That three of the Gospels portray Mary Magdalene as the first to see Jesus post-death, is generally considered to be of significance. Mary Magdalene was a major figure in Gnosticism, and one of the main teachers besides Jesus, the only other of similar significance being Thomas Didymus. Supporters of Gnostic priority (that Gnosticism is the original form of Christianity) see this as clear evidence that Mark, and hence, due to Markan priority, the entire resurrection narrative, was intended to be interpreted gnostically. Though owing to intrinsic beliefs about the nature of the physical world, Gnosticism generally viewed women as equals, in Judaism of the era women were not considered valid legal witnesses. Westcott, and other supporters of John's authenticity, sometimes use this to argue that the narratives must be factual, since someone faking it would be more likely to use a prominent and respected witness, though this neglects the possibility of well planned forgery.
Why John portrays Mary as initially not recognising Jesus, even though she had known him well for a long time, is something of much debate. One theory is that, since Luke records two disciples as failing to recognise a post-death appearance of Jesus, the physical form of Jesus after resurrection must have been different, either due to the resurrection process itself, or due to the ordeal of crucifixion. More down-to-earth explanations have also been advanced, the most prominent being that Mary's tears had clouded her vision, or alternately that she is so focused on recovering Jesus' body, that she is temporarily blind to its being in front of her. However, John Calvin, and many other Christians, read this as a metaphor: that Mary's blindness despite seeing Jesus represents the blindness, according to Christians, of non-Christians who have already been informed about Jesus. Why Jesus initially encourages Mary's lack of recognition is also something of a mystery, though Dibelius, like many others, sees it as a literary conceit, since the trope of a returning hero's being unrecognised or disguised dates back at least as far as Homer's Odyssey, and Feuillet sees echoes of the Song of Solomon in this passage.
Amongst those who see John as a deliberate piece of polemical orthodox propaganda, it is seen as a deliberate attack by John against the gnostics, by portraying one of their key figures as being stupid. The frequently raised idea that John is orthodox propaganda has also been proposed to explain the reference to gardeners. A Jewish anti-Christian story from the period sought to discredit the resurrection, by claiming that a gardener named Judas moved Jesus' body to another tomb to avoid his cabbages' being trampled upon by the crowds that came to see it, causing the resurrection myth to arise when Mary and the others found the tomb empty. Hans Von Campenhausen has argued that John adds the mention of a gardener as a deliberate reference to this Jewish story, and as an attempt to discredit it, though Rudolf Schnackenberg regards the sequence of cause and effect to be the reverse - that the Jewish story originated from John's mention of a gardener. Amongst Victorian commentators, Hoskyns and Lightfoot regarded the mention of a gardener as a metaphor relating to the Garden of Eden.