Matthew 28.1-10 KWL - 1 After sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week,
- Mary the Magdalene (and the other Mary) comes
- to see the sepulcher.
- 2 Look, a great quake happens,
- for the Lord’s angel, which comes down from heaven,
- upon coming, rolls away the stone
- and is sitting down upon it.
- 3 Its appearance is bright as lightning,
- and its clothing white as snow.
- 4 The sepulcher guards shake in terror of it,
- and become like the dead.
- 5 In reply the angel told the women, “Don’t fear, you two:
- I knew you seek Jesus the crucified.
- 6 He’s not here. He’s risen, just as he said.
- Come see the place where he was laid.
- 7 Go quickly; tell Jesus’s students
- that he’s risen from the dead,
- and look, he goes before you into the Galilee.
- He will see you there. Mark what I tell you!”
- 8 The two, leaving the sepulcher quickly,
- with fear and great joy,
- run to report to Jesus’s students.
- 9 Look: Jesus meets them, saying, “Hello!”
- They come to him, grasp his feet, and worship him.
- 10 Then Jesus tells them, “Don’t fear.
- Go. Report to my brothers
- so they can leave for the Galilee,
- and there they will see me.”
Ordinarily in
But in the resurrection stories, they don’t sync up very well at all. Oh, they get the basics right. Jesus rises before dawn, the women get there first, there’s an angelic explanation of what just happened, and everybody’s freaked out because they weren’t expecting it—even though Jesus totally foretold it.
The stories are all different because the writers of the gospels aren’t quoting one another anymore. They’re quoting four different people who were there. Tradition claims Mark gets its data from Simon Peter… though if that’s so, why didn’t Peter tell Mark about running to the sepulcher to see for himself?
What we do know is Matthew and Luke chose to go with their independent sources rather than Mark—probably because they figured they had a better account. More details, perhaps. Mark