The First Witnesses to the Resurrection Were All Women — and the Gospel Writers Couldn't Figure Out How to Handle It

There is a thing biblical scholars call the criterion of embarrassment. It is one of the few historical tools that comes close to providing actual evidence for a specific event happening in the historical Jesus's life. The criterion is simple: if a story is preserved in the gospels that the gospel writers had every reason to leave out — because it embarrassed them, contradicted their argument, or made their case harder — that story is probably historical, because nobody would invent something that worked against their own purposes.

By this criterion, the strongest historical claim in all four canonical gospels is the claim that women were the first witnesses to the empty tomb.

What the Four Gospels Say

The four gospels disagree on a great many resurrection details. The number of women at the tomb varies. The number of angels varies. Whether Jesus is encountered at the tomb itself or only later in Galilee varies. What the women do with the news varies — Mark has them flee in terror and tell nobody, while John has Mary Magdalene running to fetch Peter and the beloved disciple.

But the four gospels agree on this: the first human beings to find the empty tomb were women.

Mark 16:1–8, the earliest of the four, names Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome as the three women who go to anoint the body at dawn on the first day of the week. They find the stone rolled away and an angel inside.

Matthew 28:1–10 names Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary." They encounter the angel and then encounter the risen Jesus on their way to tell the disciples.

Luke 24:1–11 names Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, "and the other women with them." They tell the apostles, and Luke records, almost as an aside, that the apostles dismissed the report as "an idle tale and did not believe them."

John 20:1–18 has Mary Magdalene going to the tomb alone. She finds it empty. She runs to get Peter and the beloved disciple. They come, see, leave. She remains, weeping. The risen Jesus appears to her alone — the first resurrection appearance in John's account — and instructs her to go and tell.

All four. Different details. Same central claim.

Why This Is Strange

In first-century Judea, women's legal testimony was systematically restricted. The historian Josephus, writing in the same generation as the gospel writers, summarizes the standard rabbinic position in Antiquities 4.8.15:

"But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex; neither let servants be admitted to give testimony on account of the ignobility of their soul."

This is not an idiosyncratic opinion. It reflects the mainline rabbinic legal tradition that would be codified in the Mishnah and Talmud over the following centuries. In a Jewish court, certain categories of testimony required two male witnesses. Capital cases especially. A woman could not, by herself, establish a legal fact in such a proceeding.

Roman law was somewhat more permissive but operated along similar lines for serious matters. Women's testimony was admitted in some civil contexts, but their credibility was rated below that of men, and they were generally barred from testifying in criminal trials and in cases involving the substantial loss of property.

This is the legal and cultural environment the gospel writers were writing into.

The resurrection is, in the gospel writers' own framing, the single most important historical claim in their religion. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15 that if the resurrection did not happen, the entire Christian faith collapses. The resurrection is the load-bearing claim. It is the claim Christianity stakes its existence on.

And in all four gospels, the only eyewitnesses to the empty tomb — the original physical evidence — are members of a category of person whose testimony does not legally count.

What the Gospel Writers Did

Imagine you are writing the gospel of Mark, around 70 CE, for a Roman or Roman-adjacent audience. Your goal is to convince readers of the resurrection. You have heard the story from multiple sources. You know the standard version: women went to the tomb, found it empty, encountered an angel, eventually told the male disciples, who later experienced their own resurrection appearances.

What do you do?

The cleanest narrative move, if you are inventing or shaping the story for maximum legal credibility, is to put men at the tomb first. Have Peter and John get there before the women. Have the centurion stationed at the tomb be a witness. Have a male disciple be the first to encounter the risen Jesus. Any of these moves would dramatically strengthen the legal force of the resurrection narrative in the eyes of a first-century audience.

The gospel writers do not make any of these moves.

Mark, the earliest gospel, leaves the women's discovery as the only resurrection scene in the entire book — his original ending in Mark 16:8 has the women fleeing the tomb in terror, telling no one. There are no male witnesses to the empty tomb in Mark at all.

Matthew has the male disciples encounter Jesus later in Galilee, but the empty tomb itself is still discovered by the women. Luke has Peter run to the tomb after the women's report, but Peter does not encounter the risen Christ there; he sees only the linen wrappings. John gives Peter and the beloved disciple a visit to the tomb after Mary's report, but again, neither of them encounters Jesus there — Mary, alone, is the first to see him.

The structure of all four narratives is the same: women discover the empty tomb first, women receive the angelic announcement first, and in the synoptic gospels and John, women are the first to see the risen Jesus. The male disciples are always notified by the women. They are always second.

This is a story the gospel writers had every reason to alter and chose not to.

The Apologetic Discomfort

The early Christian writers knew this was a problem. Celsus, the second-century pagan critic of Christianity, attacked the resurrection on exactly this basis. He pointed out — in a fragment preserved by Origen — that the only witnesses to the central event of Christianity were "a hysterical female" (his exact phrase, gynē paroistros) and possibly one or two others. He treated this as a fatal flaw.

Origen, writing his rebuttal Contra Celsum around 248 CE, did not deny Celsus's characterization. He could not. The texts said what they said. Instead, Origen made a longer theological argument about the providential significance of women being the chosen witnesses. The defensive posture itself tells you how seriously the criticism was felt.

The conflation of Mary Magdalene with the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7 — Gregory I's project six centuries later — can be read partly as a continuation of the same defensive process. If the primary female witness to the resurrection had a complicated sexual past from which she had been redeemed, her testimony was easier to frame in a way that did not directly challenge the broader cultural assumption that women's words were unreliable. The conflation simultaneously elevated and weakened her — she was important because she was redeemed, not because her testimony was inherently credible.

This is the broader pattern. The early church inherited a story in which women were the primary witnesses, could not change the story without losing its other content, and spent the next eighteen centuries finding ways to soften the implications.

What the Story Itself Tells You

If you take the criterion of embarrassment seriously — and most New Testament historians, including the secular ones, do — the conclusion is fairly stark. The gospel writers preserved this story because they could not credibly tell a resurrection story that left it out. Too many people in the early Christian community knew that the women had been there first. Mary Magdalene was named in all four gospels as the primary witness because the early Christian community remembered her as the primary witness. If Mark had written her out, the readers who knew the story from other sources would have noticed.

This is the strongest single piece of internal evidence we have for the historicity of the resurrection narratives. Not because it proves the resurrection happened — that is a question outside the historian's competence — but because it shows that the women's role in the discovery is not a later embellishment. It is in the earliest layer of the tradition. It is in the strata the gospel writers could not edit out without breaking the story.

And what the strata tell you is that the early Jesus movement, at its founding moment, had women at the center of it in a way the surrounding culture would not have invented for any rhetorical or apologetic purpose.

What Happened Next

By the second century, Christian writers were already beginning the long project of softening the centrality of the women. The Pastoral Epistles, written in the late first or early second century in Paul's name, restrict women's teaching roles in the churches. By the time of the Apostolic Fathers, the male apostles dominate the narrative of the early church. By the time of the great patristic theologians of the fourth century — Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Ambrose, Augustine — the gospel of Mary Magdalene and the other women-led texts of the early Christian movement had been edged out of the canon and into the apocrypha.

Mary Magdalene's actual role in the resurrection narrative was preserved in the canonical text because it could not be removed. But the broader story she belonged to — the network of women teachers, the female-led house churches of the first generation, the gospels written from a women-led perspective — those got buried under the categorical decisions of the second through fourth centuries about what counted as canonical Christian text.

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene survives in fragments. The Gospel of Thomas survives in a single Coptic translation found in 1945. The Gospel of Philip, which contains the famous passage about Mary Magdalene as Jesus's koinonos — companion, partner, or possibly wife — survives in the same Nag Hammadi collection. None of them made the canon. We have no reason to think they were less authentic than the gospels that did make it; we have substantial reason to think they were edited out for theological and political reasons, including their treatment of women.

Why This Matters for the Novel

Love Remembers in Silence is set in the Mary Magdalene the four canonical gospels still cannot fully obscure — the woman from a fishing town with a tax-record-keeping merchant family, who follows Jesus across the entire arc of his public ministry, who stays at the cross when the male disciples have fled, and who is named in all four gospels as the first witness to the resurrection.

The novel imagines the women's network around her. Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward. The other Mary, the mother of James. The unnamed Galilean women Luke mentions. The female disciples Jesus traveled with for three years and who are barely named anywhere. The community of women that Mary built before, during, and after the crucifixion — and that she carried forward into the diaspora after the events the canonical gospels end with.

The book is not a polemic against the canonical gospels. It is a literary imagining of what the canonical gospels could not quite say, and of the woman whose testimony was inadmissible by the legal standards of her own century, but whose name nevertheless became the first name spoken in the central scene of the largest religion the world has produced.

If you were inventing a religion, you would not have made her the first witness.

The four gospel writers did not make her the first witness. They preserved her, because that is who was there.