If I take what God says at face value - I end up with things as I see them. This is particularly true considering the situation with the spices - which can never be resolved without a day between two Sabbaths.
This was also thoroughly addressed. Let me quote a section from the book where I discuss this (and you may notice in the footnotes that I included something just because of you).
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The other existing arguments really lose their punch beyond this point, lacking any real substance or evidence. The double Sabbath, for example, is really just a matter of semantics. Mark says that after the passing of the Sabbath, they bought spices, whereas Luke says the women prepared spices and ointments and then rested the Sabbath day.
[1]
Three things happened. Spices were bought and prepared, they rested on the Sabbath according to the commandment, and they came to the sepulcher early on the first day of the week, bringing with them the spices they “had prepared.”
[2] There were, at the very least, five women involved in this scenario. Between Mark and Luke, we know that Mary Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Chuza, who was Herod’s steward, Mary the mother of James the less and Joses, Salome, the mother of Zebedee’s children, and at least one other woman according to the plural, “other women,” in Luke, were all present at the sepulcher.
[3] And it’s highly probable that the same women who had been ministering to Jesus all along were also participating, being “many other women” according to Mark.
[4] In which case, any alleged facts that might be derived from the variance that exists between these two passages is inconclusive at best. Who’s to say which women bought what, when they bought it, who did the preparing, etc.? Did the women all stay at the same house on the Sabbath, or were they separated? Perhaps Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James and Joses, prepared some spices they procured from Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, while Salome and Joanna bought different, or additional spices either at the close of the Sabbath, or early on the first day of the week.
[5] We’re talking about two separate points of view from two separate authors, who likely got their information from different sources, relating to us the mundane happenings of five or more women over the course of three days, with no details to clarify the particulars.
Furthermore, one would also have to wonder, if the women rested Thursday and bought spices on Friday, why didn’t they just bring the spices on Friday before the Sabbath? Why wait until Sunday when the body was four days old, and “stinketh” as Lazarus’ body had, when they could have dealt with it when it was only a day and a half old?
[6]
The whole argument basically hangs on semantics and attempts to make something work that not only
doesn’t work, but that creates conflicts with other facts when you try, not the least of which being that the enumeration provided by this hypothesis has Christ rising on the fourth day rather than the third, which defies their own semantic logic.
[1]. Mark 16:1; Luke 23:56. The word in Mark is ἠγόρασαν, which is 3 pers. pl. aor. act. indic., meaning “they bought,” as opposed to the Authorized King James translation that renders it, “had bought,” which is a past perfect tense rather than aorist. Other versions, like the NIV, NASB and NRSV correctly render it “bought.”
[2]. Luke 23:56, 24:1.
[3]. Matt. 27:56; Mark 15:40-41, 16:1; Luke 8:3, 24:10.
[4]. Mark 15:41.
[5]. John 19:38-40. Nicodemus brought a hundred-pound mixture of myrrh and aloes to help prepare Jesus’ body with Joseph of Arimathea.
[6]. In my various discussions on this particular point, I
have heard it argued that the women didn’t come on Friday because they feared the guards. However, in Matt. 28:1-6 (specif. 28:4), the keepers were still there when the women arrived at the sepulcher. Their delay clearly had nothing to do with the soldiers, but with the Sabbath.
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