Post resurrection accounts of Jesus in the gospels, consistent or not?

Faith & Science Conversation
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I don’t. Or at least not without a significantly transformative overhaul of how I think and operate in this life. I think older people may be more and more sensitive to the naively youthful character of wishful immortality. It is imagined that the body is the only thing that grows old or tired or broken or in need of rest. And so then if we could just overcome that hurdle - of our own obstinately aging flesh, we would then be freed into a bliss of never-ending life. But that presumes that we would continue to like life such as we imagine we know it (almost always the mindset of somebody still in the throes of earthly pleasures - or at least the hope of more earthly pleasures to come). But our flesh isn’t the only thing we grow weary of (or in); without a total transformation of our evil selves, a forever that is spent with ourselves (and yes - that is exactly how our evil selves would spend it) becomes a hellish state - not a blissful one. Lewis has this insight in “The Magician’s Nephew” where Digory expresses his concern to Aslan that the witch has already partaken of some fruit which will make her live forever. Aslan’s reply is to the effect that “forever, spent in a life of evil is not an enviable place for anyone to be, and ‘already she begins to know that’.”

I’m not ready to be any sort of eternal being until I’ve been cleansed and fitted to it by the only one in whom I invest my hopes. If and when that happens, I trust it will only be a good thing in Christ. Not at all what our poor imaginations can conjur up of such a thing now. Imagine your favorite experience or meal or … whatever. Now imagine an eternity experiencing nothing but that! Uggh. It wouldn’t take long for it to become a hell. Just as the child naively wishing their every meal could be nothing but chocolate. We grow up and know better than the child in that regard. But regarding eternity - we are still that child in the manner of our imagination of it.

Never be satisfied with anything less than that.

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I like your tag–I think that all of us honestly are agnostic. I’m not sure what “gnostic Christian” is.
Based on the NT, it can be somewhat of an unforgiving God based on knowledge–making flesh evil in contrast. However, that isn’t want this sounds like. I’m learning on this.

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Very convenient. Why would the same excuse not work for the God Baal?

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I’m not entirely sure either. As I understand it, he’s following the heretic Marcion’s teachings.

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Well, if we read the Bible, a life of evil could be right there in the Old Testament. A place where invaders can kill you, your wife and children except they can keep all the virgins for themselves. With explicit blessing from the God of love. This is the Biblical God and whatever eternity modern Christians look forward to will be spent with this God, am I right?

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Does what you described sound like a righteous god to you? If not, then be assured at least of this one thing. No true God of Love (such as Christians see in Christ) would be less righteous than you or me. If somebody’s interpretation of any biblically recorded events has them or you thinking that God would rejoice in such things, then be assured that such an interpretation has no truth in it. Woe to us all if we were more righteous than God. But that would be an incoherent contradiction to the very definition / teaching of the Spirit as understood by prophets and Spirit-led church leaders up and down the centuries.

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That it would work for Baal apologists does not undermine its validity in any way. An apology is a good place to start when someone screws up. Because an apology is useful for many people in no way undermines its utility. The answer may work for many religions because they share common themes or they don’t posit a primitive, xenophobic, tribal God concerned with giving people theology multiple choice tests. Nor should God ever have to play tricks and roll over for a human. It kind of comes with the definition and distinction between “God” and “Man.” That God was willing to incarnate and humiliate Himself in the person of Jesus speaks volumes to me about his Love and Grace. Jesus is the greatest love story ever told to me and it ended far more badly than Romeo and Juliet but at least it had a second, happier ending.

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Your post reminds me of my buddy who’s embracing Gnosticism. I wish you were right and this God would show up in my life in a clear and recognizable way. But based on what I find in the Gospels, I must, if I’m honest, remain an agnostic atheist. Jesus made some promises that a righteous being of his power would have to follow through on.

Think of it this way. Imagine that I found a cure for all childhood cancer. I have tested it with 100pct cure rate. And then I promise that I will cure all childhood cancer, make sure as many parents know about it as possible…and then disappear. Would this be a righteous act?

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Because Baal is not real.
 

I don’t think Maggie is, do you?

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If Christianity is merely an intellectual exercise, then it’s not worth much.

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Wait a minute. I thought science cannot conclude this. How are you making this determination that a God Baal is not real?

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By the evidence of God’s providence and by trusting in legitimate testimony.

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Who said we were talking about science?

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And given that some of those reconciliations have turned out to be quite real and legitimate, then any objective observer would do well to withhold judgment to some extent, and not be so quick to affirm or conclude a contradiction… otherwise it appears that the critics or skeptics have just as much a “need” to find a contradiction as the believers are accused of having a “need” to defend their book from accusations of error.

The feeding I find a perfect example. Your proposal that Jesus fed the multitudes on two separate occasions is of course entirely legitimate, and requires absolutely no “creativity” on the part of any modern Christian. Thus if someone, hypothetically, were to claim a contradiction in this case, this belies that they want to see a contradiction there… As they are obviously jumping to the conclusion of it being a contradiction when there still remain very obvious and legitimate alternatives, and perhaps it is them that doesn’t have all the facts.

And this is a courtesy I give to any ancient authority, religious or secular. I personally wish people would be more hesitant to claim an error or contradiction in either the Koran or in Herodotus… rather we would do well in many cases to acknowledge that it may be we who don’t have all the facts.

Case in point, the Koran famously “errs” in articulating (and opposing) the doctrine of the trinity, articulating the three persons as God, Jesus, and Mary. I personally find it lazy to pin this “error” on Muhammad. Rather, if I give him the benefit of the doubt, it rather gives me the possible insight that there well may have been Christian sects that had corrupted this teaching, to which Muhammad was responding. To conclude a contradiction is to affirm that we know more than the author, without question, and that we don’t admit the possibility that we have anything else to learn from him on the topic at hand.

Or, case in point, perhaps Herodotus knew what he was talking about in his description of certain Egyptian boats, and all those scholars over the years that assumed he had erred or fabricated the idea ought to have been slower to conclude that Herodotus had simply erred…

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There is so much to respond to in all that has been said here. As I look at and compare the various accounts of the post resurrection appearances, it really is hard to get away from the Galilee vs Jerusalem issue. To use some hyperbole, that issue seems like a contradiction in the accounts wide enough to fit a passenger plane through, the simple and straightforward reading of the texts paints that much of a different picture. This I find particularly so considering the geography of how far away Galilee and Jerusalem were - Galilee ain’t no Bethany just a little walk down the road! I agree with @Vinnie when he says

@Daniel_Fisher I think you raise many valid points about not being too quick to judge errors and contradictions because we don’t know all the facts of a matter. For me personally though, I just find the differences and the logical sequence of how the 11 (or 10 with the whole Thomas issue) disciples went from Jerusalem to Galilee and then back to Jerusalem too much to be able to easily harmonise. Something’s off. I find it the efforts of various people to harmonise the accounts indicative of a need to ‘make it work by whatever means’ (not saying you were doing this, as I see you weren’t actually trying to harmonise the accounts but just saying not to write off that we could be missing something when seeing through our modern lens). Indeed, I could be maybe missing something and very much remain open to being shown otherwise.

It’s very depressing for me, this issue. I can’t just treat it as an intellectual one - it’s so much more than that. The emotions connected to it run deep. Did Jesus actually rise, or not? The weight of that question is so intense. Carefully looking at the different post resurrection accounts is akin I think to the child who starts to get the feeling they’ve got it wrong with the whole Santa. There are of course still various wild explanations still accessible to them to sustain the belief … but they start to feel the belief slipping. That light of sweet innocence fades out of their eyes (I never really thought much about Santa growing up but it goes without saying some kids are pretty shattered when they realise it’s a ruse and it’s cute to hear them not give the belief up as they earnestly hold on). I want to believe in the Resurrection, quite desperately. I hope it is real and I hope I’m totally wrong and God will extend grace to me and open my heart/eyes in the future to realise I was wrong here (and not in a scenario after I die and am facing a terrible judgment, I make the request for any realisation of my error to please not happen like that in the presence of all reading). Right now though, I’m finding an intellectually honest reading of the various accounts makes this most important story painfully hard to just accept in the way I used to. Frankly, it’s so frustrating there are such significant differences in the various accounts. When piled up against so many other factors about the Bible and concept of God generally, this is just another knife wound and this one in particular really hurts.

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Christopher, very good and honest thoughts. Admittedly I am a believer in inerrancy, but I do hope it comes across that I don’t bring with that a desperate need to harmonize every discrepancy or variance.

I could give lots of further theorizing and explanation, but I wonder if you’d indulge with me in a thought experiment…

Imagine if I were asked to write a personal account of my experiences in Bahrain. (Let’s say I wrote it to my cousin Matthew… who was interested in visiting there someday) I would describe my ship coming to Bahrain, the missions we did there, the responsibilities, the culture. I’d describe how I sailed in my Ship from Japan in Summer of 2004 for a month, the first time being off the ship since leaving Japan was stepping into Bahrain to the sweltering heat, even in late September, though I certainly enjoyed the climate of Bahrain better in early January… I enjoyed the various tremendous shopping experiences and the truly amazing food, enjoying choice hotels, met a Navy Captain (the most senior officer I met in Bahrain) and met two U.S. / American Navy Chaplains during my deployment, who took me out to an amazing British Pub (!) there in Bahrain for my birthday.

Then, for a different reason, imagine if I were asked to describe a report or after-action review of the mission where I spent time supporting the defense of Iraq’s Oil platforms. (We’ll say I wrote it to a friend named Luke who was preparing for a similar Navy at-sea defense mission). I would describe living on a ship and nothing else, how my ship left Japan with orders to immediately sail to the Oil Platforms for their defense. We made no port visit en route but hightailed it right to those terminals, where I visited them on a regular basis, making trips by small boat to and from the platforms, occasionally sleeping out on them. I never described any port visits regarding this time period, and described the awful food - how the food was limited to military MREs on the platforms, their only decent warm meals being delivered by our ship (whose food wasn’t that good) when I visited those oil platforms. And it was there during this time I met a 4-star Marine Corps general, the most senior officer I’d ever met. And I close to note that my time in the Persian Gulf lasted only a month, and then I closed off the description by describing how I spent my entire birthday very busy on the waters working that defense mission, and on that day I also happened to meet two chaplains, one American, one an Australian chaplain, part of the Australian Navy.

I dare say, if we subjected my two accounts of “My deployment to the Persian Gulf” to the same methods we use to deconstruct the discrepancies between gospel accounts, I would be accused of all manner of contradiction. The two events as I described them in those two different accounts seemed to be describing the same event, but with wide divergences likely wide enough to sail an aircraft carrier through…? - if My actual military orders were really to support the oil platform defense, why did I not even mention it once in the first account? obviously, I must have been talking about some same events, since in both accounts I describe meeting two chaplains, but somehow the wires must have been crossed since one account says both chaplains were American, the other says one was Australian. The accounts say we went immediately to the oil terminals and that I went off the ship to visit them, but the other account that my first time off the ship was in Bahrain? Also, anyone familiar with the military commands there knows that the only Marine Corps 4-star general in the area at the time had his headquarters there in Bahrain, I wouldn’t have met him out in the middle of the Persian Gulf on an oil platform - that part of the story must have been conflated from one to the other. One account mentions being there September through January, the other that the my time in the Persian Gulf lasted only a month, etc. Obviously both couldn’t be true. People would look at my letter to Matthew, and my report to Luke, and suggest the accounts are so full of irreconcilable details that they hopelessly contradict.

But this is how we talk, this is how we write, these are how we communicate - we don’t try to give every specific detail about things that don’t fit our purpose on the off-chance that someone might want to reconcile my details with another account. We narrate the event how we want to communicate in a natural format, simply omitting all manner of things that simply aren’t relevant to our purpose, describing only those details relevant to our purpose as it fits our narrative.

Either of those hypothetical accounts I described above are very realistic accounts I could very likely have given on an occasion given the particular focus or pupose of my communication. And both I can testify are absolutely correct, accurate and true, even though I expect an outsider would look at the two of them and see hopeless irreconcilable contradictions between the two. But both accounts are indeed completely true above, however many very wide irreconcilable contradictions someone might suspect they find between those two accounts.

So, I would challenge you to try to “reconcile” my two accounts above - in a way that a third party neutral observer wouldn’t very likely accuse you of coming up with some “very creative” and near-desperate contortions of my language to try to reconcile the two accounts. The different purpose or audience might explain some of the divergence, but wouldn’t the far more likely explanation be that I had simply erred in my recollection in one or both of those accounts at various minor points?

Thinking through a thought experiment like this is ultimately what gives me pause when I consider the differing accounts of the resurrection, or other such ancient accounts. My commitment to inerrancy certainly gives me sympathy to consider possibilities, but at core, inerrancy or not, I can recognize that two accounts can genuinely appear significantly irreconcilable with very different details that don’t seem to line up, and still both be true. This simply will be the result of trying to reconcile two independent summaries of a very complex, moving, multifaceted event, where each author was selecting certain details to form his narrative from a wide variety of possible facts that could have been included.

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Hello again,

So I’ve read all the post resurrection accounts again after thinking about this topic more. Bear with me as a ‘think out loud’ a bit here to gather my thoughts - it’s been a largely positive experience. What had come to mind was that there were 40 days that Jesus appeared to the disciples before his ascension

“After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.”
‭‭Acts‬ ‭1:3‬ ‭

I read too that Jesus’ command to stay in Jerusalem was given in Luke pretty well just before his ascension:
“I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven.”
‭‭Luke‬ ‭24:49-51‬

Considering this, I realise that the disciples seeing Jesus in Galilee is not necessarily inconsistent with the disciples being told to stay in Jerusalem and Jesus ascending from the Mount of Olives - it’s just that those events could very well have occurred after the disciples must have seen Jesus in Galilee.

After reviewing the various accounts again carefully I didn’t so much find an inconsistency in the disciples seeing Jesus

  • first in Jerusalem after the resurrection
  • then with the idea that they went in to Galilee
  • then returned where where Jesus ascended.
    That could quite conceivably happen after 40 days.

Even the ending of Matthew allows some flexibility- at first I thought this gospel was saying Jesus ascended from the mountain in Galilee but I don’t necessarily think it is, it’s a tad vague:

“Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.””
‭‭Matthew‬ ‭28:16-20‬
‭
Allegedly (and this is crucial to the whole argument really) the word “then” can mean “after”. I hope someone can cross reference that.

I don’t know - what do others think of this - does this make sense? I think this more or less reconciles the issues … to use a potentially bad analogy … after this reexamination I kind of feel like I was on one side of a creek where the accounts could not be, honestly, reconciled. Then after looking at this and allowing for the 40 days, it was like haphazardly throwing stones into the water one by one … by stepping on the logic stones you can cross to the other side of the creek where the accounts can be reconciled but, your feet get wet and it’s all a bit messy and kinda awkward to get there (and you might fall in if you don’t have a good footing so you need to be good at making awkward logic jumps). I hope that makes sense :slight_smile:

In all this, I feel like there are some details I’m still maybe not properly considering?? @SuperBigV and @Vinnie maybe you can cross check this - as I understand what I’m suggesting here would contrast what you were saying in the thread. I feel it’s important to kinda nut this out and hopefully - if possible (!) - come to some kind of conclusion (can that creek so to speak be crossed or not!).

At the risk of sounding repetitive, I feel like the 40 day timeline may actually quite easily accomodate the:

  • initially Jerusalem
  • week later still in Jerusalem (John 20:26)
  • then travelling to Galilee as per Jesus’ instruction to the women to tell the disciples to meet him there (Matthew 28:10) being initially ignored (Luke 24:9-11) meaning they didn’t go to Galilee, until …
  • Jesus appeared to the disciples once without Thomas
  • then with Thomas, in Jerusalem, a week later and they realised “hang on, Jesus said to the women initially to go to Galilee” and so off they went
  • once they got there, they kinda just waited around and Peter eventually said to the others (maybe after a few days and it seeming a little dull) “well guys, I’m gonna go fish” as per the opening of John 21
  • and then it happened, Jesus appeared to them on the shore and officially reinstated Peter as in the gospel of John account

How they then, after this, ended up back in Jerusalem I don’t know - as that is not specified. This honestly is a shame as it’s a fair old journey from Galilee back to Jerusalem and probably expensive for a group as well who had already tracked to Galilee from there. I don’t know how many days it’d take but it would be a fair few I imagine there and back - Jesus kept them moving haha, I imagine he did that on purpose. I guess to be honest, that part of the 40 days (them returning from Galilee to Jerusalem) is pretty patchy. You, honestly, would think more effort would be made to tracking the whole process of how those days unfolded? :man_shrugging: I mean, this is the time the Risen Christ was appearing on earth before he ascended - that’s a reeeeally important, one time only window never ever again to be repeated. The fact it’s so vague is at best a shame and at worst, well I don’t necessarily believe it - but it’s pretty suss (picture someone standing in the middle of the fast flowing creek now, looking uncertain, that’s me lol- but I’m facing the “reconcile” side).

This dynamic of it being vague is especially disappointing when you have Luke who took pains to kind of track the detailed unfolding of the whole story not even mentioning the Galilee trip. I mean Luke, dude - what happened? In fact, Luke really reads as though the disciples never left Jerusalem. I mean, it’s a bit weird.
[Sigh] that said, when you take into account the 40 days, the Jerusalem, then Galilee for old times sake and then back to Jerusalem for the business of receiving the Holy Spirit, can work. It’s enough time (I think).

I’ll leave it there for now but would love to hear others’ thoughts on this

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Christopher, I believe the word you’re referencing that is translated “then” in NIV (I believe?) is simply the word “and” in Greek (kai / καὶ). A most generic and common connective conjunction that could imply all sorts of things. For stylistic reasons it looks like NIV translated it “then”, but it is simply “and” which could imply all host of things depending on larger context, but for strict accuracy is usually just best translated “and”. it is translated as such in ESV and KJV, for instance.

a lot can happen in 40 days indeed!

I would be more than happy to discuss some of the details if you are interested… but as mentioned above, I personally don’t find an urge or need to iron out all the details, for reasons mentioned in my analogy above about the two accounts of my persian gulf story. Matthew wanted to select those parts of those 40 days and wanted to talk about Galilee, apparently, Luke selecting other details.

One thing that stands out to me is the obvious fact that, whatever Jesus did or didn’t mean by “Stay in the city”, he clearly couldn’t mean it in the strictly literalistic sense that they were not for any reason for any length of time exit those city’s walls, since the very next sentence says he led them out of the city to Bethany. Sure, Bethany is closer than Galilee, but neither are “in the city.”

So i understand Jesus words there easily could have been a general guideline, a principle not to relocate, or begin missionary journeys, or to move their gathering headquarters, or something to that effect. And again, this isn’t me forcing a foreign interpretation onto the text in order to avoid a contradiction… it is the very next sentence that qualifies and gives context to his instruction:

But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high." And he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God.

(it should be noted that, also in Acts, where the command on"stay in the city until the Spirit’s coming" was repeated, and again they are recorded as having left the city with Jesus and returning before the Spirit’s coming. clearly the “stay in the city” instruction isn’t strictly literal.)

so he told them to “stay in the city”, then led them out to Bethany, and then they returned to the city. And recall this is either a very general summary, or one very small selection, out of the 40 day period where he said all manner of things, and I find the trip to Bethany unlikely o be the only excursion they made during an entire 40 days while staying true to the general principle of his command.

Also instructive to me is thinking about Jesus’s individual appearance to Peter alone… it is referenced in passing twice to my knowledge…

in Luke…

And they found the eleven and those who were with them gathered together, saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.

and in 1Corinthians(!)…

that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Now this was surely an event of extreme significance and importance, but the details were not included anywhere, Luke making only the most passing reference. But as it is, those passing references make the accounts between 1Corinthians and Luke consistent on that part… that he appeared first to Peter, and then to the larger group of disciples.

Now, imagine if by some chance Luke had not made that passing reference… I suspect people would then see a contradiction between Luke and 1Corinthians. Did Jesus first appear to his disciples, or first to Peter alone, I would be asked.

Point is, please consider… if Luke had chosen to omit that one little relatively insignificant passing detail, simply because it didn’t fit his purpose, or for his own literary agenda, or for whatever reason as he selected from a great corpus of things he could have written about… would this very minor and rather insignificant omission have introduced an actual error or contradiction between the two accounts? of course not. such an omission would introduce a discrepancy or difficulty that we would probably be unable to easily harmonize. but it wouldn’t make a contradiction., even if I had no earthly idea how to so reconcile the two.

that, for what it is worth, is why I handle i variances between the resurrection accounts as i do… i personally don’t feel the need to reconcile every discrepancy, largely because i think it is simply and truly impossible to so reconcile them for these and other reasons… not because i believe them to actually contradict. there is just too much that may have happened in 40 days, too much selection, too many different (legitimate) agendas, too much that is a summary or overview not intended as a detailed blow-by-blow account, that even someone like me that works from the working assumption that there are absolutely no errors or contradictions whatsoever between the accounts would also affirm that i find them hopelessly irreconcilable, for the reasons i described above given my example about my persian gulf deployment.

we don’t have to reconcile the accounts to have prima facie confidence that they are all describing something accurate, even with different details, purposes, selection of material, and degree of summary or condensation involved. and, as somewhere mentioned above, the fact that they easily harmonize or line up is further evidence that these are all independent accounts, not accounts all gathered from the same source, and multiple independent attestation is a major tool used in historical study to confirm an historical account.

Well, again, i’ll observe that he specifies (twice) that they left Jerusalem, but I assume you mean left for the relatively long journey to go so far as Galilee. but again, just one thought to consider how i try to be generous to such historical accounts… It is conceivable that Luke didn’t know or was ever aware that the disciples ever went to Galilee. I don’t personally think that likely, given his research and familiarity with the eyewitnesses… i think it is better explained by his literary focus and specific purpose of writing and his literary agenda and outline of Acts where the gospel starts at Jerusalem and then went to galilee and then the ends of the earth, and describing the earlier trips to galilee would just have been (literarily at least) a bit of a distraction.

But it would be conceivable at least that he wasn’t aware of those journeys. and if so, (and here’s the point)… that would still introduce no conflict or contradiction into the account… Just like someone who had only heard me tell of my adventures in the persian gulf may have passed on that story and never shared that i ever went to Bahrain, being i orang of that fact… but this would not introduce a contradiction between his account and someone who related my adventures in Bahrain.

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one additional though just occured to me… it is entirely conceivable that the instruction to stay in Jerusalem happened at or near the end of the 40 days…

the end of Luke’s gospel is clearly quite telescoped… summarizing 40 days in about 8 verses or so. So perhaps that reference to staying in Jerusalem is simply something that happened immediately before the ascension? That is certainly the impression given in Acts, as I read it at least…

He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.
And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

Again, I don’t point this out in order to establish some firm or solid harmonization, but simply to recognize how very complex a reconstruction we would be dealing with… trying to grasp what happened when, what happened before what, who was where, given that all we have are selections and summaries of an entire 40 day period.

So again consider… if we didn’t give allowance for summary or telescoping in the account… If we read Luke’s account alone, we would likely get the impression that the ascension (and “stay in Jerusalem” instruction) happened near immediately after the day of his resurrection when he first appeared to the disciples, no? But reading the second book by the same author, that is when we realize that the period between Luke 24:43 and Luke 24:51 (~8 verses) covers a period of some 40 days.

So it certainly strikes me as entirely conceivable that the instruction to stay in Jerusalem may well have happened at the end of that period, well after their other adventures in Galilee, and for that matter, who knows where else.