To whom did the risen Jesus appear first?

Only Mark uses the word “first”, and he names Mary Magdalene (Mark 16:9). John, writing independently, gives the same order. The first meeting with the risen Jesus that he tells is with Mary, alone at the tomb, after Peter and John had gone home (John 20:11–17). On the harmony followed in these answers, Jesus then met the other women as they went with their news (Matthew 28:9).

Neither Luke nor Paul claims that Peter was first. Luke tells of no meeting with the women, but he does not deny one; he reports that by the evening the eleven were saying that the Lord “hath appeared to Simon” (Luke 24:34), so Peter had seen him at some time that day. Gill suggests that Peter was the first of the men to see him. Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 15:5–8 is a list of witnesses, part of the message he had received and handed on, and many of them were still alive for the Corinthians to ask (15:6). It names men whose testimony was public: Cephas, the twelve, more than five hundred brethren, James, all the apostles, and Paul himself. His “then” sets those he lists in order; it does not say that nobody saw Jesus before Cephas. Paul may have left the women out because a woman’s testimony carried little weight in the courts of the day; Josephus records the rule that women were not to be admitted as witnesses. Barnes too notes that Paul does not mention the woman to whom the Saviour first appeared.

Put together, the order is: Mary Magdalene; the other women; Peter and the two on the road to Emmaus, in an order the texts do not fix; and then the gathering in Jerusalem that evening.

One meeting with the women

Some harmonists think Matthew 28:9–10 and John 20:14–17 describe the same meeting, told briefly by Matthew as an appearance to the women. On that view Mary was among the women whom Jesus met first, and the answer is the same: the first to see the risen Lord were women, and Mary Magdalene among them.

Mark 16:9 belongs to the longer ending of Mark (16:9–20), which the two oldest complete Greek manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, lack (see ‘Did the women tell the disciples what they had seen, or say nothing to anyone?’). The answer does not depend on it, since John gives the same order. When exactly Jesus appeared to Peter the texts do not say.