Who found the empty tomb?

Four Gospels, four lists

Every Gospel agrees on who got there first: women, at first light on Sunday, the morning after the Sabbath. They don’t agree on how many. Put the lists side by side and the pattern shows.

• Mark: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome (Mark 16:1).
• Matthew: Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” (Matthew 28:1).
• Luke: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and “the other women with them” (Luke 24:10).
• John: Mary Magdalene, coming “while it was still dark” (John 20:1).

Only one name is in all four. Matthew’s “other Mary” is most likely the mother of James: at the cross he names “Mary the mother of James and Joses” (Matthew 27:56). Salome is Mark’s alone. Where Mark lists her at the cross, Matthew has “the mother of the sons of Zebedee,” so many readers think she was the mother of James and John. Joanna is Luke’s alone; he introduced her earlier as the wife of Chuzas, the steward of Herod Antipas’s household (Luke 8:3). Even John’s lone Mary speaks in the plural when she runs back: “we don’t know where they have laid him” (John 20:2).

Why they went

Mark gives the plainest reason.

When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, that they might come and anoint him.

They had watched the burial on Friday (Mark 15:47), done in a hurry before sunset. Spices and scented oil were a last kindness to the body, not an embalming. In Luke the women prepare them on Friday evening and rest on the Sabbath “according to the commandment” (Luke 23:56). Matthew says only that they came “to see the tomb” (Matthew 28:1): in his telling it has been sealed and guarded, so no one could get in to anoint anything. John gives no reason at all. In his Gospel, Nicodemus has already wrapped the body with about a hundred Roman pounds of myrrh and aloes (John 19:39–40). Mary simply comes.

What each one found

The stone is moved in every Gospel. After that the details part ways.

• Mark: a young man in a white robe, sitting on the right side. The women flee and say nothing, “for they were afraid,” and there the oldest manuscripts end (16:5–8).
• Matthew: an earthquake, and an angel who rolls the stone away and sits on it while the guards shake. The women run off “with fear and great joy,” and Jesus meets them on the road (28:2–9).
• Luke: no body, and two men in dazzling clothing. The apostles call the women’s report nonsense (24:3–11).
• John: at first only the open tomb. Later, weeping outside, Mary sees two angels in white, “one at the head and one at the feet,” and then Jesus himself (20:11–16).

The men came second

Peter runs to the tomb in Luke and John, with the beloved disciple outrunning him in John, but only after the women raised the alarm. Paul’s list of witnesses, the oldest one written down, names Cephas, the twelve and others, and no women at all (1 Corinthians 15:5–8). In that world a woman’s word counted for little; Josephus says women should not testify in court at all (Antiquities 4.219). The Gospels give them first place anyway, a choice historians weigh in the evidence for the resurrection.

Eastern churches never forgot them. They call these women the myrrh-bearers and keep their Sunday two weeks after Easter, with a list that grows to include Martha, Mary of Bethany and Susanna. In the south of France, a town in the Camargue claims that Mary Salome and Mary of Clopas landed there by boat; since 1838 it has been called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. The first of them has her own page: Mary Magdalene.