Although the guards witnessed God's power, the angel spoke only to the women. Often when people fell before a revelation as if they were dead, the revealer declared, "Do not be afraid" (compare v. 10; 17:7; Mk 16:6; Dan 10:11-12; for other parallels, see notes on Mt 17:6-7). But here the angel says Do not be afraid to the women, not to the guards who had fainted before him (28:4-5). Jesus appears directly to the women as well, but not to people who did not believe (vv. 8-10; compare Acts 10:41).

The men's initial dependence on the testimony of the women reflects the gospel's power to transcend gender restrictions (W. M. Thompson 1985:233). When the women met Jesus, they worshiped (Mt 28:9)—finally responding as the wise Gentiles had (2:2, 11), yet—again with an ironic touch—before the male disciples (28:17). Nevertheless, Jesus does not cast off the male disciples here; he identifies the disciples to whom he is sending them as his brothers (v. 10; 12:50; 25:40; Jn 20:17).

Because Paul explicitly reports only resurrection "appearances," some suppose that the empty tomb tradition was a myth. But while Paul's language can apply to visionary experiences, nearly all scholars concur that he is reporting earlier Palestinian tradition in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 (see, for example, Dibelius 1971:18-20), and Palestinian Jews did not speak of nonbodily resurrections. Nor would anyone have persecuted the early Christians for simply affirming that they had seen someone who had been dead; apart from the specifically bodily character of the resurrection—the sort that would leave an empty tomb—people would merely assume they claimed to see a ghost, a noncontroversial phenomenon (compare comment on 14:26; note on 1:20). Further, very little evidence suggests the plausibility of successive and mass, corporate visions (Schweizer 1971:48-49). Those inventing an empty-tomb tradition would hardly have included women as the first witnesses (see above), and "Jesus' resurrection could hardly have been proclaimed in Jerusalem if people knew of a tomb still containing Jesus' body" (Schweizer 1971:48).

Many who claimed they had seen Jesus alive from the dead (as in 1 Cor 15:1-8; virtually all the narrative accounts also suggest significant conversation with him, rather than fleeting appearances) were so sure that they devoted their lives to proclaiming what they had seen, and some died for it; clearly their testimony was not fabricated (E. Sanders 1993:280). Supposed pagan parallels to the resurrection stories are weak (see Aune 1981:48). To most ancient Mediterranean peoples the concept of corporeal resurrection was barely intelligible; to Jewish people it was a strictly end-time event. Yet once one grants the possibility of a bodily resurrection of Jesus within past history, the appearances follow naturally with or without parallels.