The Time
According to John the visit was on the first day of the week (Sunday, the day after Shabbat, the end of the Jewish week), while it was still dark. According to Mark and Luke it was light. Alfred Loisy believed that the original form of John here was similar to that recounted in the Codex Sinaiticus, and was intended to point to the Virgin Mary as the sole visitor, while later copyists substituted Mary Magdalene so that the gospel according to John matched accounts given in the other gospels more closely. An attempt at resolving the discrepancy in order to preserve the idea of infallibility describes Mary as making two different trips to the tomb, the first being in the dark on her own and the second at dawn with a group of women, including the other Mary.
Mark and Luke explain that the women were intending to continue the Jewish burial rituals. Matthew merely says that they came just to look at the tomb. John makes no mention of ritual and the apocryphal, heterodox Gospel of Peter claims that she came to mourn. Rabbi Bar Kappara was of the opinion (recorded in the Midrash Rabbah) that the third day was often the prime point for mourning in those days.
Read more about this topic: Empty Tomb
Famous quotes containing the word time:
“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Life is so short that it is not wise to take roundabout ways, nor can we spend much time in waiting.... We have not got half-way to dawn yet.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)