In the first-century Judaism women were not regarded as credible witnesses.
In the 1[SUP]st[/SUP] century AD the Jewish historian Josephus writes: “Let not the testimony of woman be accepted, on account of the levity and temerity of their sex” (Antiquities 4.8.15)
Woman occupied a low rung on the Jewish social ladder. Here is one rabbinical text that gives us an idea “Sooner let the words of the Law be burnt than delivered to woman!” (Sotah 19a)
Compared to men, women were second-class citizens. Here is another rabbinical text “Happy is he whose children are male, but unhappy is he whose children are female!” (Kiddushin 82b)
The daily prayer of every Jewish man included the blessing, “Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who has not created me a Gentile, a slave, or a woman” (Beracos 60b)
So the first-century Judaism was a patriarchal society with women having low social status and inability to serve as legal witnesses, similar to some Islamic countries nowadays.
The point that has been repeated over and over in scholarship is that “women were simply not acceptable as legal witnesses in 1[SUP]st[/SUP] century Palestine”. We may regret it, but this is how the Jewish world (and most others) worked.
Now...one of the most mysterious and strangest things in common between the four canonical narratives is that they begin with women. The amazing thing is that women are discoverers of and principal witnesses to the empty tomb.
Even if we suppose that Mark made up most of his material, and did so some time in the late 60s at the earliest, it will not do to have him, or anyone else at that stage, making up a legend about an empty tomb and having women be the ones who find it. This point has been repeated over and over in scholarship, but its full impact has not always been felt: “women were simply not acceptable as legal witnesses”.
If the author of the gospel of Mark (the earliest gospel) could have invented stories of fine, upstanding, reliable male witnesses being first at the tomb, he would have done it. That he did not - tells us that everyone in the early church knew that the women, led by Mary Magdalene, were in fact the first on the scene. Would the other evangelists have been so slavishly foolish as to copy the story unless they were convinced that, despite being embarrassing, it was historically trustworthy?
It is easy to imagine that, when a tradition was established for use in preaching to outsiders, stories of women running to the tomb in the half-light would quietly be dropped, and a list produced of solid witnesses who could be called upon to vouch for what they had seen. It is not easy at all to imagine a solid and well-established tradition, feeling itself in need of coming up with a scatter of women on a dark spring morning.
If the story of the empty tomb was fiction someone has taken the trouble to think into the situation of the two or three women and describe the whole incident, including their worries about rolling away the stone, from their point of view (had they been three men they would presumably have been strong enough to roll it away; according to Mark 15:46 Joseph of Aramathea rolled it there by himself, and even if somebody helped him it does not sound as though it was too heavy for two or three men at most). Thus the women’s reason for going (to anoint the body), their anxieties about the stone, their alarm at seeing the young man in the tomb, and their terror, panic and silent flight – all are narrated from their point of view. We see the whole scene through their eyes. This is sufficiently unusual in the gospel tradition to be considered remarkable
If the empty tomb story were a legend, then the male disciples would have been made to be the ones who discover the empty tomb. The fact that women, whose testimony was deemed worthless, were the chief witnesses to the fact of the empty tomb can only be plausibly explained if, there was an empty tomb to start with and women actually were the discoverers of the empty tomb and the Gospels just faithfully record what for them was a very embarrassing fact
