The earliest and best manuscripts of Mark's Gospel (e.g., Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus) end at 16:8, with the women fleeing the empty tomb in fear and telling no one, without any narrated resurrection appearance of Jesus -- the familiar longer ending (16:9-20) is a later addition, meaning the earliest recoverable form of Mark's Gospel lacks a resurrection-appearance account altogether.

Concede this plainly and accurately: it is a genuine, well-established textual fact, not a fringe skeptical claim. Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the two earliest complete Greek manuscripts of Mark (4th century), both end at 16:8, as does the Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis and other early witnesses, and Eusebius and Jerome both report that the majority of manuscripts known to them lacked the longer ending. This is a genuine, actively studied open question in Markan scholarship, and it should be presented honestly rather than papered over. Serious options include: (1) Mark's original ending was lost very early in transmission, due to damage to the final leaf of a scroll or early codex, a proposal with real manuscript-physical plausibility that Bruce Metzger treats as at least a live possibility; and (2) Mark intentionally ended his Gospel at 16:8 as a deliberate literary and theological choice, a view seriously defended by N.T. Wright and others, who note that Mark's Gospel is characterized throughout by a consistent motif of fear, silence, secrecy, and human misunderstanding in the face of divine action, the 'messianic secret' pattern and the disciples' repeated failure to comprehend (Mark 4:41, 6:52, 9:32), such that an abrupt ending on the women's fear and silence, leaving the reader to complete the proclamation the text has already promised (Mark 16:7, the angel's word that Jesus goes ahead to Galilee), is a coherent, even powerful, rhetorical strategy consistent with the rest of the book's technique. Serious scholars remain genuinely divided, and no false certainty is claimed either way. Critically, this text-critical question does not affect the historical evidentiary basis for the resurrection appearances themselves, which rest on independent, and in fact earlier, apostolic testimony: 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, a creedal formula Paul received and quotes, universally dated by critical NT scholarship, including skeptical scholars such as Bart Ehrman and Gerd Ludemann, to within a few years of the crucifixion, decades before Mark was even written, lists multiple named individual and group resurrection appearances entirely independent of, and prior to, whatever the original ending of Mark's Gospel contained.

The convergence of multiple independent early strands, the pre-Pauline creed of 1 Cor 15, the independently composed resurrection-appearance narratives in Matthew, Luke, and John with overlapping but non-identical appearance traditions consistent with independent transmission, and Mark's own pre-16:8 material, the empty tomb and the angelic promise of a Galilee appearance in 16:7, provides a historically robust basis for the resurrection-appearance tradition entirely independent of the disputed longer ending of Mark.