Mark 16: why women and not men?
Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2018 7:34 am
If I take the apologists in their own words:
The clues seem to be put there not to make believe more, but to provoke more doubt:
1) women and not men,
2) women who can't move the stone (equally, they can't move the human "rock", Peter, to Galilee, differently from Jesus who is able to move Peter in Galilee by only a word)
3) women who fear even a young man in the tomb.
4) women who continue to have fear (out of the tomb) even after the command by the young to have not fear.
5) the young man is not even an angel, so where is his authority from? The last one who has been with and who then abandons Jesus, is also the first one to announce his resurrection, but he fails to announce his resurrection, since even the women who fleed him are remembered (by name) while his name is not remembered. So if he had a merit, even so the his role is entirely vain to explain the origin of the belief in Jerusalem. The reader knows only that in Galilee is happening the "real origin" of the Christianity.
Hence the question: why was the Galilee so important? What was happening really there? The reader is left with the secret hope that at least in Galilee, if not in Jerusalem, there are less idiots à la Peter and the women. But was it really so? Or even in Galilee did they fail to see the Risen?
(In addition: Celsus despised the Christianity as a religion of women and slaves. Could the young man be only a slave? )
...then this may be true but under a particular condition: they did value the witness of the women because they were moved to do so, because the alternative was too much absurd for them to accept: that the women were introduced at the tomb only in order to prove the extreme weakness of their claims, and by extension of Peter and company.The Christians were the first people in Antiquity to value the witness of the women
The clues seem to be put there not to make believe more, but to provoke more doubt:
1) women and not men,
2) women who can't move the stone (equally, they can't move the human "rock", Peter, to Galilee, differently from Jesus who is able to move Peter in Galilee by only a word)
3) women who fear even a young man in the tomb.
4) women who continue to have fear (out of the tomb) even after the command by the young to have not fear.
5) the young man is not even an angel, so where is his authority from? The last one who has been with and who then abandons Jesus, is also the first one to announce his resurrection, but he fails to announce his resurrection, since even the women who fleed him are remembered (by name) while his name is not remembered. So if he had a merit, even so the his role is entirely vain to explain the origin of the belief in Jerusalem. The reader knows only that in Galilee is happening the "real origin" of the Christianity.
Hence the question: why was the Galilee so important? What was happening really there? The reader is left with the secret hope that at least in Galilee, if not in Jerusalem, there are less idiots à la Peter and the women. But was it really so? Or even in Galilee did they fail to see the Risen?
(In addition: Celsus despised the Christianity as a religion of women and slaves. Could the young man be only a slave? )