There's a question, of course, whether we are to regard Mk 16:1-8 as an
authentic tradition or a Marcan creation. To me it has seemed not unlikely
that the last verse ("they told nobody, because they were scared witless")
is an indication of Marcan composition much like Plato's comment in the
Phaedo that Plato wasn't present on that last day of Socrates' life (and
therefore won't vouch for the literal accuracy of his account of the
conversaion).
Apart from that, I've been toying with a couple possibilities. I looked
about a little yesterday to try to test my hypothesis that IDE is a
dialectal variant of the more common IDOU and can be used as an
interjection rather like the French "voici" or "voila"--which are hardly
more than a "Hey, lookee!" and not real imperatives. I want to do a TLG
search, and now that I've finally got Don Wilkins' new TLG search program
to working, I'll give it a try.
Yet one other possibility is that we ought to understand IDE hO TOPOS
hOPOU EQHKAN AUTON as parataxis with typical (or not really untypical)
ellipsis for:
IDE! (hOUTOS ESTIN) hO TOPOS hOPOU EQHKAN AUTON
"See here: this is the place where they laid him." I don't know whether
that's really plausible either, but inasmuch as ellipsis is such a normal
thing in Greek of every period and punctuation is very much an editorial
judgment, I think it might just be possible to punctuate (mutatis mutandis,
so far as the punctuation marks are concerned): IDE: hO TOPOS hOPOU EQHKAN
AUTON.
I'll post the results of my search for IDE later.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/