ix. 10); and in consistency with this want of comprehension, they,

after the death of Jesus, exhibit no trace of a recollection that his resurrection had been foretold to them, no spark of hope that this prediction would be fulfilled. When the friends of Jesus had taken down his body from the cross, and laid it in the grave, they undertook (John xix. 40)—or the women reserved to themselves (Mark xvi. 1; Luke xxiii. 56)—the task of embalming him, which is only performed in the case of those who are regarded as the prey of corruption; when, on the morning which, according to the mode of reckoning in the New Testament, opened the day which had been predetermined as that of the resurrection, the women went to the grave, they were so far from thinking of a predicted resurrection, that they were anxious about the probable difficulty of rolling away the stone from the grave (Mark xvi. 3); when Mary Magdalene, and afterwards Peter, found the grave empty, their first thought, had the resurrection been predicted, must have been, that it had now actually taken place: instead of this, the former conjectures that the body may have been stolen (John xx. 2), while Peter merely wonders, without coming to any definite conjecture (Luke xxiv. 12); when the women told the disciples of the angelic apparition which they had witnessed, and discharged the commission given them by the angel, the disciples partly regarded their words as idle tales, λῆρος (Luke