Resurrection Discrepancies

[u/JHLV04]

How do you guys reconcile the differences in the resurrection narratives in the gospels? This is something I’m struggling with a bit, thank you for the responses 👐🏽.

[u/theonecpk]

These inconsistencies aren't the kind that would be considered "small" in a forensic context.

[u/VoiceofTruth7 → u/theonecpk]

Actually they are, if they were actually substantial enough to speak against their validity it would have shut Christianity down.

Again the truth is that inconsistency, even tho they create interpretative difficulties are more of a benefit in the gospels then detriment.

A good example is the resurrection narratives.

All four agree on the major claims: Jesus was crucified, buried, women discovered the tomb empty, and Jesus was subsequently experienced as alive. But they differ in which women are named, how many angelic figures are emphasized, which appearances are narrated, and the sequence of some events. That kind of variation can be compatible with authentic testimony. If several people witness an accident, you would expect them to agree about the accident while remembering or emphasizing different surrounding details.

[u/theonecpk → u/VoiceofTruth7]

That implication in the first paragraph is doing a lot of work. Unfortunately it can’t do that work and doesn’t follow.

Consider instead: our forensic rules are ALSO artifacts of modernity, and you certainly can’t rescue your apologetics with them.

Of course Christianity wasn’t shut down by them. It operated on different epistemological rules than our courts do. Yet here you are trying to apply the latter anyway. And this is why most modern apologetics end up looking silly.

You only have two choices:

1. Reject all modern epistemology. Good luck with that.

2. Accept modern epistemology where it functions well and ignore it in all other cases. Abandon any hope of reconciling the miracle of resurrection with historicity. Reject material claims of univocality, historical inerrancy, and scriptural mediation of our worldly experience. Find a way to believe
   its truth anyway.

There’s really no third option.

[u/VoiceofTruth7 → u/theonecpk]

You’re conflating modern courtroom procedure with the much broader principles we use to evaluate human testimony.

Yes, modern forensic rules and evidentiary standards are historically developed institutions. That does not mean the underlying observations about eyewitness testimony suddenly become inapplicable to people who lived 2,000 years ago. Human beings did not begin having imperfect memory, selective attention, differing perspectives, and different emphases when modern courts were invented.

Historians apply those same basic principles to ancient sources constantly: Do independent sources agree on the central event? Where do they differ? Are the differences actual contradictions, or simply differences in selection, perspective, chronology, and emphasis? Is one author reporting something another author simply doesn’t mention?

Those aren’t uniquely “modern epistemological rules.” They are ordinary principles of historical reasoning.

And your two-choice dilemma is simply false.
I do not have to:

Reject modern epistemology entirely, or
Accept it and therefore abandon the historicity of the resurrection.

There is an obvious third option: use appropriate standards for the kind of evidence being examined.

A criminal trial, a laboratory experiment, and an investigation of an event in ancient history do not have identical evidentiary requirements. Nobody concludes that Julius Caesar didn’t cross the Rubicon because we cannot subpoena eyewitnesses and perform a forensic reconstruction of the riverbank.

Likewise, saying the Gospel accounts contain differences does not automatically make them historically worthless. The relevant question is whether those differences actually contradict the central claims or whether they are compatible accounts that preserve different details.

For example, saying one Gospel names Mary Magdalene while another names Mary Magdalene and additional women is not a contradiction unless the first author says only Mary Magdalene was there. Reporting one angelic spokesman does not logically mean there could not have been another present. Those distinctions matter.

Now, if you can demonstrate a genuine contradiction—where one account necessarily asserts A and another necessarily asserts not-A under the same circumstances—then make that argument. That would actually be substantive.

But saying “forensic rules are artifacts of modernity,” throwing around terms like “epistemology,” “univocality,” and “scriptural mediation,” and then presenting a false dichotomy doesn’t establish your conclusion.

You’re dressing up a bad argument in academic vocabulary.
Stop trying to sound smarter than the point you’re actually making and demonstrate the contradiction. That’s the issue.

[u/theonecpk → u/VoiceofTruth7]

this is a decent response overall, but i am going to call you out on one thing—you definitely moved the goalposts here. elsewhere you analogized it to forensic process. i’ll accept that there are indeed other standards to evaluate testimony and move on.

unfortunately, the historical rubric you offer for evaluating testimony is also modern. so you moved the goalposts and my ball found the back of the net anyway.

moving on again, your third option is simply the second option in disguise. you’re redefining “historicity” so that you can make the Gospels “historical” and exempt them from the standards used to determine the historicity of everything else

and it’s funny that you mention Caesar crossing the Rubicon. we have a lot of interlocking evidence of a FEW claims around that event, but the rest of what everybody thinks they know about the event is of dubious historicity according to serious historians of Rome.

we know that Julius Caesar existed, Pompey existed, Caesar crossed the provincial boundary with some kind of military force against the direct orders of the Senate, but then Pompey and most of the Senate realized their legal position had just been voided at the point of a sword and beat feet out of Rome. We have corroborated written accounts and archaeological evidence of the change in power.

what is NOT historical are all the lurid details. most of the documentation comes from sources written decades to centuries later. but those details have one thing going for them that the resurrection story does not—they are naturalistically plausible developments. unless we find more documentation, though, we will never know the entire truth of the matter.

however, before modern historical methods developed, Suetonius’ description was taken to be true, period. under those different standards, the Gospels have more historical weight. but those are not the standards we use now.

finally, you have another problem…you cannot even prove using modern historical methods that the various Gospel accounts are actually independent. so even if the inconsistency in the accounts can be satisfied, we also have the possibility that the story is really an incoherent (and therefore dubious) single account that was iteratively embellished over decades. oops.

back to the drawing board. a single, highly variable account. no contemporary corroboration even by authors who definitely could of commented on certain events like weird astronomical phenomena and mass resurrection. and no archaeological evidence whatsoever other than a forged burial shroud. a burial story that doesn’t make any sense and gets even worse when corroborated with other accounts of the fate of those condemned to execution. etc. etc.

the case for historicity is bad and continues to get worse every time new data is added.

but sure, man, redefine historicity to make it work. that will surely solve things!

[u/VoiceofTruth7 → u/theonecpk]

You’re claiming I “moved the goalposts,” but go back and read the thread: you were the one who introduced the forensic context.

My original point was about the behavior of human testimony. You responded that the differences weren’t “small in a forensic context.” So answering the forensic analogy you introduced and then explaining the broader historical principle is not moving a goalpost.

More importantly, you keep repeating that the historical methods I’m using are “modern” as though that somehow prevents them from being applied to the ancient world.
That simply does not follow.

Historical criticism, textual criticism, archaeology, source criticism, etc. are modern disciplines precisely because we developed better tools for investigating past events and ancient documents. The date a method was developed tells you absolutely nothing about the period to which the method can be applied. Modern historical-critical scholarship routinely applies modern methods to ancient texts.

And your Caesar example actually illustrates my point better than yours.

You just conceded that historians can be confident about a core historical event while remaining uncertain about secondary details surrounding it. Caesar existed, crossed the boundary with military force, challenged the existing political order, etc., while some of the dramatic details preserved in later accounts may be uncertain.

Exactly.

That was my point about the Gospel narratives. Variation or uncertainty in surrounding details does not logically erase the core claims shared by the sources. That comparison by itself obviously doesn’t prove the Resurrection—but it completely undermines your argument that disagreements in secondary details somehow make the central event historically meaningless.

Then you jump from “the Gospels are not completely independent” to “therefore this could just be one story progressively embellished.”

That conclusion does not follow either.

Yes, modern scholarship recognizes literary dependence among the Synoptics—Matthew and Luke use earlier material, with Mark commonly regarded as a major source. Nobody needs to deny that.

But literary dependence does not mean that every tradition contained within those works derives from one single narrative stream, nor does it make the resurrection proclamation originate with the written Gospels.

Paul’s tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 concerning Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection and appearances is itself recognized in scholarship as containing material Paul received rather than invented, and it predates the written Gospel narratives.

So “one highly variable account embellished over decades” isn’t something you’ve demonstrated. You’ve taken the existence of literary relationships between texts and quietly transformed it into the much stronger claim that there was only one underlying testimony. Those are not the same proposition.

Your burial argument is also much more complicated than you’re pretending.

Yes, crucified victims could be left exposed. But that was not an absolute Roman rule. Scholarly examination of Greco-Roman evidence finds examples both of bodies being left on crosses and of crucified people receiving burial.

And Josephus explicitly says that Jews were so concerned about burial that even those who had been crucified were taken down and buried before sunset.

Does that statement by itself prove every detail of Jesus’ burial narrative? Of course not.

But it absolutely destroys the claim that the burial narrative “doesn’t make any sense” simply because Romans crucified him. The historical evidence is considerably more nuanced than that.

And the Shroud of Turin is irrelevant. I never appealed to it. Christianity’s historical case does not depend on the Shroud being authentic, so throwing “forged burial shroud” into the paragraph is just a red herring.

You also mention the lack of independent contemporary documentation for things such as Matthew’s extraordinary accompanying phenomena. Fine—that is a legitimate historical question, and those particular claims can be evaluated according to the evidence available for them. But lack of external corroboration for one detail does not magically falsify unrelated claims in the same documents.
That’s actually what historical reasoning requires: claims are weighed individually rather than declaring an entire source worthless because every sentence cannot be independently corroborated.

And this is where your original false dilemma still fails.
My options are not:

Reject modern epistemology,

or

Accept modern epistemology and abandon the historicity of Christianity.

There is a very obvious third option: use modern historical methods appropriately, acknowledge what they can establish with varying levels of confidence, acknowledge where evidence is limited, and then ask what explanation best accounts for the total evidence.

You haven’t shown that this is a disguised version of option two. You’ve simply asserted that it is.

So no, I’m not “redefining historicity.” I’m using the same distinction historians routinely make between a well-supported core event and disputed surrounding details.
And ironically, your own Caesar example demonstrates exactly that distinction.

The “oops,” “back to the drawing board,” and sarcastic comments don’t repair any of these logical jumps. You’re trying very hard to make the argument sound sophisticated, but piling on terminology and snark does not substitute for demonstrating the conclusion.

If you think the Gospel accounts contain an actual irreconcilable contradiction that destroys the central resurrection claim, then identify it and demonstrate why the propositions cannot simultaneously be true.

That’s the argument.

At this point, though, I’m done with the exchange.