How many women came to the sepulchre?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

On the bare question "how many women came to the tomb," the apologetic harmonization carries real logical force. John 20:1 names only Mary Magdalene; Matthew 28:1 names Mary Magdalene "and the other Mary"; Mark 16:1 names Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome; Luke 24:10 names Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, "and other women that were with them." Gleason Archer (1982, pp. 347-349) and John Wenham (1992, pp. 79-94) argue that naming a subset is not denying the rest: none of the four Gospels states that ONLY the named women came, so the lists can be read as partial enumerations of a single larger party, each evangelist foregrounding the figures relevant to his narrative. As a matter of strict logic, "A and B came" does not contradict "A, B, and C came," and on this point the harmonization is sound — the differing numbers are not, by themselves, a formal contradiction.

The difficulty lies in the details the harmonization must absorb. John's Gospel narrates a solo Magdalene scene, yet in John 20:2 Mary reports to Peter and the Beloved Disciple, "they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not (ouk oidamen) where they have laid him." The first-person plural "we know not" is anomalous in an otherwise single-woman narrative, and most critical commentators — Raymond Brown (1970, pp. 980-1004) and Andrew Lincoln (2005, pp. 488-491) — read it as a fossil betraying an earlier tradition in which Mary was one of several women, which John has redacted down to a Mary-focused scene for his own dramatic and theological purposes (the intimate recognition scene of 20:11-18). If that reading is right, John has not merely declined to mention others; he has reshaped a multi-woman tradition into a solo one, and the "we" is the seam.

The accounts also diverge on why the women came, and these purposes are not all compatible. Mark 16:1 and Luke 24:1 have the women bring spices to anoint the body — yet John 19:39-40 has already reported that Joseph and Nicodemus anointed Jesus with a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes at burial, leaving no occasion for a later anointing. Matthew 28:1 gives a different purpose entirely: the women came simply "to see the sepulchre," with no spices, consistent with Matthew's having sealed and guarded tomb (27:62-66) that would make anointing impossible. John 20:1 supplies no stated reason at all. These differences in personnel, timing ("when it was yet dark" in John 20:1 versus "as it began to dawn" in Matthew 28:1 and "very early" in Luke 24:1), and purpose indicate that the evangelists drew on independent and partly divergent resurrection traditions rather than excerpting a single shared report. Dale Allison's detailed study (2005, pp. 233-269) catalogs these discrepancies and concludes that the empty-tomb narratives reflect a fluid oral tradition that each evangelist shaped, not a stenographic record.

Thus the numerical question harmonizes, but the underlying texts do not fully cohere. Calling all four accounts strictly compatible requires reading "and others were also present, for reasons compatible with my version" into each silence — and it has to set aside John's anomalous plural and the conflicting purposes of the visit.

Where the critical reading lands: the head-count harmonizes as partial lists, but the divergent purposes and John's redactional seam mark genuinely independent, not fully reconcilable, traditions.