2. The Greek aorist (ἡ ἀλέιψασα) shows that the reference is to some unction that had already taken place, and not to that which happened subsequently, and which is narrated by our Evangelist (xii. 3; Matt. xxvi. 7; Mark xiv. 3). The unction here referred to we take to be that recorded by St. Luke (vii. 37, 38); and hence, notwithstanding their apparently different characters, we regard Mary the sister of Lazarus (xi. 2) as identical with “the woman who was a sinner in the city” (Luke vii. 37). For St. John in the words: “Mary was she that anointed the Lord,” &c., certainly seems to speak of an unction already known to his readers, and the only unction of Christ, as far as is known, that had taken place before this illness of Lazarus, is that recorded by St. Luke in the passage referred to. In this view, then, our Lord was _twice_ anointed by a woman; on the first occasion in the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke vii. 40, 46), probably in Galilee (see Luke vii. 11), as recorded by St. Luke vii. 37, 38; on the second occasion at Bethania, in Judea, in the house of Simon the leper (Matt. xxvi. 6), as recorded by Matthew, Mark, and John (J. xii. 3). As the present verse proves that Mary, the sister of Lazarus, had already anointed our Lord: and as John xii. 3, with its context, proves that the same sister of Lazarus again anointed Him on a subsequent occasion, we hold that the only woman referred to in the Gospels as having anointed the living body of our Lord, is Mary, the sister of Lazarus; and that she did so on _two_ different occasions. Thus, as already stated, we identify Luke’s “sinner in the city” with the sister of Lazarus. If it be objected that the contemplative character of the sister of Lazarus (Luke x. 38‐42), and the close friendship of Jesus with her and her family (John xi. 3, 5), forbid us to regard her as identical with the woman who had once been “a sinner in the city,” we reply that Mary, converted in the beginning of our Lord’s public life, had now for some years led an edifying life of penance. As a sinner she had lived in some city of Galilee, far away from home, whither she may have gone with some lover whom she met at Jerusalem at one of the great festivals; now she lived with her brother at Bethania, in Judea, where possibly her former sinful life may have been unknown, so that there was no danger of scandal in Christ’s friendship with herself and her family. To those who, like Steenkiste (_Comm. on Matt. Quaes._ 678, _conclusio_), have “a deep‐ rooted repugnance” to believing that the sister of Lazarus had ever been a public sinner, we would recall the fact that there are many sinners in heaven to‐day enjoying the society of God after a far shorter penance than we require to suppose in the case of the sister of Lazarus, before she began to enjoy the friendship of Christ. Our Divine Lord’s tenderness and mercy towards sinners are written on every page of the Gospels, and the