Did the women tell the disciples what they had seen, or say nothing to anyone?

Mark describes how the women left the tomb: they fled, trembling and astonished, and on the way they spoke to no one. He does not say that they never told the disciples, which would make nonsense of the angel’s command a moment before, “go your way, tell his disciples and Peter” (Mark 16:7). Matthew also mentions their fear (“with fear and great joy”) and says they ran to the disciples, which fits their stopping to speak to no one on the way.

Mark uses the same kind of expression elsewhere. When Jesus healed a leper he told him, “See thou say nothing to any man: but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest” (Mark 1:44). Saying nothing to anyone plainly did not mean saying nothing to the priest he was sent to. In the same way the women, too frightened to speak to anyone they met, went straight to the disciples they had been sent to, and told them (Matthew 28:8; Luke 24:9–10). Gill reads the verse this way: they said nothing to anyone ‘they met with by the way, till they came to the disciples’.

A silence that soon ended

Others take Mark to mean that the women were at first too afraid to speak at all, and found their voices later that morning. Luke 24:9–11, and the longer ending of Mark (16:10), where Mary Magdalene “went and told them”, show that the silence did not last.

In the two oldest complete Greek manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, Mark’s Gospel ends at 16:8; the longer ending of Mark (16:9–20) is found in most later manuscripts. Christian scholars differ over whether Mark meant to end at verse 8, whether his original ending was lost, or whether verses 9–20 are original. The answer above does not depend on that question.