Note 86 — Chapter IV · DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

But with the above difficulties of the harmonistic method of incorporation as to the substance, there is associated a difficulty as to form, in the question, how comes it, under the presuppositions of this mode of viewing the gospels, that from the entire series of occurrences, each narrator has selected a separate portion for himself,—that of the many visits and appearances not one Evangelist relates all, and scarcely one the same as his neighbour, but for the most part each has chosen only one for representation, and each again a different one? The most plausible answer to this question has been given by Griesbach in a special treatise on this subject.86 He supposes that each Evangelist recounts the resurrection of Jesus in the manner in which it first, became known to him: John received the first information from Mary Magdalene, and hence he narrates only what he learned from her; to Matthew (for without doubt the disciples, as strangers visiting the feast, resided in different quarters of the city), the first news was communicated by those women to whom Jesus himself appeared on their way from the grave, and hence he relates only what these had experienced. But here this explanation already founders on the facts, that in Matthew, of the women who see Jesus on their way homeward, Mary Magdalene is one; and that in John, Mary Magdalene, after her second visit to the grave, in which Jesus appeared to her, no longer went to John and Peter alone, but to the disciples in general, and communicated to them the appearance she had seen and the commission she had received: so that Matthew in any case must also have known of the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene.87 Further, when, according to this hypothesis, Mark narrates the history of the resurrection as he had learned it in the house of his mother who lived in Jerusalem (Acts xii. 12); Luke, as he had received it from Joanna, whom he alone mentions: we cannot but wonder at the tenacity with which, according to this, each must have clung to the narrative which he had happened first to receive, since the resurrection of Jesus must have been the subject of all others on which there was the most lively interchange of narratives among his adherents, so that the ideas concerning the first tidings of the event must have found their level. To remove these difficulties, Griesbach has further supposed, that the disciples had it in their intention to compare the discordant accounts of the women and reduce them to order; when, however, the resuscitated Jesus himself appeared in the midst of them, they neglected this, because they now no longer founded their faith on the assertions of the women, but on the appearances which they had themselves witnessed: but the more the information of the women fell into the background, the less conceivable is it, how in the sequel each could so obstinately cling to what this or that woman had chanced first to communicate to him.