I saw the end of Jesus of Nazareth, the six hour miniseries version. It was a beautiful description of what might have happened. Mary is telling the disciples and John and Thomas immediately discount it. They seek support from the other Apostles and they come to Peter. He has a lost look on his face and he says that he believes her, because he said it. Thomas points out that Peter denied Jesus and Peter enraged points out that while he betrayed Jesus, they all did, that he (Peter) was a coward and abandoned Jesus. It ends with him saying he believes, it had to be, it was to be. It was quite touching and a description of what the upper room might have been like when the women returned to the Apostles upon finding the empty tomb.
It’s an imaging of it, not scripture. We’re not given much detail anyway, so we don’t know much more than the faintest outline of what happened between the burial of Jesus and the women leaving to go visit the grave of Jesus, so writers will imagine to fill in the blanks, collate the various accounts, and come up with a narrative.
I meditate on this all a lot myself, and I have a pretty strong imagining of what it might be like, but I will be the first to tell you, these are my meditations and imaginings, not history. Pious speculation, rooted in the text, geography and history if I can find it, but not more than that.
I suspect the writer was doing something similar.
Sort of a human thing to do. Been done by a lot of writers over the centuries. Some have been best sellers. None of them are the Gospel text.
Specifically, I know it doesn’t follow scripture exactly. But it could have happened this way, couldn’t it?