Did the eleven believe the two disciples from Emmaus?

Luke himself shows that the room was not of one mind. The words “The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon” were the greeting that met the two from Emmaus (Luke 24:33–34). But a little later, when Jesus himself appeared, Luke says the company “were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit” (24:37). Jesus asked them “why do thoughts arise in your hearts?” (24:38), and even after he had shown them his hands and feet, “they yet believed not for joy” (24:41). Mark adds that when Jesus appeared to the eleven as they sat at meat, most likely that same evening, he “upbraided them with their unbelief” (Mark 16:14). So Luke’s report of what some were saying does not mean that everyone present firmly believed.

That leaves room for both accounts. Some, convinced by Peter’s report, said that the Lord was risen. Others, and perhaps the same people in their doubts, could not accept the story the two told of a stranger who walked with them, was known in the breaking of bread and vanished (Luke 24:31, 35). Gill reads it so: when the two told the whole affair, unbelief returned. Mark, telling it in a sentence, gives the general response, “neither believed they them”; Luke gives the joyful words of some. The doubt went on afterwards: Thomas, who was absent, refused to believe the other ten (John 20:24–25), and even in Galilee “some doubted” (Matthew 28:17).

Mark 16:12–14 belong to the longer ending of Mark (16:9–20), which the two oldest complete Greek manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, lack (see ‘Did the women tell the disciples what they had seen, or say nothing to anyone?’). The answer above does not depend on that question.