AWOL: Andrew Wilson Online

1.      Who went to the tomb – Matthew says Mary Magdalene and ‘the other Mary’, Mark adds Salome, Luke indicates at least five women went, while John tells us Mary Magdalene went alone?

Answer: John 20:1 says that Mary went to the tomb, but notice that in John 20:2 she says to Peter and John that ‘we do not know where they have laid him’, implying that there were others. So, it is untrue to say that John’s Gospel records that Mary turned up ‘alone’. Just because Matthew, Mark or Luke do not exhaustively list the names of the women does not mean that they are contradicting each other. Writers often need to generalise instead of being specific, for brevity’s sake.

We have another example of this in relation to Peter and John’s trip to check out the empty grave. John’s Gospel tells us Peter and John went, but Luke (24:12) only mentions Peter. However, notice that later (Luke 24:24), the two on the road to Emmaus say that ‘certain of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said’.

2.      What happened when the women got there – Matthew says there was an earthquake and an angel rolled away the stone, whereas Mark, Luke and John say the stone was already rolled back?

Answer: Matthew 28 does not say when the stone is rolled back, nor that it happened while the women watch. This is again a case of putting words into Matthew’s mouth. Instead, verses 2 and 3 are probably describing what had happened before the women got there, to explain (a) why the guard (Mt 27:65) was not there, and (b) why the sealed stone (Mt 27:66) had been moved.

3.      Matthew says the angel sat on the stone, Mark says the women saw a young man in white, Luke says the women went inside and saw two men in white, John mentions no angels – what happened?

Answer: As mentioned, Matthew does not state where the angel was while speaking to the women. His ’sitting on the stone’ was in relation to the guards in verse 2, not in relation to the women who arrived later. The angels/men discrepancy is phenomenological language - ie. they were in reality angels, but the way they would appear to a startled bystander would probably be best described by the language of ‘young man, wearing white (or bright) clothing’. We commonly use this sort of everyday language to say the sun ‘rises’ (whereas, actually, the earth spins on its axis). As to the numbers of angels at the tomb, let us assume (for argument’s sake) that there were two. When they spoke to the women in Luke 24:5, did they convey their message in unison or talk over each other? If they both spoke, must a Gospel writer record every word? In real life, one messenger takes the role of spokesman, and reporters also often generalise their account by giving one person a position of prominence. A little simplification saves tonnes of explanation. A Gospel writer who mentions an angel is not contradicting others who mention two angels – the word ‘an’ is not a number.

4.      What happened after the women left the tomb? Matthew says they met Jesus, Mark says they told no one, Luke says they told the disciples who did not believe, and John says Mary told Peter and John and then returned to the tomb where she met Jesus on her second visit.

Answer: This is probably where the Gospel writers have taken the most editorial liberty. Matthew combines the women’s two visits to the tomb into one in which they meet the risen Lord (he ‘telescopes’ the two visits into one – a radical form of summarising). Mark’s Gospel reports that the women said nothing to anyone, but this is probably a reference to the evasive way that Mary told Peter and John that the tomb was empty (as recorded in John 20 – notice there is no mention of the most important part of the angels’ message: that Jesus had risen). Matthew, Mark and Luke all give extremely brief accounts of what happened that morning (Luke’s account is the longest but is still only 12 verses long). John gives us the fullest account, but (as he himself tells us in John 20:30 and 21:25), he too has had to leave out many details.

Thus, the secrets to unravelling these alleged discrepancies are (1) to read the accounts carefully (it is amazing how many times their incidental details confirm other Gospel accounts), (2) understand the nature of the writing process (writers focus upon a message and are forced to cut, summarise, generalise and simplify many interesting details), (3) use some common sense when reading – the Gospels were written by ordinary people for ordinary people; stop pretending to be Sherlock Holmes, and (4) understand that real life events are always multi-faceted and messy, particularly when different witnesses are telling us the same story from their own different angles.

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