They arrived at the tomb early. The Gospels use different phrases to describe the hour: very early in the morning, while it was still dark, at the break of day. It was the exact moment between night and dawn.
And they encountered an unexpected problem.
They were asking one another, 'Who will roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb?' But when they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away, even though it was extremely large.
Mark 16:3–4
The stone that sealed the entrance of the tomb was a flat, circular stone that rolled along a channel cut in the rock. According to experts in the archaeology of first-century Jewish tombs, it weighed between one and two tons. It took several men to move.
When they arrived, it was already rolled.
They entered the tomb. And the body was not there.
In the Jewish legal system of the first century, a woman's testimony was not valid in a court. The historian Flavius Josephus, citing common practice, wrote that one should not accept female testimony "on account of the levity and rashness of their sex."
If the Gospels had been invented as propaganda, the authors would have chosen male witnesses: apostles, soldiers, anyone with legal weight. That they chose women as the first witnesses of the resurrection is one sign, among others, that they were recording events as they had occurred.