When scribes split up the Bible into different chapters during the Middle Ages, it seems they accidentally put a chapter separation right in the middle of a sentence! The sentence appears across the end of chapter 27 and beginning of chapter 28.
This is a big deal, because it moves the final words of chapter 27 to the first sentence of chapter 28. The wording just happens to line up in such a way that it sounds like the women who visited Jesus’ tomb did so on Saturday evening (the end of the Sabbath). That places Jesus resurrection on the wrong day – muddling the timing of events and causing an apparent ‘contradiction’ with the other gospels.
However, everything is resolved when you realize that the sentence has been ended half-way through and you move the words back to their correct places. Then, Saturday evening is no longer the time when the women arrived, but was instead the time when the guards were placed at Jesus’ tomb. It was then the next day, at dawn, that the women arrived and saw that Jesus was gone – exactly when it was supposed to happen!
Unfortunately, many people have failed to spot this simple mistake. Over the years, writers have published all sorts of fancy and contrived explanations to explain away the problem. All they needed to ask themselves was:
“Hey, who put this chapter marker here?”