The Good News stayed dead until, fed by the power of Bread [with a capital "B"] broken

 The Women of Mark 16:8

"He is risen!  He is not here!"

we heard - and fled

from the empty tomb,

our lips sealed by fear,

to cower in the upper room.

The Good News stayed dead

until, fed by the power 

of Bread

broken, 

we arose from our dread

and the Good News was spoken. 

Sr. Irene Zimmermann OSF

One of the interesting things about the Resurrection narratives is the place that bread plays in it, the staple of the daily diet.  And the most interesting thing about that is that it is BROKEN bread, bread broken to share it.   I don't think that that is merely incidental,  I think that to hold a sacramental view of the breaking of the bread and sharing the cup of wine you can't leave out that it is food that is broken, shared from that view of it.  That the narratives  of the sacramental institution of the Eucharist has Jesus specifically stating that the broken and shared bread, the shared wine are his body and his blood, which I think more than just implies that the action of sharing and eating and drinking is as central to the sacramentalism of the act as the so-called elements of it. 

Mark's ambiguous ending which has the Women at the tomb told by a mysterious young man dressed in white that Jesus is risen and that they are to tell his disciples that he has gone on before them and will see them in Galilee.   But, as the poem notes, they are presented as having been terrified and that the fled, not telling what they'd seen.  Which you have to ask, how did Mark know about it, in that case.   The several extensions of that ending which scholars don't believe was the original ending of it provides accounts of post-Resurrection appearance.   Some think Mark ended at 16:8 with the Women not telling anyone, some theorize that the original ending was lost early in the manuscript tradition of Mark, though there isn't any way to know which is the case.   It's clear that Mark did teach the Resurrection of Jesus, though he may not have chosen to go into much detail about it.   It's clear from even earlier in the canonical texts, especially in Paul that the earliest known tradition is that Jesus died, was buried and on the third day he rose from the dead into a state of glory.  

I generally prefer the Luke tradition with Matthew's coming in second.   I don't know to what extent those might be elaborations of the account in Mark - truncated or extended - or how much variation there was in the manuscript tradition.   I do think that all of the New Testament is a product of the early followers of Jesus and the earliest converts expressing their experience of the Living Jesus after his death and Resurrection.   I don't think it was just spinning tales.  I know that some evangelicals like to use Mark's "bare bones" account of the suffering, execution, burial and Resurrection of Jesus in their line of evidence to "prove" the factual historicity of all of that, which seems to me to be alien to the tradition I was raised in.   It is in that large category of mystery for which historicity in a valid sense is not possible.  I think real belief in it requires that it be on the basis of experience and choice to believe.  Just as every single thing in human life which is believed or taken to be known is a matter of choice based on experience.  If you don't like that, it's just the way that human life is, in everything up to and including valid science and rigorous mathematics as well as things without that kind of evidentiary basis.   Bread broken seems to me to be as good a basis of belief as the general cargo-cult or ideological belief in science.  And it's a lot more nourishing than mathematical proof.