Jesus Meets Cleopas Post Easter - Richard Bauckham

This is one of my favorite paintings of Jesus post-resurrection.

                Jesus and the two disciples On the Road to Emmaus, by Duccie,1308-1311,
 Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena.  Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Today as I think of this scene from Luke chapter 24 I am picturing the later "testimony" of Cleopas in the Jerusalem church, describing his glorious encounter with Jesus on the road to Emmaus.  On this subject of the testimony of the eye-witnesses,  Richard Bauckham explains why Luke mentions Cleopas by name:

If the names [of those named in the gospels] are of persons well known in the Christian communities, then it also becomes likely that many of these people were themselves the eye-witnesses who first told and doubtless continued to tell the stories in which they appear and to which their names are attached.  A good example is Cleopas (Luke 24:18):  the story does not require that he be named and his companion remains anonymous.  There seems no plausible reason for naming him other than to indicate that he was the source of this tradition.  

Richard Bauckham,  Jesus and the Eyewitnesses  (Eerdmans 2006) at page 47 (footnotes omitted).  

Who was Cleopas?

[Cleopas] was very probably the same person as Clopas, whose wife Mary appears among the women at the cross in John 19:25.  Clopas is a very rare Semitic form of the Greek name Cleopas, so rare that we can be certain this is the Clopas who, according to Hegesippus, was the brother of Jesus'  father Joseph and the father of Simon, who succeeded his cousin James as leader of the Jerusalem church (apud Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.11; 4.22.4). Cleopas/Clopas was doubtless one of those relatives of Jesus who played a prominent role in the Palestinian Jewish Christian movement.

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses at 47 (footnotes omitted).   Mary wife of Cleopas/Clopas was at the cross and her husband had the blessed privilege of encountering Jesus post-resurrection.  These two witnessed sacred  mysteries of our faith, the death of Jesus, and his appearance to his friends after his resurrection from the dead.     Their son Simon was a Torah observant Jew who led the Jerusalem church.    Now I would have loved to hear the testimony of any one of those three!