Jesus appears to Mary the Magdalene, in 𝘑𝘰𝘩𝘯.

John 20.11-18.

When we last saw Mary the Magdalene—well, in my previous article anyway—she was weeping outside Jesus’s sepulcher because she didn’t know where his body was. Had no idea he was alive. Even though he’d told his students more than once he’d rise again, she probably assumed this was just a metaphor, or figured he’d rise on the last day; certainly not millennia before the last day. (Pretty sure nobody in bible times realized Jesus would wait millennia before his second coming!)

Anyway Peter and John had come to check it out; they found nothing but the linen strips his corpse had been wrapped in. It was reallyunlikely anybody would unwrap the corpse, so that had to make ’em wonder. John said he believed, Jn 20.8 which probably means he believed Jesus is alive; but in the other gospels none of the Eleven appears to have believed it until Jesus himself showed up. In any event they left, and left Mary behind to weep in confusion.

Then she bothered to look into the sepulcher, as Peter and John had… and saw angels.

John 20.11-13 KWL

11…and Mary stood outside the sepulcher, weeping.

So as she’s weeping, she bends down

to look into the sepulcher.

12Mary sees two angels in white,

sitting where Jesus’s corpse had been laid;

one at the head and one at the feet.

13These angels tell her, “Woman, why do you weep?”

She tells them, “Because they took my Master,

and I don’t know where they put him.”

I’ve been in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which has the slab they placed Jesus’s corpse on… hidden beneath another slab. Too many pilgrims kept kissing it, and knowing the way the pilgrims in my tour group behaved, likely they kept trying to chisel souvenirs off it. The erosion would’ve whittled it away entirely, so the churches in charge of the sepulcher decided to cover it with marble. Meh; the slab’s hidden in there somewhere. Anyway it’s a nice long slab. Plenty of room for two human-sized angels to sit at either end, and not look like they were sitting right next to one another.

In the other gospels, the angels tell the women, “He is risen; he is not here,” Mk 16.6 but in John, Mary doesn’t give them a chance to reply. She turns round because she notices someone else is there.

Mary the Magdalene discovers Jesus’s empty sepulcher.

John 20.1-11.

The gospels manage to give slightly different accounts of Jesus’s resurrection. Even the synoptic gospels, which are usually in sync, aren’t. Thus creating “bible difficulties” which many Christians kinda drive themselves bonkers trying to unjumble. I don’t, because as any cops can tell you: Sometimes eyewitnesses, who were there and totally saw everything, won’t all say the exact same thing. If they do, it means they got together to get their story straight—which now means their testimonies are compromised. Whereas what we have in the gospels are uncompromised testimonies. So don’t worry about ’em!

Anyway one of the facts they do get straight is Mary the Magdalene was there. In Mark and John, she was the only one there—and the first to see Jesus. In Matthew she’s with “the other Mary,” Mt 28.1 who’s probably Jesus’s aunt Mary, or “Mary of James,” Lk 24.10 meaning James’s mom; the wife of Zebedee. In Luke she’s with Joanna as well. Lk 24.10 But in Mark and John she appears to be alone. The long ending of Mark has her see Jesus right away; John has her see nothing yet.

John 20.1-2 KWL

1On the first day of the week,

in the dark part of the morning,

Mary the Magdalene comes to the sepulcher,

and sees the stone was taken away from the sepulcher.

2So Mary runs away.

She comes to Simon Peter,

and to the other student whom Jesus loves,

and tell them, “They took the Master out of the sepulcher!

We couldn’t figure out where they put him!”

The “we” in verse 2 reveals other people were with Mary at that time, and no doubt these women speculated where Jesus’s corpse might be. I translated οὐκ οἴδαμεν/uk ídamen, “we haven’t known” as “we couldn’t figure out,” because it’s better English.

Yeah, Matthew and Luke depict the women going to wherever the Eleven were staying, and telling them what the angel(s) had told them. John—written by John, who’s this “student whom Jesus loves” in verse 2—recalls it differently. He and Peter were together in some other place. Neither bothers to go inform the other nine what’s going on; they run to the sepulcher themselves… as if they can figure out what happened where the women couldn’t. Men, I tell ya.

The first time Jesus cured anyone.

John 4.46-54.

While Jesus and his students were staying in Cana (where they didn’t respect him as a prophet, so he didn’t have to deal with people seeking “Jesus the Prophet” all day), a certain royal showed up. Probably specifically to seek him out: Someone did respect Jesus the Prophet.

John 4.46 KWL

46 Jesus goes again to Cana of Galilee,

where he made the water wine.

A certain royal is there,

whose son in Capharnaum is sick.

John calls him a βασιλικὸς/vasilikós, “a royal.” Not a king, but someone in the royal family; debatably a servant in the royal household, but that’s far less likely. Could be someone who might actually become king himself someday, but if that’s so you’d think John woulda named names.

Both John Wycliffe and the Geneva Bible translated vasilikós as “little king.” But for some reason the King James translated it “nobleman,” and that concept has kinda stuck in translators’ heads ever since. You get “royal official” (Amplified, CSB, NASB, NET, NIV, NRSV), “government official” (ISV, GNB, and NLT), plain ’ol “official” (ESV), and of course “nobleman” (NKJV, MEV).

Regardless, he was a big deal—and word leaked to him Jesus might be the sort of person who could do miracles. And when you’re desperate, you’ll jump all over that sort of rumor. So this royal saddled up, rode 30 kilometers across the province, and called upon some obscure Nazarene rabbi.

John 4.47 KWL

Once this royal heard

Jesus comes from Judea to the Galilee,

he goes to Jesus

and asks whether Jesus might come down

and cure his son,

for he’s about to die.

What do people think Jesus is?

Mark 8.27-30, Matthew 16.13-20, Luke 9.18-21.

Provincial leaders in the Roman Empire liked to suck up to their emperors, which is why there were cities named Καισάρεια/Kesáreia, “Cæsarea,” dotting the empire. Ancient Israel had two. The usual city referred to in the New Testament as Cæsarea is also called Cæsarea Maritima; it’s on the Mediterranean coast of northern Israel. The other is in Philip Herod’s province, so it got called Cæsarea Philippi. Today it’s called Banias.

Banias is actually an Arabic distortion of its original name, Πανειάς/Paneiás. It was named for the pagan god Pan. Likely Pan was originally Baal-Gad, one of the many Baals in the middle east, and when Alexander and the Greeks attached Greek names to everything, they referred to this Baal as Pan. The Greeks depicted Pan as a goat-man with a flute, but Pan comes from πάντως/pántos, “everything”: It’s a nature god, and therefore the god of everything. It’s considered a minor god because it didn’t have a large following, but Pan-worshipers thought their god was a big, big deal. They built a big ol’ shrine to Pan there, and it’s still there for tourists to gawk at.

Overt paganism tends to creep out certain religious Christians, who stay far away from any “wicked” city which practices such things. Of course Jesus knows all about the covert paganism going on in our supposedly “righteous” cities, which is why Caesarea didn’t bug him any more than Kfar Nahum… or Jerusalem. People are messed up no matter where you go, and our “righteous” avoidance of the appearance of evil doesn’t make us any more holy, or score us more karma points with God, like we imagine it does. On the contrary: We can’t minister to the lost when we’re “too good for them,” and we’re not all that good when we refuse to obey God and love our neighbors, pagan or not. Jesus doesn’t discriminate in that way, so of course he took his students to such cities.

In a city named for Caesar, you’d naturally see monuments dedicated to Caesar-worship. Herod 1 had deliberately built a temple there for the purpose. (Yeah, he also rebuilt the LORD’s temple in Jerusalem, but don’t think for a minute he did it for anything other than political reasons.) Technically they weren’t worshiping him, but his genius (pronounced 'ɡɛ.ni.us, not as our English word 'dʒin.jəs), his guardian spirit. Our word genie comes from the Latin word… and the Greek word for it would be δαίμων/démon.

But over time, Romans stopped worshiping the guardian spirit and simply worshiped the Caesars directly. After each Caesar died, the Roman senate voted to declare them to be gods. They believed whenever you worshiped ancestors as gods, they actually became gods; the Olympians would actually have to include ’em in their pantheon. Some pagan Romans didn’t even wait for ’em to die, but worshiped the living emperor as a god. Same as the ancient Egyptians worshiped their pharaohs.

So that’s what people said the Caesars were… so naturally Jesus wanted to talk about what people said he was.

Mark 8.27 KWL Jesus and his students went into the villages of Caesarea in Philip Herod’s province. On the road he was questioning his students, telling them, “What do people say I am?”

Matthew 16.13 KWL Jesus went into the Caesarea area in Philip Herod’s province, and questioned his students, saying, “What do people say about the Son of Man?”

Luke 9.18 KWL It happened while Jesus was praying alone, though with the students around him, he asked them, saying, “What do the crowds say I am?”

As you know, plenty of pagans nowadays admit Jesus is a wise man and great moral teacher… and little more. Muslims, and some Jews, say he’s a prophet… and again, little more. People of other religions, plus nontheists and skeptics, say much the same as the pagans, although they’re more honest in their disregard: Wise or not, they have no interest at all in following him.

So what do we Christians think he is?

St. Thomas, and healthy skepticism.

21 December is the feast day of the apostle Thomas. His name Tomás is produced by taking the Aramaic word taóm/“twin” and adding the Greek noun-suffix -as to it. John pointed out he was also called Dídymos/“twice,” so likely he was an identical twin. There’s an old tradition he looked just like Jesus, and that’s why they called him a twin, but since Jesus was likely old enough to be his dad, I think they’d have nicknamed him “junior” instead of “twin.” No doubt Thomas had a twin brother, though we know nothing about him.

What we do know is Thomas was one of the Twelve, namely the one who wouldn’t believe Jesus was alive till he saw him for himself.

John 20.24-25 KWL

24 Thomas, one of the Twelve, called Twin, wasn’t with the others when Jesus came.

25 The other students told Thomas, “We saw the Master!”

He told them, “Unless I see the nail-marks on his hands and put my finger on the nail-scars

and put my hand on the scar on his side, I can’t believe it.”

And we give him crap for this.

We call him “Doubting Thomas.” Forgetting none of the Twelve believed the women whom Jesus first appeared to. Lk 24.11 Simon Peter did bother to check out the sepulcher for himself, and John informs us he followed behind, but all of them thought the women were nuts. And when Jesus did show up to talk to them, at first they thought he was a ghost. Lk 24.37

Thomas just happened to be the only guy not in the room when Jesus first appeared, and like the others, couldn’t believe until he saw Jesus with his own eyes.

So Jesus accommodated him.

John 20.26-29 KWL

26 Eight days later the students, Thomas included, were indoors again.

Though the door was closed, Jesus came, stood in the middle of them, and said, “Peace to you.”

27 Then he told Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands.

Put your hand on my side. Don‘t be an unbeliever. Believe!“

28 In reply, Thomas said, “My Master and my God!”

29 Jesus told him, “This you believe because you saw me?

How awesome for those who don‘t see me, yet believe.”

Jesus wants us to trust him wholeheartedly. Sometimes that’s hard for us to do. I get that. So does he. But he’s willing to work with us if we’re willing to make the effort, and not just close our minds to what he’s trying to teach us. Thomas, y’notice, didn’t abandon his fellow students just because they were sure Jesus was alive, and Thomas wasn’t so sure. Eight days later, there he was, the only doubter in a roomful of believers, holding out because you don’t just psyche yourself into believing things; that’s how people get led astray. You take your doubts to God—who might be the one making you doubt! You investigate. You look for evidence. You patiently wait. Thomas did all that, and his wait was rewarded.

So don’t give Thomas crap. Commend his patience. Jesus gave him the truth he sought. He’ll do that for you too, y’know.