This narrative of the empty tomb is probably not a Markan invention (against Kirby, “Case”). John 20:1–13, which seems to be literarily independent of the Synoptics, tells the same basic story, and in a way that is in some respects more primitive (e.g., one woman rather than three, no angelic interpreter; cf. Brown, Virginal Conception, 120–21). Moreover, Mark 16:7, which is probably redactional (cf. its close parallel to the editorial 14:28 and its plethora of Markan vocabulary; see the introduction to the COMMENT on 14:26–31), interrupts the story in which it occurs, since it begins with a disjunctive alla (“but”) and disrupts the natural progression from the women’s sight of the empty tomb and reception of the announcement of Jesus’ resurrection (16:5–6) to their reaction of fear and flight (16:8). Mark, then, has probably inserted this disruptive verse into an existent narrative. The list of names in 16:1 also bears witness to the pre-Markan provenance of the passage, since the redactional 15:40 appears to be an attempt to reconcile this list with the one in 15:47 (see the NOTE on “Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the Small and of Joses, and Salome” in 15:40, and Bode, First Easter, 21). Besides 16:7, other redactional features in the passage may include “very early in the morning” in 16:2, which makes this into a typically Markan double time expression and uses words that are redactional elsewhere in Mark, and the last sentence in 16:8 (“And they did not say anything to anyone, for they were afraid”), which employs a characteristically Markan double negative and gar (“for”) clause, repeats the theme of fear from 16:8a, and emphasizes the Markan secrecy motif (cf. Gnilka, 2.338–39).