Note 136 — Chapter IV · DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

That Mark, under the words ἑτέρα μορφὴ understands a form miraculously altered, ought never to have been denied;136 but this is a point of minor importance, because it involves only the narrator’s own interpretation of the circumstance which had been already stated, but with a different explanation, by Luke: namely, that the two disciples did not know Jesus. That Mary Magdalene took Jesus for the gardener, was hardly, in the view of the Evangelist, the consequence of his having borrowed the gardener’s clothes: rather, the spirit of the narrative would require us to explain her not knowing him by supposing that her eyes were held (κρατεῖσθαι, Luke xxiv. 16), or that Jesus had assumed another form; while her taking him for the gardener might then be simply accounted for by the fact that she met the unknown man in the garden. Nor are we authorized by the evangelical narratives to suppose a disfiguration of Jesus by the sufferings of the cross, and a gradual healing of his wounds. The words Touch me not in John, if they were to be regarded as a prohibition of a touch as painful, would be in contradiction, not merely with Matthew, according to whom Jesus on the same morning—that of the resurrection—allowed the women to embrace his feet, but also with Luke, according to whom he on the same day invited the disciples to handle him; and we must then ask, which representation is correct? But there is nothing at all in the context to intimate that Jesus forbade Mary to touch him for fear of pain; he may have done so from various motives: concerning which, however, the obscurity of the passage has hitherto precluded any decision.137