John 20:15 is a verse in the Gospel of John

Gospel of John

The Gospel According to John , commonly referred to as the Gospel of John or simply John, and often referred to in New Testament scholarship as the Fourth Gospel, is an account of the public ministry of Jesus...

. It occurs when Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene was one of Jesus' most celebrated disciples, and the most important woman disciple in the movement of Jesus. Jesus cleansed her of "seven demons", conventionally interpreted as referring to complex illnesses...

 has returned to Jesus

Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

' tomb and found it empty. She does not know that Jesus has returned and they begin conversing without her realizing his identity.

In the King James Version of the Bible the text reads:

Jesus saith unto her, Woman,

why weepest thou? whom seekest

thou? She, supposing him to be

the gardener, saith unto him,

Sir, if thou have borne him hence,

tell me where thou hast laid him,

and I will take him away.

The World English Bible

World English Bible

The World English Bible is a public domain translation of the Bible that is currently in draft form. Work on the World English Bible began in 1997 and was known as the American Standard Version 1997...

 translates the passage as:

Jesus said to her, "Woman, why

are you weeping? Who are you

looking for?" She, supposing him

to be the gardener, said to him,

"Sir, if you have carried him

away, tell me where you have laid

him, and I will take him away."

According to John, "Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?" is the first thing Jesus says upon his resurrection. The first part "Why are you crying?" repeats the statement made by the angels in John 20:13

John 20:13

John 20:13 is the thirteenth verse of the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of John in the Bible. This verse occurs after Mary Magdalene has found Jesus' tomb empty, except for two angels...

. Jesus adds "Who is it you are looking for?" This question, which Jesus has asked others previously in the Gospel, is often read as a wider question of what people are seeking in their lives. That Jesus quickly understands why Mary is weeping is also said to show his greater understanding of humanity and human feelings than the angels.

Mary fails, for an unexplained reason, to recognize Jesus, but it is speculated that her sorrow is too overwhelming. John Calvin

John Calvin

John Calvin was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530...

 and others read this as a metaphor: so focused is she on the worldly concern of who took Jesus' body, she is temporarily blind to the greater event behind its "disappearance". It is also possible she could not see clearly because she was weeping. She mistakes him for the gardener, generally believed to be one of the workers of Joseph of Arimathea

Joseph of Arimathea

Joseph of Arimathea was, according to the Gospels, the man who donated his own prepared tomb for the burial of Jesus after Jesus' Crucifixion. He is mentioned in all four Gospels.-Gospel references:...

. According to Calvin, how she addressed him in the original texts, translated as "sir", was the typical form of address for lower class labourers in the period.

This is the only place in the Bible where the word gardener, kepourous, is mentioned. The word does occur regularly in secular works from this period. It is perhaps linked with John 19:41, which mentions that Jesus was buried in a garden. John is the only of the Gospels to mention this.

The mention of the gardener is also perhaps linked to a Jewish story from the period which attempted to discredit the resurrection. One version of this story supposes that a gardener named Judas was worried that the crowds coming to see Jesus would trample his cabbages and he thus moved Jesus' body to another tomb. When Mary and others found the tomb empty, the resurrection myth was born. Von Campenhausen thus argues that the author of John added the mention of the gardener to try and counter this story. Schnackenberg thinks it is also possible that the Jewish story originated from this mention of a gardener.

Hoskyns

Edwyn Hoskyns

Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, 12th Baronet was a Bishop in the Church of England.-Early life:Edwyn Hoskyns was fourth son of Canon Sir John Leigh Hoskyns, 9th Baronet, and father of Sir Edwyn Clement Hoskyns, 13th Baronet...

 and Lightfoot

Joseph Barber Lightfoot

Joseph Barber Lightfoot was an English theologian and Bishop of Durham, usually known as J.B. Lightfoot....

 both support the idea that Jesus as a gardener is a metaphor relating to the Garden of Eden

Garden of Eden

The Garden of Eden is in the Bible's Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, lived after they were created by God. Literally, the Bible speaks about a garden in Eden...

.

That Mary easily mistakes Jesus for a common labourer adds detail to why she has failed to recognize him. It seems to contradict the notion that Jesus' body was horribly mangled by the crucifixion. It also seems at odds with Kastner's view that Jesus was nude at the time of his resurrection as gardeners at the time would normally have been clothed.

Mary does not tell the supposed gardener of whom she is speaking, also seen as evidence of her single-mindedness. Jesus seems to encourage this confusion by addressing her as woman and asking questions to which he already knows the answer. Why he does this is still something of a mystery, though some ideas have been proposed. The suspense of Mary interacting with Jesus while not knowing his true identity does add considerable extra drama to the scene. The trope of a returning hero being unrecognized or in disguise dates at least to Homer

Homer

In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

's The Odyssey and was common in Greco-Roman literature for many centuries. Dibelius

Martin Dibelius

Martin Dibelius was a German theologian and a professor for the New Testament at the University of Heidelberg.Martin Dibelius was born in Dresden, Germany in 1883...

 links it to the many stories of the Greco-Roman gods walking among men and then suddenly revealing their divine nature. Feuillet sees echoes of the Song of Sol in this passage.

The question she asks him implies that she hopes to recover Jesus' body and rebury it. Bruce suggests that this willingness to rebury Jesus shows that Mary must have been a woman of some wealth as such a reburial would have been a costly affair. Bruce also believes this initiative shows Mary's enterprising character. According to Leonard, St. Theresa read the same text as an illustration of Mary's audaciousness.