Lucas 24:9-11

And returned from the sepulchre, &c.— These words may be rendered, And returning back from the sepulchre, they told all these things to the eleven, and to all the rest; Lucas 24:9. Now they who related these things to the apostles, were Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and the rest with them, that is to say, of their company. As the account of the Galilean women begins in the foregoing chapter, and is carried on without any interruption to the 9th verse of the present, so that the several verbs occurring in this and the preceding verses are all governed by the same nominative case, namely the women, (ch. Lucas 23:55.) it is evident that the words all these things must be taken to extend to all the particulars mentioned in that account, and cannot be confined to the transactions of the sepulchre only; and the same observation holds equally with the expression these things, Lucas 24:9.

The utmost therefore that can be inferred from St. Luke's naming Mary Magdalene and the other Mary is, that they were concerned in some or other of these transactions, and joined in relating some of these things to the apostles; which is true: for they sat over-against the sepulchre, when Joseph laid in it the body of the Lord; they also brought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him; and they were the first who came to the sepulchre that morning, and brought the first account of the body's being missing; and though by comparing the accounts given by the other evangelists with this of St. Luke, it appears that neither of these women went with Joanna and her company to the sepulchre; yet as they were Galilean women, and bore a part, and a principal part too, in what the women of Galilee were then chiefly employed about, namely, the care of embalming the body of Jesus, there is certainly no impropriety in St. Luke's naming them with Joanna and the rest, as he does in the end of the general collective account which he gives of what was reported and done by the Galilean women: neither does his naming them appropriate to them any particular part of that general account, any more than his not naming them would have excluded them from their share in those transactions, and the report then made to the apostles. In this case they would have been included in the general term of the

Galilean women; as by being named they are distinguished and marked as the most eminent persons and leaders of that company who followed Jesus out of Galilee. See the note on Juan 20:4; Juan 20:31.