“How can you tell it’s early?” I asked. “Two reasons,” he said. “First, Mark is generally considered to be the earliest gospel. Second, his gospel basically consists of short anecdotes about Jesus, more like pearls on a string than a smooth, continuous narrative. “But when you get to the last week of Jesus’ life—the so-called passion story—then you do have a continuous narrative of events in sequence. This passion story was apparently taken by Mark from an even earlier source—and this source included the story of Jesus being buried in the tomb.”
