Without the cross prophetic imagination will likely be as strident and destructive as that which it criticizes - The Prophetic Imagination in Holy Week 4

The crucifixion,then, is not an odd event in the history of faith, although it is the decisive event.  It is, rather, the full expression of dismantling that has been practiced and insisted upon in the prophetic tradition since Moses confronted Pharaoh.  As with Moses, so Jesus' ministry and death opposed the politics of oppression with the politics of justice and compassion. As with Moses, so Jesus' ministry and death resisted the economics of affluence and called for the economics of shared humanity.  As with Moses, so Jesus' ministry and death contradicted the religion of God's captivity with the freedom of God to bring life where he will, even in the face of death.

The cross is the ultimate metaphor of prophetic criticism because it means the end of the old consciousness that brings death on everyone.  The crucifixion articulates God's odd freedom, his strange justice, and his peculiar power.  It is this freedom (read religion of God's freedom), justice (read economics of sharing), power (read politics of justice) which break the power of the old age and bring it to death.  Without the cross prophetic imagination will likely be as strident and destructive as that which it criticizes. The cross is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one.
 

 You wonder if this paragraph might not hold the key to the scandalous history of nominal Christianity with power of exactly the kind that Pharaoh personified, what Christianity became when it was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire and other governments and theologians started the process of taming Christianity to make it harmless to the rich and powerful. That it was the cross, the willingness to die to practice "God's freedom," "economics of sharing," and "politics of justice."  You might compare the French Republican slogan of "liberty, equality and fraternity" and look at what happened far faster in that self-conscious age of "reason" and "enlightenment" as the various factions of "brothers" got power and immediately used it to kill their rival comrades and the worse to come under Napoleon's and his successors violent, turbulent regimes in the next century.  Or, the United States and its slave and genocide republic or the Russian, Chinese Revolutions,  etc. self-consciously scientific revolutions for which the culture of the Enlightenment "enlightened" have yet to be called to nearly as full account.  

Certainly, even more influential has been the attack on religion by the entertainment industry, writers and performers who want to be considered in the know (most of them are quite ignorant) aimed at making Judaism into a joke and Christianity a tacky, hypocritical entity which is absurd, to blame for everything and opposed to everything good in the commercial sense that comodified "good" has come to mean for most Americans. The culture of show biz has left those it keeps in ignorance through eating up most of their days with entertainment when they could be learning something real with the vague sense that Christianity is unfashionable and tacky - it doesn't help that so many nominal Christians do so much to help in the effort - and that if they so much as really look into it, it'll give them cooties.  It is always a mistake to consider that the world of accurate thinking and study and writing have much to do with the lives of the large majority of people whose real educators are TV, other broadcast and cabloid media and, God save us, the internet.  Compared to those the entire educational apparatus is totally ineffective, except in so far as it, also, has promoted that discrediting of religion.

As Brueggemann points out, in so far as they wanted to claim Jesus as their inspiration, the Christian establishment totally blew by the Gospels and Epistles. The extent to which the modern Pharaonic regimes have blown by reason and the consequences of materialism would be far harder to tease out, any alleged moral content not being something science is required to deal with. The religious ferment of the 16th and 17th centuries may have given rise to the reaction of the "Enlightenment," the "Enlightenment" has given rise to the anti-intellectualism and moral decay of consumer capitalism and, under the most self-consciously scientific regimes, nothing more than state capitalism and the brainlessness of entertainment culture.  That, as much as anything, is the consciousness, or unconsciousness, that has to be attacked now.

Prophetic criticism aims to create an alternative consciousness with its own rhetoric and field of perception.  That alternative consciousness, unless the criticism is to be superficial and external, has to do with the cross.  Douglas Hall has explored how we might think about this, suggesting that creative criticism must be ethically pertinent and premised on our own embrace of negativity.  The kind of prophetic criticism does not lightly offer alternatives, does not mouth assurances, and  does not provide redemptive social policy. It knows that only those who mourn can be comforted and so it first asks about how to mourn seriously and faithfully for the world passing away.  Jesus understood and embodied that anguish which Jeremiah felt so poignantly.

Last year, as the KGB man, Putin, invaded Ukraine the Orthodox intellectual, philosopher and theologian David Bently Hart gave a very pessimistic lecture about the future of Christianity.  I think if you started with the view that nominal Christianity may well be going into eclipse as it seems to lose the struggle with secularism his pessimism is spot on.  But I think Christianity has, in reality, always been in an eclipse since Constantine.  I've never been that impressed with nominal Christianity because those Christians don't seem to have much to do with Jesus, James, Paul or the largely unknown authors of the rest of the New Testament. I would include much if not most of evangelical and Catholic and Orthodox (look at Kyril, the Patriarch of Moscow, just now) Christianity in that critique though all of those large groups have always had those who tried to follow Jesus, even those who rather clearly took up a cross to do it.  I think Francis is trying to move Catholicism into being more Christian as Vatican II started under John XXIII of blessed memory. But they have also included the shadow on The Light for the entire time. The preface to John's Gospel is something I've come to appreciate a lot more this past year, for all of the baggage the whole book has had placed on it.

I don't know what the future holds for Christianity as a major force in Western culture, though I do know it has endured even in the face of modernity to some extent. It endured the corruptions of many a Pope, many a bishop, many a movement.  The great civil rights movement of the period of Martin Luther King jr. came out of what was largely a conservative evangelical tradition, it is certainly proof of the durability of Christianity.  There have been many, many smaller examples of it, often leading the the martyrdom which our St. Martin suffered.  I think right now the worst enemies Christianity has are probably internal, Catholic neo-integralism (listen to DBH's horrific example from Harvard Law School at the link above), Protestant fundamentalism, Orthodox nationalism, sterile academics biblical experts and theologians.  All of whom discredit Christianity.  But none so much as those who oppose the economics of sharing and the politics of justice, who, in the United States and elsewhere where the heresy of "Christian nationalism" is rampant.  

I have been deeply pessimistic since Putin invaded Ukraine and the Republican-fascists, the "religious rights" liars, on the Supreme Court here have placed women under the subjugation of state legislatures and governors in Republican-fascist dominated states, the ongoing slaughter by mass murdering gun nuts the Supreme Court and Republican-fascists enable, etc. They certainly do more to discredit Christianity than the fading snark of the new atheists who flourished in teh 00's.  

Those are the reasons I haven't felt much like posting music or radio dramas.  But it's not in my nature to give in to pessimism for long. As the historian Howard Zinn said in his wonderful 1990 essay "Failure to Quit,"

I can understand pessimism, but I don't believe in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical evidence.  Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give hope, because for hope we don't need certaintly, only possibility.  Despite all those confident statements that "history shows. . ." and "history proves. . .," hope is all the past can offer us.

It occurs to me that is what the Gospel accounts, the professions of Paul and Acts, concerning the Resurrection are to most people who first look at them or look at them seriously for the first time "not overwhelming evidence,"  they are words on a page, if you choose not to be inclined to seriously consider them.   If they choose to take them seriously they are "just enough to give hope."  If we read it expecting "certainty" it's unlikely we'll really get to belief in the possibility of it.*  I'd say they are the beginning of choosing to believe.

I have listened to the arguments, some of them rather good in the way that you can make good arguments for anything in the evidence of history from that period, of the apologists for historicity of the Resurrection, certainly as strongly attested in the record when compared to anything else known about early 1st century history.  

But in the end it's on me, I have to choose to believe or choose to disbelieve.  I choose to believe now after I suspended belief for a long time.  It is impossible for me to conceive of believing without the experience of life as an LGBTQ+ person reacting to the oppression of both church and state, witness to the aftermath of WWII and the knowledge of the scientific regimes genocides, the discrediting of Marxism through its catastrophic and criminal test of time, my disillusionment with the secular left and secularism, in general, the great civil rights struggles, the martyrdom of so many in Central and South America under U.S. foreign policy. . . But also witness to genuine Christian belief and action.  The involvement of my mother with Pax Christi and other groups, the Martyrs of Central America, many local and others who give witness to the teacings of Jesus among the least among us.  I don't think I could have chosen to believe, finally, without that experience.  And, especially in the period when I could go online and check the primary documentation of materialist, atheist, scientism and secular (read anti-religious, anti-Christian) culture, I found that one after another most of the totems and idols and myths of secularism were just that, self-apparent myths documented to be so in the far more complete recent documentary record.   It was a long road.

I think the future of the possibility of a decent life under egalitarian democracy, probably the continuation of the human species and life on Earth depend on enough people to REALLY believe it for the first time.  I also choose to believe that the best days of Christianity are in the future, not in the past, that much of the past and present of Christianity will not be a part of it. I don't think that "just war" theory will be.  That trio of values Walter Brueggemann set out certainly must be. I choose to believe that when Jesus told his followers to pray, "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven," he was telling them to pray for AND TO PERFORM that so as to make Earth as heavenly as it can be.  I don't think he'd have told them to do that if it were an impossibility or even next to impossible. I do believe The Meek will inherit the Earth.  They won't get much support from the secular left or Hollywood or academia, they won't get it from "Christian" media, the putrid EWTN or the secular media.  They certainly won't get it from most of the powers that be anywhere, left or right.  It won't come from that kind of power.

* I won't go into it again having done so recently but the idea that there is much of anything that has that level of certainty in what we choose to believe we know about much of anything is a delusion of scientistic materialism.
 

Therefore God has highly exalted him - The Prophetic Imagination During Holy Week - 3

This theological tradition of life in the shape of death and of power in the form of suffering is more than the dominant culture can receive or accept.  That alternative discernment is evident in the theology of the cross as narrated by Mark and as articulated by Paul.  While many texts might be cited,here I mention only the ancient hymn utilized by Paul:

Jesus Christ, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.  Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the father. (Phil. 2:5-11)

That tradition of radical criticism is above the self-giving emptiness of Jesus, about dominion through the loss of dominion, and about fullness coming only in self-emptying. The emptying is not to be related to a meditative self-negating, for it is a thoroughly political image concerned with the willing surrender of power; it is the very thing kings cannot do and remain kings. Thus the entire royal self-understanding is refuted. The empty one who willingly surrendered power for obedience is the ultimately powerful one who can permit humanness where no other has authority to do so.

The story of the foundation of the nation of Israel in the promise to Abraham made first that he would have a son and heir in his old age, a covenant that was sealed with the near but non-sacrifice of his second son, Isaac, but with the willingness of Abraham to go intentionally sacrifice his son, is something I never thought of in relation to the willingness of Jesus to, himself, go to an even more horrible death.  I haven't come across a theological investigation of that though I'm sure it must have occurred to someone in the two thousand years of Christian theology.   I don't get the feeling that it occurred to the Gospel writers, though, as I have to always mention, I'm a beginner at this.  Has this seeming adoptionist view of the divinity of Jesus in this passage has ever figured into such an exploration of it? Jesus, instead of being the patriarch of a great nation would have a status like that Paul said was his due in the crucifixion, the Son of the Father.     

The crucifixion and Resurrection are the heart of the problem Jesus and Christianity present to the world, no matter where or when in the past two thousand years.   And the Resurrection is the definitive aspect of that.  As Paul said elsewhere it is a stumbling block that a lot of even those who profess to be Christians can't get past. 

 

I think a lot of the problem for many of them, as it was for me, was that they expect to just magically find that they suddenly believe in it when that belief is as much a matter of choice as it is an act of involuntary conviction.  I think that psychology has done far more to alienate our experience of believing and knowing from what it actually is as people repeatedly demonstrate that belief and the act which is probably foolishly separated from it "knowing" through the demotion of human agency in the matter.  

Considering the enormous public demonstration of the worst part of such human agency on full display as the true believers in Trump, Putin, Orban, ETWN, Jordan Peterson, etc. who demonstrate that what those people are convinced they know the most deeply absurd and contra-factual and malignant things are exactly that, based in their choice to believe what they want to, you would think the whole matter of the automatic act which is held to be "knowing" something would get more of a deep criticism.  In fact, the very field of psychology in which huge sheets of such knowledge, as was contained in the various schools of Freudianism, Behaviorism, Evo-psy, and a myriad of other discredited and soon to be discredited structures deemed to be known enough to be taught as science in universities, only to be junked, waiting for those who made money as practitioners to die off before totally decommissioning that "knowledge" which was as much chosen to be believed as the Trumpists knew that horse medicine would cure Covid and drinking bleach was a health measure.

While the strength of an experience, such as those reporting near death experiences and, I wouldn't be surprised, Paul reported had may compel belief to the point where it reaches the level of conviction to be asserted to be knowledge seems to be a real thing - the conversion in their acts and personality are also attested to by those around such people - the final choice lies in whether or not the person chooses to believe in the reality of their experience.  In some cases, no doubt, would-be "skeptics" can talk even those who have had profound experiences which you would think would override the typically tread-bare and 7th grade style coercion, out of believing what they have experienced.  

If Jesus chose to believe what he said, as any mere human would have to, even as having a divine nature that he may well not have been aware of until his death, then that is probably singular in the history of the human species. It's unclear from the Gospels and Paul and Acts that Jesus was fully aware of being the Son of God in the Christian theological sense of the term, as I said yesterday it would explain his cry quoting Psalm 22 from the cross, or maybe he, facing the point of death, had an all too human conviction that he had been wrong about it all.  Did his knowledge of who he was have enough strength at the point of death or was it necessary for him to experience our own ultimate fear at that point?   I don't think it's possible for us to tease out the meaning of all of those things.  For me it has more power of persuasion than if he had remained tranquil at that point.  For me to believe in the divinity of Jesus,  I have to believe that he was fully human, as well.

I think if the Gospel writers, if Paul had been able to they certainly would have made those points clear.  But we would still be left with the choice to believe it or not.  I was afraid to believe it for a long time, due in no small part to the anti-Christian propaganda sold as knowledge that was virtually everywhere in my formal education but, also, the very true scandal of the behavior of Christians in the past and then and, yes, still, now. It's clear a lot of Christians choose not to believe the heart of Jesus's Gospel. I'm not afraid to believe it any more and I'm not afraid to admit that what I believe is a great mystery.  The great mystery.  I say that while being fully convinced of the truth of what Jesus said.  I had to empty myself of a lot of "knowledge" before I wasn't afraid to believe it anymore.

the old assurances and awareness's of meaning are now all gone - Reading From The Prophetic Imagination In Holy Week

Jesus' sayings on the cross as preserved in the various traditions are the voice of an alternative consciousness.  His initial plea for forgiveness for his enemies is an act of criticism (Luke 23:34), for it asserts the insanity of the dominant culture.  On behalf of the world which has now sentenced him, he  enters a plea of temporary insanity. A reference should be made here to the insightful interpretation of Paul Lehmann, who shows that the trial of Jesus before Pilate in fact has Pilate, and not Jesus, on trial.  The cry of Jesus from the cross, then, may be regarded as a decision (by the Judge) that the defendant (the old order) may not be punished because it is insane.

I never noticed that before or put it together with the prophecy that Christ would have the role of judging the living and the dead in this part of the narrative.  Now that I've been introduced to the idea in a deep way (writing down a text can do that for you) it makes a kind of sense of the passage I'd never considered from just listening to it or reading it.  It's certainly to be compared to the worldly powers which so seldom forgive unless it's to the rich and powerful or otherwise favored unequally.  Whether it's a king or president or prime minister or judge or Supreme Court "justice" of a governor, etc. even those who will make a profession of faith in Christianity have followed bishops and ministers and popes in going all old-order when it comes to even those who never offended them but especially on those who they perceive as their enemies.  In that regard, Pope Francis in not using his power to severely punish some of the worldly bishops and cardinals who have set themselves, publicly as his enemies, to silence them is impressive in a way I don't remember his immediate predecessors doing.

Second, his cry of despair (Mark 15:34) is an announcement of abandonment.  The whole known network of meaning has collapsed in and a new dangerous situation of faith has emerged.  Thus Jesus experiences the result of the criticism;  the old assurances and awareness's of meaning are now all gone.

It is certainly also something that shows Jesus was fully human, I doubt anyone of us has such complete confidence in our judgment and choices, our own perceptions that we will not fear that we were wrong in believing at that point.

Third, the ultimate criticism ends in submission (Luke 23: 46), the last thing possible in a world of competence and control. Thus in that very world of control Jesus presents a new way of faithfulness that completely subverts the dominant way.

I read this and recalled several accounts of near death experience that said the terrifying feeling of everything from hellish mirages to total aloneness and nothingness persisted so long as they tried to maintain control but passed as they gave up control.  Never having had the experience,  I have to rely on the reports of those who have.  You really can't take anything with you, including your old habits of assurance, or so it seems. Again, Jesus was fully human and one of us, perhaps this was the only way to convince us that the Resurrection is a new thing in the world, the "cosmos."  Maybe Jesus died because of our sins and also as a means of breaking through our resistance to a new reality.   

And finally, his assertion of paradise (Luke 23:43) is a speech about the delegitimization of the world that killed him. Now he speaks from a very different value system.  The very one called criminal is now welcomed to paradise;  the outcast is the welcomed one.  Jesus' new way of acting and speaking announces that another way is now operating.  It is the final assertion that the old way is null and void.

Again, this is certainly not somehting that self-called "Christian" societies, governments, churches have done much to follow.  "Christian" prisons and capital punishment - the most enthusiastic states for killing people are full of those fastest to tell you they're "Christians" - are the leaders in showing no mercy to anyone but the rich and powerful.  That's not confined to any one region of the country, it's true in even states which have abandoned capital punishment that those who are most eager to get it back include those most ready to make a show of religion. At least that's what I've seen in Maine, one of the earliest states to get rid of at least that level of old-order governance and "justice."  The prisons here are not excessively humane, though.

Too much should not be made of these isolated statements of the cross, for each has its own complex development in the history of the tradition, which is undoubtedly in part a history of the liturgy. Nonetheless, together they form a statement that completely refutes the claims of those who seem to be in charge. These statements (a plea of insanity; a cry of abandonment; a groan of submission; and an assertion of a new way of graciousness) are a refutation of the world now brought to an end.  The old order may be characterized as madness masquerading as control; phony assurance of sustained well-being; a desperate attempt to control and not to submit; and a grim system of retribution.  Thus each statement of Jesus is a counter-possibility that places all the old ways in question.  The passion narrative of Jesus provides ground for prophetic criticism.  It hints at a fresh way for the repentance of Lent.

To that all I feel like saying right now is Amen.
 

I Do Know The Difference Between A Roman Governor And A Guy Who Flies a Plane

That one was spell check, not me.

None of us is prepared for such decisive criticism.

. . .  the ultimate criticism is not one of triumphant indignation but one of the passion and compassion that completely and irresistibly undermine the world of competence and competition.

THIS WEEK I'LL BE POSTING some of what is said about the Crucifixion as the prophetic witness of Jesus in Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination.  

It is the crucifixion of Jesus that is the decisive criticism of the royal consciousness.  The crucifixion of Jesus is not to be understood simply in good liberal fashion as the sacrifice of a noble man, nor should we too quickly assign a cultic, priestly theory of atonement to the event.  Rather we might see in the crucifixion of Jesus the ultimate act of prophetic criticism in which Jesus announces the end of the world of death (the same announcement as that of Jeremiah) and takes that death into his own person.  Therefore we say that the ultimate criticism is that God himself embraces the death that his people must die.  The criticism consists not in standing over against but in standing with; the ultimate criticism is not one of triumphant indignation but one of the passion and compassion that completely and irresistibly undermine the world of competence and competition.  The contrast is stark and total;  this passionate man set in the midst of numbed Jerusalem.  And only the passion can finally penetrate the numbness.

A number of years ago I posted something about someone I heard on the radio, a modern sophisticated non-religious person whose young son became very interested in becoming a Catholic.  Why, she wanted to know, when she went to the church with him, did anyone want to look on the hideous image of a tortured, executed man, executed in one of the worst manners sadistic dictatorial power has found to sadistically kill and, as an act of terror for the population,  display the tortured, murdered victim someone.  Why, she wanted to know, couldn't they choose something pleasant to look at instead of a crucifix?  Her son said, who would bother to notice something like that?  

If early First Century Jerusalem is numbed, the United States, the entire modern world is at least as numbed.  When Marjory Taylor Greene or some other Republican-fascist makes a show of "Christian nationalism" they are advocating something as corrupt as the Roman imperial occupation and likely far more corrupt than the corrupted Chief Rabbinate and his court in the degraded Temple.  The very people who killed Jesus.  There isn't one of them who I would doubt would play the role of Pilate in the story only without any kind of qualms.  

The corruption of Easter into something no more significant than candy and new clothes and the rest of the Easter Parade of commercial tackiness, something that many of the churches are in on and certainly the most typical American notice of the day with little to say about the undermining of the "world of competence and competition" that has entirely supplanted anything like a real Christian culture in the modern period.

But, as it's always necessary to point out, I certainly wouldn't want to go back to any previous observance of Holy Week and Easter because it inevitably got mixed in with things which may have in many cases been more charming or interesting than the chocolate eggs and greeting card companies anthropomorphized bunnies and the crappy pop music of the season, but they were on the same side of what has become so nauseating about the American version of the holiday.  The only way for a holiday to escape the American commercial trivialization of it is to be so insignificant as to escape that treatment.  Creating a national holiday for the remembrance of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. has certainly done far more to trivialize him and for his enemies to co-opt his memory than it has to hear his message. It was a really bad idea, instead of parades they should have held sit-ins or unauthorized readings of the suppressed words of the man.  Considering what they've done to the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus, it was bound to happen in that case.

That phase Brueggemann constructed about "competence and competition" is certainly shorthand for the modern Western culture that the Crucifixion of Jesus, its prophetic meaning, is opposed to.  I don't remember where I recently heard the idea that there is nothing more powerless than dead and it's clear in the Gospels that Jesus was consciously putting himself on the road to death when he turned his face to Jerusalem even as he told his followers what was coming for him and for them.  

The radical criticism embodied in the crucifixion can be discerned in the "passion announcements" of Mark:

And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again (Mark 8:31).

The son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him;  and when he is killed after three days he will rise (9:31).

Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles  and they will mock him, and spit on him, and scourge him, and kill him;  and after three days he will rise (10:33-34).

There is no more radical criticism than these statements, for they announce that the power of God takes the form of death and that real well-being and victory only appear via death.  So the sayings dismantle the dominant theories of power by asserting that all such would-be power is in fact no-power. Thus the passion announcements of Jesus are the decisive dismissal of every self-serving form of power upon which the royal consciousness is based.  Just that formula, Son of man must suffer - Son of man/suffer! - is more than the world can tolerate, for the phrase of ultimate power, "Son of man," has as its predicate the passion to death.  It is true that no precise counterpart can be found in the history of Moses.  Moses never speaks or acts that way, but we may pause to discern important continuities between the two.  Moses also dismantled the empire and declared it to be no-power (remember Exodus 8:18) by disregarding the claims of the imperial reality and trusting fully in the Lord of justice and freedom.  In parallel fashion, the dominant power is dismantled by appealing to an uncredentialed God.

Could there be anything more uncongenial to the modernistic, learned sensibility than "an uncredentialed God?"  In reading Mark's Gospel as translated with what he says is faithful rhetorical style to the Greek original, David Bently Hart presents Mark as if it were an uneducated person narrating an eye-witness account of things. I have to say it is the most compelling translation of Mark's Gospel I've yet read.  Compared to it the Contemporary English Version reads like one of the smarter seniors in high school was saying it.

That the passion sayings of Jesus constitute the ultimate criticism of the royal consciousness is evident in the reaction of the faithful:  First (Mark 8:32-33) Peter, on behalf of the church, rejects the criticism as too radical and he is roundly reprimanded.  Second (9:32), the disciples did not understand and are afraid to ask.  Third (10:35-37), they respond, indicating they understood nothing, by fresh dispute about their own power and authority.  The criticism of Jesus is too radical, not only for the imperial manager but also for his own followers.  None of us is prepared for such decisive criticism.

When, inevitably, the annual snark about Mark's Gospel having no mention of the Resurrection is dragged out again, those passages above certainly prove that it is contained in the Text.  I, personally, find the theory that early in the transmission of Mark that the end of the scroll was lost from it, entirely believable. It's not as if it was likely the scribe who lettered that earliest copy which cuts off so abruptly had any way to check on the ending by looking at another copy.  I wouldn't be surprised if the extant copies of the Gospel at that point might have been fewer than a hundred.  It's not as if books that survive from that period are found in numbers. If that loss happened very early in the history of the book, I'd guess much less than a hundred copies would have existed.  The fragility of the transmission of texts in the manuscript based period accounts for a lot more than our modern habits of thought might take notice of. It's clear that far from being silent on it, Mark presents the Resurrection as a crucial part of the phenomenon of Jesus and figured heavily in the only reason the writer of the Gospel would have been writing the account to start with.  That modern snark about the "original ending of Mark" is a better example of the habit of "skeptical" atheists of ignoring the whole text and what it says.  I've got to say that was one of the things I found most enlightening about modernism, how intellectually dishonest it is. And so resistant to that criticism, perhaps another clue to why they detest Jesus so much.

I'll wait to comment on more of the Easter evergreens of modernistic mockery as they might come in.  
 

The Trial of Jesus - An Alternative Timeline by Prof. Israel Knohl

 

 

This isn't something I'm endorsing as what I believe is a final explanation of things, it's just one of many proposals but it's one from a point of view I wasn't familiar with before now.  

Palm Sunday is also known as Passion Sunday because in addition to the familiar story of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on a donkey with palm branches spread before him as a sign of respect.