The women at the foot of Jesus’ cross are attested to by all the evangelists for their heroic witness and faithfulness. Most of his men friends, except the ”beloved disciple” (John?) deserted him, no doubt in fear that the Romans would not hesitate to do to them what they did to Jesus. Since we now know not to misuse the Gospels as newspaper accounts or historical biographies of the Lord, we are not disturbed that the evangelists do not agree on which women were there. In fact, we know that the eventual compilers at the beginning of the second century of what we call the New Testament were fully aware of these anomalies but deliberately put them into the final version out of fidelity to their sources.
Matthew in 27:56 names Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph and the mother of the sons of Zebedee. Mark in 15:40 names Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of the younger James and of Joses, and Salome. Luke in 23:49 merely says some women acquaintances from Galilee were there. John in 19:25 names Jesus’ mother Mary, her sister Mary the wife of Clopas (how could the blessed mother Mary have a sister by the same name, unless John meant “sister” in the wider familial sense we use to explain how Jesus, son of the virgin Mary, could have brothers and sisters, as Mark tells us in 3:31-33?) and Mary of Magdala. “Magdalene” means the woman from Magdala, a small village a short distance from Capernaum, the town where Jesus lived as an adult.
John’s Clopas fascinates me. He seems to appear in Luke’s Easter Sunday afternoon account of two disciples dejectedly walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus. They grieved at the recent execution of the Lord even though they admitted having heard accounts of his being raised from the dead that morning, accounts which they apparently did not believe. Luke tells us only his name, which suggests that his companion was his wife since wives’ names were customarily omitted in such narratives.
We know Luke’s purpose with this Emmaus story. The two disciples, Cleopas and companion, stand for disbelievers in Jesus’ resurrection. Luke is calling them to faith. Are Clopas and Cleopas the same man? The footnote for John 19:25 in the imprimatured New American Bible says, “It is not clear whether four women are meant, or three (i.e., Mary the wife of Cl[e]opas [c.f. Luke 24, 18] is in apposition with his mother’s sister) or two (his mother and his mother’s sister, i.e., Mary of Cl[e]opas and Mary of Magdala.”
In explicitly referring to the Emmaus story’s Luke 24:18, and twice using the brackets around the letter “e,” the scholars who translated the NAB and who wrote this explanatory footnote want us to see that Clopas and Cleopas could be the same man. Interestingly, he and his unnamed companion had their spirits revived while walking with Jesus, whom they did not recognize while on the road. He opened the Hebrew Scriptures for them there in a dramatic way to explain why the Scriptures called for the crucifixion. So eye-opening was this Bible lesson for them that they offered to buy him dinner, so much did they want it to continue. We know the rest. When they sat down at table, the stranger took bread, said the blessing, broke it and gave it to them. With that their eyes were really opened and they recognized the risen Jesus.
If that was the case, they had to have been with him at the Last Supper just a few nights before, when he had done these actions that now unmasked his identity. The text says they recognized him in the breaking of the bread. Since none of the apostles was named Clopas or Cleopas, it suggests that others than they were with Jesus in the upper room the night when he gave those at table and us the Eucharist. We may have been too exclusive in saying that the only ones with Jesus at that first Eucharist were his chosen Twelve.
It is consistent with the truth that Jesus did not hesitate to commission Mary Magdalene at the tomb to be the apostle to the apostles, taking them the life-changing news that Jesus had indeed risen. But then, God did not hesitate to arrange that his mother Mary in Bethlehem could be the first to say of Jesus, “This is my body.”
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