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15 He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

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Now, why do you suppose she mistook Him for the GARDENER?

Early on a Sunday morning, she saw a man of working age moving around the garden -- in my view, she thought he was an EMPLOYEE of a MONEY MAKING GARDEN. Not someone's private rose garden or veggie producing plot. A place that made enough money to HIRE tenant gardeners to keep the produce coming.

Does anyone try to explain how the Holy Sepulchre was found in a garden? A PROFESSIONAL garden with employees, one that had an annual wine production that made its owner wealthy?

Don't just toss this part of scripture away without thought. It is one of the clues to the identity of the real burial place of Jesus, and the place of resurrection. The garden. There was only ONE TOMB in the wall of rock behind this garden. The wealthy owner had it carved for himself and his family, on his property, but... he wasn't dead yet. So the tomb was still ritually clean. No dead ever occupied it.

Now consider that, when Jesus died, there was a HUGE time crunch, as Jewish culture demanded the dead be buried before the sabbath began at sundown on Friday. Jesus DIED on this Friday, in the afternoon, and Joseph of Arimethea (a Christ follower) begged Pilate to release the body so that the horror of a Jewish body above ground at Shabbat (sundown Friday) would not happen.

Do you suppose Joseph already planned on using the tomb? How could he have done that, if it wasn't HIS? It was a single rich family tomb with several stone beds for the dead, on private property outside the Jerusalem city walls. Don't you think the owner would go a little bit NUTS over someone burying another guy in HIS family tomb?

I believe Joseph, the wealthy man of Arimethea, OWNED the garden... and the tomb was HIS, which made it a simple matter for that Christian man to decide to use his own tomb to bury Jesus.

The garden has an in-ground stone wine press, meaning you dump the grapes into a stone-lined hole in the ground and stomp them until the juice runs out one end and into a channel that went to a processing area. it’s in the photo above. I've stood in the wine press, I remember it well. If Joseph OWNED the garden, he definitely was rich; it produced a lot of grapes and had a pretty high volume wine output, judging by the big stone press. And Joseph’s ownership of that garden explains both Mary Magdalene mistaking the risen Jesus for a gardener, AND the speed with which that tomb was secured for Jesus that Friday afternoon. The tomb was his. He was a Christ follower. He would have thought it an honor to put Jesus in his own tomb on his own property.

If the sepulchre inside the walls of Jerusalem is the burial place of jesus, explain the above.