[According to the visions of Sister Emmerich, the three women named in the text had been living for some time at Bethania, in a sort of community established by Martha for the purpose of providing for the maintenance of the disciples when our Lord was moving about, and for the division and distribution of the alms which were collected.  The widow of Naim, whose son Martial was raised from the dead by Jesus, according to Sister Emmerich, on the 28th Marcheswan (the 18th of November), was named Maroni.  She was the daughter of an uncle, on the father’s side, of St. Peter.  Her first husband was the son of a sister of Elizabeth, who herself was the daughter of a sister of the mother of St. Anne.  Maroni’s first husband having died without children, she had married Elind, a relation of St. Anne, and had left Chasaluth, near Tabor, to take up her abode at Naim, which was not far off, and where she soon lost her second husband.

Dina, the Samaritan woman, was the same who conversed with Jesus by Jacob’s well.  She was born near Damascus, of parents who were half Jewish and half Pagan.  They died while she was yet very young, and she being brought up by a woman of bad character, the seeds of the most evil passions were early sown in her heart.  She had had several husbands, who supplanted one another in turn, and the last lived at Sichar, whither she had followed him and changed her name from Dina to Salome.  She had three grown-up daughters and two sons, who afterwards joined the disciples.  Sister Emmerich used to say that the life of this Samaritan woman was prophetic—­that Jesus had spoken to the entire sect of Samaritans in her person, and that they were attached to their errors by as many ties as she had committed adulteries.

Mara of Suphan was a Moabitess, came from the neighbourhood of Suphan, and was a descendant of Orpha, the widow of Chelion, Noemi’s son.  Orpha had married again in Moab.  By Orpha, the sister-in-law of Ruth, Mara was connected with the family of David, from whom our Lord was descended.  Sister Emmerich saw Jesus deliver Mara from four devils and grant her forgiveness of her sins on the 17th Elud (9th September) of the second year of his public life.  She was living at Ainon, having been repudiated by her husband, a rich Jew, who had kept the children he had had by her with him.  She had with her tree others, the offspring of her adulteries.

‘I saw,’ Sister Emmerich would say,—­’I saw how the stray branch of the stock of David was purified within her by the grace of Jesus, and admitted into the bosom of the Church.  I cannot express how many of these roots and offshoots I see become entwined with each other, lost to view, and then once more brought to light.’]