Someone stole the body!

[Vicki Q]

With the ending of Mark 16:8; an intriguing possibility (Philip G Davis/Larry Hurtado et al) is that Mark never intended to do a resurrection ending, because he was writing in a contemporary genre which can be summarised as “How to live the life of a good disciple”. Hence the beginning with baptism, ending with death thing etc. There is of course the classic “Last page went missing”, or “Mark didn't think to put it in” or many others.

That Mark knew the resurrection is clear (8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34), that later manuscripts have other endings is a problem for fundies, not for me.

Firstly, that the appearances were unambiguously physical in nature. Secondly, that their type and strength required a complete rethink about how vital structures of Judaism needed to change.

Having a vision of someone who died is a pretty good bit of evidence they're still dead. The Early Church claimed Jesus was alive again.

The above two statements are false, historically.  Paul, and Jews like him, would have no problem whatsoever seeing a phantasm of Jesus while believing at the same time that Jesus' corpse was buried in some grave.

I wouldn't disagree with that for a minute. There's any number of OT/NT/other stories say exactly that.

The point being that the witnesses were crystal clear that they didn't see a ghost/vision/similar. The words used (anastasis, egeiro) are unambiguously physical in nature. You would expect the witnesses to talk in terms of visions, but they are very clear that's not what they saw.

Our cleaner at work died recently. If she wandered in during tomorrow's meeting, tidied the bins, did the washing up and generally cleared up the mess, while we poked her occasionally to make sure she wasn't a ghost, you would have anastasis. That event would completely shake everything everyone believed about death, religion, How Things Worked...

That's exactly the sort of thing the disciples said happened. Several times.