Matthew 28 versus John 20.

i believe that what jar is getting at is that they are simply separate stories, and should be read as such. neither is exactly an account of what happened per se, like a history would be, but rather are homiletics or some similar fictionalized storytelling framework designed to teach the gospels.for instance, go about rectifying gibson's "passion of the christ" with zeffirelli's "jesus of nazareth". they won't quite line up, either.this kind of thing happens all over the bible, especially in the torah. like the gospels, the torah originally existed as several separate (and slightly contradictory) documents, and a redactor has interwoven them. compare the stories of genesis 1 and genesis 2, for instance. you can try to reconcile the two, but doing so will betray one or the other, or both.

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In my view the Bible is the grand narrative of God dealing with His creation as written by His image bearing creatures, not one ghost written by God. In that you will find human fallibility.

Frankly, it is THE thing that is relevant. If it didn't happen then the Christian faith is based on either an error or a lie, and as Paul says we are wasting our time or worse.

But it is irrelevant to the topic and honestly, pretty irrelevant to Jesus message IMHO as well.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Yes, that's the sensible view, and I was pretty sure that was how you looked at it. However, it seems to me that the OP is posing the topic as a potential problem for inerrantists.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

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They were written about 40 years after the resurrection so there would still have been eyewitnesses.

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Really ? Matthew is usually dated about that time, but John is dated later typically to ~60 years after the events. And don't forget that the Jewish Revolt and it's aftermath would have reduced the number of surviving eyewitnesses. And I doubt that the (unknown) author of Matthew had any reliable eyewitnesses telling him about, for instance, the dead "saints" wandering Jerusalem (27:52-3)

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I think it is generally agreed that the first books were by Paul around 50 AD and the first gospel, (Mark) was about 15 years later. I agree that the minor details would vary over that span of time.

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Of course with both Matthew and John being written later there's plenty of room for more major differences to come in. Consider the differences between Matthew and Luke for a start.

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That I disagree with. If everything lined up perfectly it would be a strong indication that there was an agreed upon agenda and they were going to make everything fit into a preconceived narrative. The fact that there are discrepancies should lead us to believe that we have the letters that accurately reflect what the original authors believed to be truthful, and not what someone later wanted to promote.

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And thus we know that the author of Luke and Matthew disagreed to the point where we cannot trust that either account is reliable or based on reliable eyewitness testimony. (Although they agreed on much of the material that they copied from Mark).

Agreed There were no doubt other written records around by eyewitnesses, or from the accounts of eye witnesees that the writers would have drawn, (possibly Q), but I'm not inclined to think that they were copied directly from Mark, but who knows.As I explained earlier, I contend that the fact that there are discrepencies in the non-essential details of the accounts adds credence to the essential details of which the resurrection is central. Nobody who was trying to promote a fictional version of this would have put together things that had inconsistencies in the details.

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There were no doubt other written records around by eyewitnesses, or from the accounts of eye witnesees that the writers would have drawn, (possibly Q), but I'm not inclined to think that they were copied directly from Mark, but who knows.

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THat they drew from other documents is quite possible. That these documents were written by eyewitnesses or directly from eyewitness accounts is rather more doubtful. I'm not sure what the point in postulating additional copying is. It doesn't seem to be supported by evidence or help your argument.

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As I explained earlier, I contend that the fact that there are discrepencies in the non-essential details of the accounts adds credence to the essential details of which the resurrection is central. Nobody who was trying to promote a fictional version of this would have put together things that had inconsistencies in the details.

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Because obviously you should believe documents containing major inaccuracies... No, its evidence that there wasn't a coordinated plot to pass off a deliberately created invention as fact but who suggests that ? But it is also evidence that the account underwent a good deal of legendary development - likely after the writing of Mark, and who knows how much before ? Paul tells us very little about Jesus life, or even the resurrection - not even mentioning the empty tomb, for instance.

Do you have any evidence for either of the assertions in this sentence?

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

No doubt? Really? Really?
Any evidence to back this up? Is tradition and your personal beliefs your evidence?

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

After reading the above posts, I had to go back and read what I had written in the OP. From the responses, it seemed that I had asked why there IS a contradiction between Matthew 28 and John 20. But after rereading my OP, I see that I had asked what I had intended to ask - an explanation for why there ISN’T a contradiction.

perhaps the logical answer is that they can't be reconciled.

arachnophilia,re: perhaps the logical answer is that they can't be reconciled.Perhaps so.However, I was hoping to hear from someone who thinks that there ARE no contradictions in the Bible.

The biggest influence on those statistics is infant and child mortality. I am not saying that helps the situation for the advocates much at all but during those times if you could make it into adulthood you had a pretty good chance of living a decently long life barring illness and such.

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If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. --Thomas Jefferson

well, you're welcome to keep trying of course, but those kind of responses are generally pretty unsatisfying. those who think that there are no contradictions in the bible know how to hand-waive a few away, and generally haven't noticed the hundreds of other ones. so they duck the issue, pretend it isn't there, stick their fingers in their ears and go lalalalalala.they operate from the assumption that god wrote the bible personally, and god is perfect, so any apparent contradiction obviously can't be. but when pressed for explanations, they generally falter. or resort to the mystical "limits of human understanding" nonsense.i was in my friend's church once, and the guest sermon ran short, and so the pastor asked for questions. first about the sermon, and then about anything. so i asked, in front of the whole congregation, a question very similar to yours. here is an apparent contradiction, how do we reconcile these two gospels? now, i'd heard a few arguments about the specific question i had asked, but i wanted a really good answer.what followed was the pastor saying, "i don't know," a lot of head-scratching, and the sounds of pages flipping back and forth and people murmuring that they had never noticed that before.critically thinking about the bible is the way of the devil, you know.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

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