(Wikimedia CC public domain image)
His disciples hadn’t always grasped the idea that Jesus would rise from the dead, but the prophecy was well enough known to concern the local authorities.
And, in fact, theft of the body will become one of the common skeptical explanations — already in antiquity — for the claim that Christ was resurrected.
And what a brilliant plot that would have been! “Hey!” say the apostles to one another. “Let’s steal the body, conceal it, claim that he was resurrected, and get ourselves put to death in the most gruesome possible ways!”
A very clever career plan.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
Compare Matthew 26:32; 28:10; Mark 14:28; Luke 23:56; John 20:17-18
1.
Finally, we’ve arrived at the pay-off –truly glad tidings of great joy.
This story ends very, very well.
2.
The first Christian witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus were women — which, to my mind, is an argument for the truth of the accounts.
In ancient Judaism, as elsewhere, the frankly sexist attitudes of the day granted women second-class status. Their opinions and testimony were not highly valued, where, indeed, they were accepted at all. (Consider the attitude of the apostles themselves to the first reports from the women of the empty tomb and the risen Lord, as recorded at Luke 24:11: “Their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.”)
Had the author of Luke simply been making this up out of thin air, he wouldn’t have chosen women as the first witnesses to this absolutely pivotal event.
“Christ’s Appearance to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection”
Alexander Ivanov (1835)
Wikimedia CC public domain; click to enlarge
Nope. This painting suggests a coolness and a distance that, according to the actual Greek text, weren’t there between Mary Magdalene and the resurrected Jesus.
Compare Matthew 26:32; 28:7-8; Mark 14:28; 16:7, 9-11; Luke 24:10-11
Notice the statement in the Matthew passage that the women, having met the resurrected Christ, “held him by the feet.” This, by itself, is enough to suggest a problem in a common reading of the “Touch me not” passage in John.
I wrote a column several years ago that indicated why a lot of what I’ve heard said about that passage is wrong: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765566003/The-gospel-truly-brings-joyful-news.html?pg=all
The proper reading of it is much, much more dramatic and real, in my view.
Posted from En Gev, Israel
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