Various moments of the Emmaus story are very frequently represented in art, and most follow this general theme. But here is the thing. The story tells of two people walking along, and then inviting a stranger to come back to the house where they live, and giving him a meal. In the context of the time, is it not very, very likely, to the point of certainty, that such a pair would in fact be a man and a woman, a married couple, who live in their house at Emmaus? Yet in the whole history of art, I know of vanishingly few depictions that actually show such a couple, as opposed to two men.I looked up the passage in Luke 24 just now in the Revised Standard Version. It translate's Jesus' rebuke to the couple as "O foolish men ..." But the word "men" is not present in the Greek, and the grammar of the verse could refer to two men or to a man and a woman.
I first assumed that this was a holdover from the KJV, but in fact it translates the verse with the same ambiguity as the Greek. So do the NIV and the NRSV.
Belatedly for Easter.
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