Resources I’ve used to research the Easter set

Here is a picture I took of the whole thing, as far as I have finished it: Mary Magdalene, Jesus, bushes, and tomb front. NOT pictured: the stone, which I didn’t have time to finish for this beta version.

After I finished the paper nativity, a couple of my sisters kept asking me how I was going on designing an Easter set. I thought that was a weird question, but then a friend asked, too. She pointed out that Easter should be at least as important to us as Christmas, so… I started.

But because I’m genetically related to Hermione Granger, I started with research. And today’s post is about the stuff I found while I was researching.

I finished reading Clothing and Textiles in the New Testament, which I had started when I was trying to figure out the designs for Mary and Joseph’s clothing in the nativity. From this I found out that women generally wore longer robes and head coverings for modesty, but men often wore knee-length robes. Since I am designing in paper and the thought of trying to design paper legs at this scale makes me wince, I have decided that if I get around to designing Peter and John this season, they will be VERY FANCY and be wearing long robes. Also now I know why Jesus talked about the Pharisees liking to wear long robes, and why the accounts of the resurrection comment that the angels (whom I assume to be male) were wearing long robes.

I then found this article about why the “Garden Tomb” in Jerusalem probably really wasn’t where Jesus was buried— and why it’s probably a great place to visit anyway: Revisiting Golgotha and the Garden Tomb.

I also found out that the stone covering Jesus’ tomb was almost certainly cork-shaped and sorta square. Supposedly over a hundred of these tomb-covering stones from Jesus’ time have been found, but I could only find three pictures total, one in each of these articles: How Was Jesus’ Tomb Sealed? The Rolling Stone Tomb and Did a Rolling Stone Close Jesus Tomb? The TL;DR from all of these is that while there have been over 100 tombs discovered from Jesus’ time period, only four of them had disc-shaped stones, and at least three of those belonged to actual royalty. Joseph of Arimathea may have been rich, but he wasn’t royalty, so the stone that covered the tomb probably was cork-shaped.

As I promised in the last post, I’m sharing the picture of this silly-looking attempt at a tomb-covering stone so that you can have a laugh at it. Which, I will have you know, took me some time to design before I abandoned it. I’m almost done with the real one. If you want to know why the tomb-covering-stone was probably shaped like a cork and not a disc, you can read one (or all) of the articles I link to about the subject above.