I would like to run through a scenario close to what I think Joe and Kunigunde are suggesting, one which does
not involve a reconciliation between Jesus and the disciples from Mark's perspective:
- The disciples are known, not only by Mark but also by his readers, to preach a gospel that does not involve the resurrection (it is a healing and teaching gospel, as Joe says). This pretty much has to be known by Mark's readers, I think, because Mark himself takes no pains to point it out in the gospel; the predictions he puts on Jesus' lips about their careers after Jesus' death lack any mention of what kind of gospel they preach, so without this knowledge it would be too easy to assume that they are reconciled to a resurrected Jesus, not just to a healing and teaching Jesus.
- Mark incorporates the history of or legends surrounding those disciples into those dominical predictions. These include the martyrdoms of James and John and the conflicts with the authorities by the four core disciples (Peter, Andrew, James, and John). He does not take the trouble to emphasize that they suffered for an incomplete gospel because, again, presumably his readers already know the contents of their gospel.
- The gospel they preached is incomplete specifically in comparison to the gospel preached by Paul. I say that the gospel is incomplete instead of simply wrong because (A) Paul himself was not against healing and teaching and (B) Jesus himself is the one who gave the disciples this healing and teaching ministry in the first place; they may have missed a turn along the way, but they did not start off with the wrong information.
Now, such a scenario requires us to suppose that the readers of Mark are meant to fill in the gaps of the gospel with the information that the disciples, after fleeing at Jesus' arrest, eventually come back to their calling (sans knowledge of or interest in the resurrection, however) and begin to preach again. My main issue here is simple: this scenario pretty much
forces us to regard Mark 14.28 and 16.7 as interpolations, correct? I deliberately left those verses out of the OP in order to handle them separately, but they combine to provide the disciples with a promised resurrection appearance. (I reject out of hand those proposals I occasionally see to the effect that the young man in the tomb was lying or misinformed or being in any other way less than forthright and accurate. If Mark's intentions are
that obscurely written, then we have no shot at understanding him.) If 14.28 and 16.7 are allowed to stand, then I think the information Mark has given us (in the form of those predictions by Jesus) will lead us to assume that the disciples meet the risen Lord and are later persecuted and martyred for him. If we are assuming, as per above, that Mark's readers know they did not preach a resurrection, then questions will inevitably arise for those readers. How did they manage to meet the risen Lord and then not include that in their preaching? When Jesus told them to heal, they healed; they may not have been great apostles, but they at least understood what they were told to do. Alternately, if the meeting was negative, why did they continue to preach at all?
More importantly, since our assumption above that the readers already knew the disciples preached a gospel without a resurrection is just that, an
assumption, it makes me wonder whether other assumptions might not be just as likely, if not more so. For example, if we assume rather that the readers of Mark's gospel knew that the disciples did preach a resurrection, then 14.28 and 16.7 make perfect sense, and we are not forced to regard them as interpolations. (This "knowledge" on their part need not be accurate, incidentally. We know that the disciples were credited with preaching the resurrection at some point anyway, whether early or late, and we need only imagine that Mark's readers knew this much.)
I personally think that Mark could safely assume his readers already know about Simon Peter, at least. I base this on the way in which Simon is introduced in the narrative, without a descriptor:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2551&p=57573. It is much less clear to me that Mark was assuming they knew James and John already; his prediction of their martyrdom in chapter 10 I can see in either light, really: either as affirming what they already knew, to wit, that James and John were martyrs, or as filling them in on the fact for the first time. That James and John are introduced with a descriptor may imply that the second option is better, but I am not married to that outcome. Andrew is more of a wild card, and I do not see any reason to suspect that Mark assumed his readers knew much or anything about Andrew. At any rate, while I think it likely that the Marcan readership already knew about Simon Peter, and therefore may well have known about what kind of gospel he preached, this does not tell us anything about that gospel itself. It could have been a resurrection gospel, or it could have lacked the resurrection.
This post is a bit rambly, I think, but my main point here is to sketch out the possibilities as they relate to Mark 14.28 and 16.7. With those verses intact, a scenario such as the one I sketched out above becomes unlikely, right? We have to assume that those verses are interpolations, right?