Post-Resurrectiin confusion

[nithin]

Hi.. I'm new here.. Just trying to learn how things work here.. I've been having few doubts from the bible.. Hope someone could clear them..
After resurrection, Jesus asks the women and others to tell the disciples go to galilee where they would see him. Then Jesus appears to them in Jerusalem and asks them to stay and not leave Jerualsem till they receive the Holy Spirit. (Why did Jesus ask them to go to galilee?).
But then the disciples go to galilee where Jesus appears to them by Tiberius and Mountain of galilee. (Why did the disciples not stay in Jerusalem?) I would like to know if the sequence of events are as I said.
Thank you

[zeno]

Welcome! I moved your post to the part of the board where it fits best. I am sure you will get some great feedback.

Zeno

[anawim]

It was 40 days. They first went to Galilee, and then to Jerusalem.

[Doom]

There are differences in the narratives, between the Gospels, these kinds of differences are normal and to be expected whenever you have multiple witnesses recounting the same events. Police officers questioning witnesses to a crime notice the differences in how they tell the story of what they saw. And yet successful prosecutions of crimes still happen despite conflicting accounts of the eyewitnesses.

Every major historical event that has multiple witnesses has the same ambiguities. Try reading all the different accounts of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, no two witnesses tell exactly the same story. According to some, Booth said "Sic semper tyrannus' before he shot Lincoln, some say he said it after he shot Lincoln, and some say he didn't say it until after he jumped from the platform. And some witnesses claim he said other things.

There are similar conflicting accounts of the authorship of the Declaration of Independence. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin all tell a different story.

This is the case with literally dozens of other historical events whose historicity no one doubts,

There was a 1994 book about producer Robert Evans called "The Kid Stays in the Picture", it was made into a movie in 2002, it contains a fairly profound statement

There are three sides to every story, your side, my side, and the truth, but no one is lying, rather common memories serve each person differently

The early Church was aware of the differences between the gospels, and yet except for the Diatessaron, which was an attempt to combine them all into one narrative, an attempt that was later condemned as heretical, there was no attempt to reconcile the accounts, rather it was believed that each account should be taken on its own merits.

I do not doubt that cross-examination of all the witnesses if it were possible, would resolve all the differences between the gospels, but ultimately it doesn't matter. And as far as it goes the fact that differences exist is proof of the authenticity of the accounts, these kinds of differences are what you would expect if they were real events described by different witnesses.

[aussie_aussie_oi_oi]

To add to what Doom has said: The earliest or only written sources on Easter, discrepancies in how they report resurrection phenomena have caused many to call into question their historical authenticity. So why the differences?

As much as we might want the Gospels to conform to our modern conventions of history-writing, they don’t read like modern police reports. But that doesn’t mean they don’t contain reliable accounts. In fact, they are perfectly consonant with how the ancients recorded history. The key is to understand the literary conventions of the time, which was  the mid-first century A.D. ,  and how the Gospels fit that mold.

Scholars have noted that the genre of ancient literature that the Gospels most closely resemble is that of Greco-Roman biography. In reporting the speeches and activities of famous figures, writers utilized techniques in recording history that were perfectly acceptable at the time, such as compression (truncating longer speeches for the sake of brevity). The Gospel writers did this as well: they report that Jesus held crowds spellbound for hours with his preaching, yet his recorded sermons can be read in minutes.

We also need to consider the way students (disciples) were taught in the Jewish tradition. Theirs was a culture of memorization. Scholars report that students in Jesus’ day were capable of memorizing prodigious amounts of speeches and sacred texts. Even so, Jesus’ disciples were not expected to “parrot” his teachings, repeating them verbatim. In fact, if they had, they would have been considered poor students. Jesus himself probably gave different versions of the same basic “talk” as he preached in various settings. One example could be the similarities between the “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew 5-7 and the “Sermon on the Plain” in Luke 6:17-49.

Having a proper understanding of Jesus’ message was the key, which was proven by an ability to accurately re-present the essence—or the “gist”—of Jesus’ teachings in a way that would be relevant to the audience and its particular needs. The one thing disciples were most assuredly not allowed to do was to invent sayings or deeds of Jesus.

Even though there is variance in secondary details (how many angels were at the tomb, for example), the basic message is the same: Jesus’ tomb was found to be empty of him early on Sunday morning, and the resurrected Christ later appeared to various disciples over a period of time. What might be some reasons for these varying secondary details?

Ironically, the fact that these accounts are not in verbatim agreement actually enhances the probability that they are historical. Each evangelist is making use of different sources of eyewitness testimony when composing his Gospel. The evangelists didn’t “cut and paste” prefabricated Easter accounts into their respective Gospels.

Each of the Gospels was written to different communities at different times so there will be variations. Luke & Acts is written to a gentile community. The rest of the Gospels and New Testament is written to Jewish Christian communities. So there are variations in the Gospel accounts off all Jesus words and deeds as well as the Resurrection.

[Kage_ar]

I just want to post and thank Doom and Aussie for their responses. Clear, thoughtful and educational, I will keep these bookmarked for times when I need to answer this sort of question IRL.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Banned for having a R--- L---.