Because of our familiarity with the resurrection of Jesus and its central importance to our faith, as we read the resurrection accounts we tend to focus only on the happy ending and forget that the disciples’ understanding of the resurrection happened in stages and was not what they were expecting at all. Although the tomb…
Very early on Resurrection Sunday Mary Magdalene and another Mary, the mother of James and Joseph, were the first to discover the empty tomb, at which time they also experienced an angelic vision announcing Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. They were also the first to meet the resurrected Jesus, but not until after their vision…
We might imagine that the visions of angels announcing Jesus’ resurrection from the dead would be so dramatic that the women who had seen them could never come to doubt them. And yet, precisely because their experience was so singular and outside of the normal course of events, that is exactly what they did. For…
Three times John emphasizes Mary weeping outside the tomb of Jesus before He appeared to her, noting that both the angels and Jesus inquired why she was weeping before she came to recognize Him. Why such a question?
In the first written account of Jesus’ resurrection, Matthew highlights the initial discovery of the empty tomb by Mary Magdalene and another Mary, the mother of James and Joseph (abbreviated as Joses), and His subsequent resurrection appearance to them; see Mat 28:5-9. However, for his purposes in summarizing the account, he omitted details of the…
Early on Resurrection Sunday, “there yet being darkness”, Mary Magdalene and another Mary, the mother of James and Joseph, arrived at the tomb and discovered it empty. An angel in a vision told them Jesus had risen from the dead (Mat 28;1-8), but like a dream it quickly gave way to the only thing that…
In what has become one of the most enigmatic passages in all of Scripture, John writes that upon entering the tomb of Jesus, Peter “beheld the linen wrappings lying there, and the face-cloth, which had been on His head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself” (Joh 20:6-7). …
After being informed by Mary Magdalene on Resurrection Sunday that Jesus’ body was gone from the grave in which it had been placed, Peter raced off to the tomb, perhaps with a tiny glimmer of hope that what seemed impossible to him might somehow be true, but mostly to salvage what he could of his…
After arriving at the tomb very early on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph discovered that the tomb was empty where they had seen Joseph inter Jesus’ body Thursday evening. They found the stone rolled away from it when they arrived, not realizing it had been removed just moments…
On the first day of the week after Jesus’ crucifixion, following the sabbath rest for the first day of Unleavened Bread on Friday and then the seventh day Sabbath on Saturday (cf. Mat 28:1, where the Greek literally reads, “after the Sabbaths”), the tomb where Jesus was interred was discovered to be empty. A number…