Did the eleven disciples believe the two men who claimed to see Jesus?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This contradiction sits partly on a textual fault line. Mark 16:12-13 belongs to the Longer Ending of Mark (16:9-20), which is absent from the two oldest and most weighty Greek codices, Sinaiticus (ℵ) and Vaticanus (B), and from the Sinaitic Old Syriac, several Old Latin and Armenian and Georgian witnesses, and which Eusebius and Jerome report was missing from nearly all the Greek copies known to them. Some manuscripts mark it with asterisks or obeli or supply alternative endings (the Shorter Ending; the Freer Logion in Codex W). The vocabulary and style of 16:9-20 diverge sharply from Mark's — it contains numerous words found nowhere else in the Gospel, and the transition at 16:9 awkwardly reintroduces Mary Magdalene as though she had not just appeared in 16:1-8. Bruce Metzger and the UBS committee classify the passage as a near-certain second-century addition. So the conflict is, at one level, a conflict between a late appendix to Mark and the earlier Lukan tradition.

That appendix appears to be summarizing Luke. Mark 16:12-13 — "he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country. And they went and told it unto the residue: neither believed they them" — is a compressed paraphrase of Luke's Emmaus narrative (Luke 24:13-35). James Kelhoffer has argued at length that the author of the Longer Ending knew and epitomized Luke and the other Gospels, drawing his resurrection appearances from them. But in compressing the Emmaus story, the Markan epitomizer reverses its outcome. Luke 24:33-34 is explicit and structural: when the two return to Jerusalem, they "found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them, saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon." In Luke the eleven are already proclaiming the resurrection — on the basis of a prior appearance to Simon Peter (the appearance Paul also attests, 1 Corinthians 15:5) — at the very moment the Emmaus pair walks in. The Markan Ending instead has the eleven disbelieve the two travelers' report.

The only available harmonization is to posit distinct reception stages: an initial disbelief (Mark) followed by belief once the Simon appearance was confirmed (Luke). The texts will not bear it. Luke does not narrate a disbelief-then-belief sequence around the Emmaus report at all; the belief is already in place, anchored in the Simon appearance, before the Emmaus disciples speak. There is no temporal slot in Luke for the Markan disbelief, because in Luke the cause of the eleven's belief (the appearance to Simon) precedes the Emmaus pair's arrival, whereas in Mark the disbelief follows the travelers' report. The two accounts assign opposite responses to the same moment.

The cleanest reading is text-critical and tradition-historical: the Longer Ending is a later attempt to give the abrupt Markan ending (which stops at 16:8 with the women's silence and fear) a fuller resurrection conclusion, stitched together from the other Gospels. In summarizing Luke's Emmaus episode the epitomizer either followed a divergent tradition or simply rendered the scene carelessly, and the result contradicts the source he was condensing. Fitzmyer and Marcus both treat the Longer Ending as secondary and note its imperfect fit with the material it draws upon.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction, and one that dissolves into a textual-critical problem — Mark 16:12-13 is not original to Mark, and where it summarizes Luke it gets the reception backwards.