even have entailed the savior’s resurrection then, to fulfill Psalms 16:9-11 that the savior’s body would not see corruption. Other possible origins of the idea include Jonah 1:17 and 2 Kings 20:5. The covenantal use of the third day motif in Exodus 19:11, 15, and 16 is also an inviting possibility, as is the story in 2 Kings 2, where, after his ascension men search for Elijah for three days and don’t find him (2:17).

The same idea was popular long before Judaism. The first recorded myth of a crucified and resurrected deity, that of the Sumerian goddess Innana, relates that after her naked, murdered corpse is nailed up, her minions come to feed her the food and water of life and she is raised back to life “after three days.” Many pagan legends of resurrection feature rising “on the third day,” including that of Aridaeus, Timarchus, and Rufus of Philippi (Not the Impossible, p. 122 nn. 17-18). Parallels with then-contemporary Osiris cult are curiously strong, too, though I see no need for so precise a connection. Among the links: Osiris was sealed in a casket (equivalent to a tomb) by seventy-two conspirators, while the Sanhedrin who condemned Christ consisted of seventy-one men, and Judas makes seventy-two; Osiris was then resurrected on the third day, and died during a full moon, just like Christ (Passover occurs during the full moon). I don’t know what to make of this, though it does seem an improbable coincidence (see Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 39 and 42, where Osiris is buried on the 17th of Athyr, the concluding day of the full moon, and raised on the 19th, two days later—thus three days inclusively, just like Jesus.

Whatever the case, Paul’s conviction in 1 Corinthians 15:4 that Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the scriptures” must derive from some Old Testament passage, even if it was also developed (then or by Mark) in conjunction with Jewish or Pagan ideology. However, in choosing how to illuminate this motif in his parable of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, Mark drew upon the Psalms. He consciously modeled his crucifixion narrative on Psalm 22, adapting phrases directly from the Septuagint text thereof (as countless scholars have long noted), including Christ’s cry on the cross, the taunts of the onlookers, and the dividing of garments by casting of lots. Crucifixion also calls up that Psalm’s image of the messiah’s pierced hands and feet. This begins a logical three-day cycle of psalms: Psalm 22 marks the first day (the crucifixion), Psalm 23 the next (the Sabbath, during which Christ’s body rests in the grave), and then Psalm 24 predicts and informs the resurrection on Sunday, the third day.

The middle one, Psalm 23, corresponding to the Sabbath, the day of rest, is the Funeral Psalm (“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want…Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”) and thus represents Christ’s sojourn in the realm of the dead. That Psalm also concludes with what can be taken to be a prediction of a Pauline resurrection: “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” just as Psalm 22 concludes with a prediction of salvation for those who believe in the Christ.

Then Psalm 24 proclaims God’s Lordship over the universe and anticipates a new era, which a Christian would understand began with Christ’s resurrection and ascension to heaven. As the Psalm proclaims, “Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place?” And with what imagery is this signaled? “Lift up your heads, O gates, And be lifted up, O ancient gates, That the King of glory may come in!” So what might be the gates that open up in Mark? The “stone” that “had been rolled away, although it was extremely large,” a symbol of the barrier of death, which Christ has finally broken through. So the gates of the land of the dead have opened for him, proving that he has “ascended to the Lord’s hill.” Hence the empty tomb signifies not only the conquest of death, but Christ’s ascension—and the fact that he is the Christ.

That Mark is drawing on Psalm 24 for his empty tomb narrative is indicated by the very same method employed for Psalm 22: he adapts and inserts a peculiar phrase from the Septuagint (or Greek) version of the Psalm. Breaking with the Pauline phrase “on the third day” that most characterizes the Gospel, Mark instead employs the strange Hebraic formula “on the first from the Sabbaths” (mia tôn sabbatôn) meaning “on the first day of the week,” i.e. the first day after each Sabbath (Mark 16:2). This phrase appears in only one place in the entire Old Testament in Greek: Psalm 24, in the title verse, “A Psalm for David during the First Day of the Week” (tês mias sabbatôn; this heading is not present in the Hebrew from which modern English translations derive; also note the Psalms are numbered differently in the Septuagint, these being Psalms 21, 22, and 23 there, but I will continue using the standard numbers). The obvious narrative role of Psalms 22 and 23 for Mark, combined with this peculiar phrase as an overt marker, confirms that he is calling the reader to reflect on Psalm 24 and to ‘interpret’ his empty tomb narrative in light of it. And in so doing, we see the tomb as a symbol of the gates of death that Christ has flung open.

Mark also calls upon other biblical parallels to illuminate the secret meaning of the narrative. I list several in my discussion of this in The Empty Tomb. But most prominently among them, when Mark has the women say “who will roll away the stone…?” he copies a Septuagint phrase from the Genesis narrative of Jacob’s fathering of the twelve tribes of Israel through two women (Mark 16:3, apokylisei…ton lithon; Genesis 29:8, apokylisôsin ton lithon), which, like Mark, contains a reversal of expectation theme, leads to the foundation of a new Israel (the twelve tribes prefiguring the twelve disciples), and involves the visit of a woman, in that case bringing in the sheep to be watered from the well, the parallel to Christ’s tomb, whose opening also brings the water of life to the faithful. Psalm 24 also links us to this very narrative and its meaning, through its prominent mention of Jacob and his nation (in Psalm 24:6).

Thus, just as the empty tomb served for Matthew to evoke Daniel in the Lion’s Den (as I demonstrated in my chapter on the theft legend in The Empty Tomb and later summarized in Proving History), so here, for Mark, it evokes Jacob’s watering of the sheep and the founding of Israel. But there is an even more telling mythic connection here in result. Jewish legend held that ‘Mary’s Well’ (a reference to Mary, meaning Miriam/Mariam, the sister of Moses) was the rock that gave birth to the flow of water after Moses struck it with his staff. Paul equated Jesus with that very rock (1 Corinthians 10.1-4). But if Jesus were instead equated with the water that flowed from it (the water of life), the rock would then become his mother. Thus ‘Mary’s well’ would have been Jesus’ mother in Paul’s conceptual scheme.

In the legend, ‘Miriam’s Well’ (the name Miriam and Mary are identical in the Greek) not only traveled with the Jews, but finally settled in the Sea of Galilee, where it healed the sick (the evidence is catalogued by Joan Taylor in Jewish Women Philosophers, pp. 335-36). Paul’s contemporary, the Jewish theologian Philo, equated that same rock with the celestial being named Wisdom (e.g. in his Life of Moses and On Flight and Finding), which was then considered the feminine dimension of God (Taylor, p. 336, who notes that “Miriam is thus associated with an everlasting well which will never dry up,” a legend ripe to be paralleled with the mothering of Jesus). The fact that ‘Mary’s Well’ also had symbolic parallels to ‘Jacob’s Well’ which Mark is thus linking Jesus’s death to, both his birth and his death are associated with life-giving wells. The symbolic achievement is elegant, and foregoes any need of this being historically factual.

But why did Mark choose to say “the first day,” why Psalm 24? Besides the handy alignment of the three psalms with the three days of Christ’s death, sojourn, and resurrection, and besides the rich meaning that can be drawn from the text, brilliantly illuminating the Christian concept of salvation, the ‘first day’ also represents the day of circumcision, and through faith in Christ’s resurrection the believer is spiritually circumcised, a prominent theme in Paul (e.g. Philippians 3:3-5; Romans 2:28-29; and in Pseudo-Paul, Colossians 2:11), and we know Mark loves to adapt his ideas from Paul. But even more importantly, this represents the first day of the New Creation, a fundamental symbol in early Christian eschatology, as we see not only already in Paul (e.g. 2 Corinthians 5:17, specifically in connection with resurrection; and Galatians 6:15, specifically in connection with circumcision) but also in the later texts of Barnabas 15 and Justin Martyr’s Apology 1.67, Colossians 1:15-18, 2 Peter 3:13, and so on.

Thus, by inventing an empty tomb, Mark can exploit all these layers of meaning through his allusions to the Psalms, and convey deep truths about the Gospel. This is mythmaking. Not history.

The Women

Even the names of the women in Mark’s empty tomb tale are likely symbolic. Salome is the feminine of Solomon, an obvious symbol of supreme wisdom and kingship. Wisdom was often portrayed as a feminine being (Sophia), so to have her represented here behind a symbolic name rich with the same meaning is not unusual. Mariam (the name we now translate as Mary) was famously the sister of Moses and Aaron, who played several key roles in the legendary escape from Egypt, including her connection with that famous well of salvation that acquired her name, and being the one who led the Hebrew women in song after their deliverance from Egypt—and Egypt was frequently used in ancient Jewish literature as a symbol of the Land of the Dead, just as crossing the wilderness into Palestine symbolized the process of salvation, escaping from death into Paradise.

But Mark gives us two Mary’s, representing two aspects of this legendary role. “Magdalene” is a variant Hellenization of the Hebrew for “tower,” the same exact word transcribed as Magdôlon in the Septuagint—in other words the biblical Migdol, representing the borders of Egypt, and hence of Death. In Exodus 13, the Hebrews camped near Migdol to lure the Pharaoh’s army to their doom, after which “they passed through the midst of the sea into the wilderness three days” (Numbers 33:7-8), just as Jesus had done, on their way to the “twelve springs and seventy palm trees” of Elim (33:9), just as we know the gospel would be spread by twelve disciples and—according to Luke 10:1-17—seventy missionaries. Meanwhile, “Mary the mother of Jacob” (many don’t know it, but “James” is simply Jacob in the original languages, not a different name) is an obvious reference to the Jacob, of Jacob’s well, whose connection we already see Mark intended. This Jacob is of course better known as Israel himself.

So these two Marys in Mark represent Egypt and Israel, one literally the Mother of Israel; the other, the harbinger of escape from the land of the dead. Thus they represent (on the one side) the borders of the Promised Land and the miraculous defeat of death needed to get across, and (on the other side) the founding of a new nation, a New Israel—both linked to each other, through the sister of the first savior, Moses, and Aaron (the first High Priest), and mediated by Wisdom (Salome).

Another clue that these women are symbolic is the fact that they don’t exist in Mark’s story at all except on three symbolically connected occasions: they attend the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus—the very events Mark adapts from that sequence of three Psalms (though Salome is omitted from the burial: Mark 15:40, 15:47, 16:1). In Mark’s Gospel we never hear of any of these women until then, not once in the entire ministry of Jesus. Nor are any of them explained (who are they? why are they there?). They simply appear, serve their mythical function, and vanish (none exist in Acts, either, after Acts 1 when the public history of the church begins in Acts 2; they do not appear to have ever been historical).

All this seems a highly improbable coincidence, there being exactly three women, with exactly these names, appearing exactly three times (that Mark’s fabrications tended to love the deployment of patterns of three I demonstrate in Chapter 10.4 of Historicity), which evoke exactly those scriptures, and triangulate in exactly this way, serving no other purpose and given no other explanation, all simply to convey an incredibly convenient message about the Gospel and the status of Christ as Messiah and miraculous victor over the Land of the Dead. What are the odds?

Maybe you’re not as impressed by all these coincidences as I am. But you don’t have to agree with my analysis of the evident symbolism of these women. The only thing that matters is that this interpretation cannot be ruled out—there’s no evidence against it, and some evidence for it. Mark even tells us he expressly approves of concealing symbolic meanings behind seemingly mundane narratives (see Mark 4:11-12, 33-34), and the names and events of this narrative fit the deeper meaning of the Gospel with surprising convenience.

These details therefore provide an available motive to invent a visit to the tomb by women, especially these particular women, which means we cannot assume the Christians would instead have invented a visit by men first. We cannot demonstrate that they would. For inventing a visit by women carried even more meaningful symbolism, and was even more in accordance with the Gospel message itself. It therefore cannot be said Mark had “no reason” to contrive these women as the finders of the tomb. We have no evidence these women ever existed before his invention of them. And we have no evidence he names them for any other reason than their symbolic role in the text.

The Orphic Background

We have ample evidence that the Jewish theologian Philo and, according to Josephus, the Essenes in general, saw even the body of a living person as a corpse and a tomb—a tomb for the soul. This concept appears to have originated within pagan Orphic theology (I cite the scholarship in The Empty Tomb). Plato puts the Orphic view like this: “In reality we are just as if we were dead. In fact I once heard the wise men say we are now dead, and the body is our tomb” (Georgias 493a; cf. Cratylus 400). Accordingly, a tomb would be a recognizable symbol for the body, especially in the context of a salvation cult. And an empty tomb would therefore symbolize an empty body, representing the fact that the soul has risen—into a new body. It would thus leave a mere ‘shell’ behind, which was its ‘tomb’ in life. To understand the resurrection then requires one to understand that the body is not where the person lies: for they have gone elsewhere, just as Mark has the mysterious man in white say (Mark 16:6-7).

In Orphic theology, this meant a bodiless soul had ascended to heaven. In Pauline theology, however, influenced by Judaism, it would mean the person had been re-clothed in a new body and ascended to heaven. This is exactly what Paul calls a “mystery,” and like all mysteries, it would not be written down in the cult’s sacred story, but explained through an oral exegesis, and only to initiates, while the outward appearance of the story would serve to conceal this mystery from the uninitiated. This could well be just what Mark was doing. Paul hedges around it, but is nevertheless pretty clear in saying the body that dies is not the one that rises, that the new body will be made of new material (1 Corinthians 15:37-55), in fact it’s a body God has already built for us and has waiting for us in heaven (2 Corinthians 5).

Orphic mysteries, such as the mysteries of Bacchus, were one of the most popular categories of salvation cult in the ancient world, widely known to everyone. A common motif was that initiates would be taught the secret of eternal life, which often included instructions to follow after they died. Several metal plates preserving these secret instructions have been recovered from the graves of initiates. The best example, from around 400 B.C. (and thus contemporary with Plato) is the Gold Leaf of Hipponion. Though this preserves the instructions in a significantly older form, and in a different dialect, than what would be known to Mark, the links remain startling, and informative.

According to the plate, when an initiate enters the land of the dead, they will find “a white cypress” on “the right-hand side” (leuka and dexia). In Mark 16:5, when the women enter the tomb (the land of the dead), they find a “boy in white” on “the right-hand side” (leukên and dexiois). The Bacchic initiate is told to go beyond the white cypress, where guardians of the sacred waters will ask them “What are you looking for in the land of the dead?” In Mark, too, the women are searching for something in the land of the dead: Jesus, the water of life. Yet they, too, are supposed to go further (physically, to Galilee; but psychologically, to a recognition of the truth), for they are told that though they are “looking for Jesus,” he is not there (Mark 16:6). The initiate is supposed to ask for a drink from the sacred waters, because they are “perishing” (apollumi, hence “being destroyed, dying”), and the guardians will give it to them, and they shall thereby secure themselves eternal life in a paradise of the hereafter. Likewise, for the women (and the reader), through Mark’s invocation of Jacob’s well, the tomb represents the well of eternal life, from whose waters the sheep must drink to be saved. Just as the initiate must drink of the waters of “memory” (mnêmosunê) to be saved, so do the women enter the tomb, a “memorial” (mnêmeion), where they are told to remember something Jesus said (Mark 16:7).

Thus, Mark’s empty tomb story mimics the secret salvation narratives of the Orphic mysteries, substituting Jewish-Messianic eschatology for the pagan elements. Only in an understanding that Christ is not here (meaning: the land of the dead; but also, the corpse) will the water of life be given. This is the fundamental underlying message of Mark’s empty tomb narrative. The tomb, and its emptiness, symbolizes the land of the dead, or even the dead flesh of Jesus, and the details (the boy in white on the right, the water of life being sought, the need to go further, the role of memory) evoke the symbols of Orphic mystery cult, thus becoming a narrative symbolic of the path to salvation: one must ‘see’ the truth, and become ‘one’ with the new body of Jesus in heaven, in order to be saved. This is the message Mark wrote his myth to convey, albeit only to the insightful, those initiated into the mysteries of the Christian faith.

This is clearly myth, not history.

Reversal of Expectation

Finally, an empty tomb serves Mark’s thematic agenda of ‘reversal of expectation’, which structures much of his Gospel. Indeed Mark clearly sought to “reverse” the reader’s expectations throughout his narrative. As just a few examples: James and John, who ask to sit at the right and left of Jesus in his glory (10:35-40), are replaced by two criminals at his crucifixion (15:27); Simon Peter, Christ’s right-hand man who was told he had to “deny himself and take up his cross and follow” (8:34), is replaced by Simon of Cyrene (a foreigner, from the opposite side of Egypt, that symbol of death again) when it comes time to truly bear that cross (15:21); instead of his family as would be expected, his enemies come to bury him (15:43); Pilate’s expectation that Jesus should still be alive is confounded (15:44); contrary to all expectation, Christ’s own people, the Jews, mock their own savior (15:29-32), while it is a Gentile officer of Rome who recognizes his divinity (15:39); likewise, the very disciples are the ones who abandon Christ (14:50 and 66-72 vs. 14:31), while it is mere lowly women who attend his death and burial, who truly ‘followed him’, and continue to seek him thereafter (15:40-41, 15:47, 16:1), fulfilling Christ’s word (the very theme of reversal itself) that ‘the least shall be first’ (9:35, 10:31); and, the mother of all reversals, Mark ends his Gospel with the women fleeing in fear and silence, and not delivering the good news (16:8), the exact opposite of the “good news” of the “voice crying out” of the “messenger who will prepare our way” with which Mark began his Gospel (1:1-3). I present other examples in my section on Markan mythology in Historicity.

The parables of Jesus are also full of the reversal of expectation theme (Mark 4:30-32, 7:15, 8:35, 10:29-30, 10:44, 12:1-11), and as I already noted, Mark explicitly agrees with the program of concealing the truth behind parables (Mark 4:11-12, 33-34). And so, the empty tomb story is probably itself a parable (just as John Dominic Crossan argues Mark’s entire Gospel is in The Power of Parable), which accordingly employs reversal of expectation as its theme. The tomb has to be empty, in order to confound the expectations of the reader, just as a foreign Simon must carry the cross, a Sanhedrist must bury the body, and women (not men) must be the first to hear the Good News.

This is also why, contrary to all expectation, Jesus is anointed for burial before he dies (14:3), which is meant to summon our attention when the women go to anoint him after his death (16:1), not understanding it’s already happened, and only to find their (and our) expectations reversed by finding his body missing, and a young man in his place—and this with an explicit verbal link to the exchange of one thing for another in Ecclesiastes 4:15—for both Mark and Ecclesiastes speak of walking under the sun and seeing the youth who “stands in place” of the king, just as this youth does in Mark—and just as Mark’s tomb door is explicitly linked with another reversal-of-expectation narrative in Genesis, regarding the fate of Jacob at the well. The expectation is even raised that the tomb will be closed (Mark 16:3), which is yet another deliberate introduction of an expectation that Mark will then foil.

Just as reversal of expectation lies at the heart of the teachings of Jesus—indeed, of the very gospel itself—so it is quite natural for Mark to structure his narrative around such a theme, too. This program leads him to ‘create’ thematic events that thwart the reader’s expectation, and an empty tomb is exactly the sort of thing an author would invent to serve that aim. After all, it begs credulity to suppose that so many convenient reversals of expectation actually happened. It’s more credible to suppose that at least some of them are narrative inventions; and probably, all of them. One such invention could easily be the empty tomb. And as we saw above, an empty tomb would have made a tremendously powerful parabolic symbol, rich with meaning. And all the evidence lines up with Mark having constructed it for exactly such a purpose. None stands against.

Conclusion

We therefore have no difficulty explaining why Mark would make this up. He made it up for the same reason he made up a story about Jesus magically drowning thousands of pigs (to relate a message about the doom attending militarism) and withering a fig tree for no reason (to relate a message about why God allowed his temple to be destroyed by heathens), both of which I discuss in Chapter 10.4 of Historicity. These things never happened. No one witnessed them. They were not stories people passed on orally about Jesus. Mark made all these things up. Just as he did the empty tomb.

Mark made all these things up to tell a story, the meaning of which lies in the interpretation, not the literal truth. Anyone who takes him literally, really isn’t getting it. They are, as Jesus says, the outsiders who hear but don’t understand, and who are therefore doomed; these are the people Mark has Jesus mock and condemn, so that:

They may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven! Mark 4:12

Such is the Christian who takes Mark to have meant his empty tomb story literally, as history, rather than as a symbol for his message, his message about the gospel, in other words, as a mythic stand in for the truth: that the least shall be first, and only those who give up on the body shall be saved.