Reading the Gospel of Luke's Walk to Calvary as a Funeral Procession: A Study of Luke 23.27–8

This study offers a fresh explanation for the characterisation of the women in Luke 23.27 as mourning. It argues that the uniquely Lukan material of women mourning on the walk to Calvary subtly fashions that walk into a funeral procession. The phrase μὴ κλαίɛτɛ in the following verse, Luke 23.28, recalls accounts of Jesus bringing the dead to life earlier in the Gospel, thereby evoking the concept of resurrection. Luke 23.27-8 works in conjunction with material later in Chapter 23 about the ritual preparation of Jesus’ body, to portray funerary ritual for Jesus conducted in reverse (the funeral procession precedes rather than follows the preparation of the body). This inverted order of funeral allusions adds extra resonance to the endpoint of the Gospel, casting it as the logical culmination of a reverse funeral—the resurrection of Jesus from death to life. The interpretation in this paper highlights one way that lived ritual experiences among the Gospel's readers, in this case, the paradigm of funeral ritual, informed the narrative technique in the Gospel of Luke, complementing other well-recognised uses of Greco-Roman rhetorical devices and literary themes.