John 20:14

Rembrandt's perception of the moment when Mary turns her head and sees the newly risen Jesus

John 20:14 is the fourteenth verse of the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of John in the Bible. In this verse, Mary Magdalene has just finished speaking to the angels she found in Jesus's empty tomb. She then turns and sees the resurrected Jesus, but fails to recognize him. In the Gospel of John, this is the first moment anyone sees Jesus after his resurrection.

The English Standard Version translates the passage as:

Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

It is significant that it is Mary Magdalene who is the first to see the risen Jesus, but it raises the question of why she does not recognise him; in the next verse she mistakes him for the gardener. One interpretation is that the resurrected Jesus did not have the same physical form as before, but rather a wholly new appearance. John Calvin argued that the fault is with Mary, seeing her blindness in the face of Jesus as a metaphor for those who fail to see Jesus despite his divine nature.^[1] This episode does not appear in the other Gospels.

That the angels of the previous two verses are from this point wholly forgotten is to Schnackenberg evidence that the angels were a later addition to the text and that the original narrative did not include them.^[2]

References

1. John Calvin's commentary on John 20:10-15
2. Schnackenberg, Rudolf . The Gospel According to St. John: Volume III. Crossroad, 1990.

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