Talk:Resurrection of Jesus—Wenham's harmony of the four accounts of the first Easter Sunday

John 20:1 "cometh Mary Magdalene ... unto the sepulchre".

The Authorised Version (KJV) says that Mary "cometh" to the tomb. That seems, to a modern reader, to imply that she has just arrived there. In that case there seems to be a contradiction with Matthew and Mark, who indicate that the women arrived at daybreak, when it would probably be no longer dark.

The NIV translates the verb in John 20:1 as "went". In that case, it was dark while Mary was on her way to the tomb, but light when she arrived there.

Would it be better to read the verb as "is coming"? That would not mean that Mary had arrived at the tomb yet, so that, as with the NIV translation, there would not be the inconsistency with Matthew and Mark.

There are two items of evidence suggesting that "is coming" is a reasonable translation at John 20:1. They are:-

1. The Greek word is "erchetai". It can be described as Strong's number 2064 and morphology v-pni-3s. Exactly the same Greek word, occurring at John 16:25, is translated as "is coming" in many versions, for example NIV, ESV, NKJV, NASB, Weymouth.
2. That word "erchetai" occurs 38 times in John's Gospel. In the NASB it is translated "is coming" in 11 of those, according to the Sainte Bible website, which mentions Englishman's Concordance. So "is coming" is a not infrequent translation of "erchetai" in the NASB.

This remark is relegated to the Discussion webpage because I do not know Greek.

Scartho77 (talk) 22:21, 27 March 2024 (UTC)