Contradictions and Improbabilities in the Descriptions? “APPEARANCES OF JESUS RAISED FROM THE DEAD”

A prime example of imagination at work in a description has already been given in the portrayal of the abnormal phenomena said to have accompanied Jesus’s death given in Matthew’s Gospel. The events that followed the Resurrection provided material for contradictory and even absurd descriptions on the part of all the evangelists.

Father Roguet in his Initiation to the Gospel, page 182, provides examples of the confusion, disorder and contradiction reigning in these writings:

“The list of women who came to the tomb is not exactly the same in each of the three Synoptic Gospels. In John only one woman came: Mary Magdalene. She speaks in the plural however, as if she were accompanied: ‘we do not know where they have laid him.’ In Matthew the Angel predicts to the women that they will see Jesus in Galilee. A few moments later however, Jesus joins them beside the tomb. Luke probably sensed this difficulty and altered the source a little. The Angel says: “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee . . .’ In fact, Luke only actually refers to three appearances . . .”-“John places two appearances at an interval of one week in the upper room at Jerusalem and the third beside the lake, in Galilee therefore. Matthew records only one appearance in Galilee.” The commentator excludes from this examination the last section of Mark’s Gospel concerning the appearances because he believes this was ‘probably written by another hand’.

All these facts contradict the mention of Jesus’s appearances, contained in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (15,5-7), to more than five hundred people at once, to James, to all the Apostles and, of course, to Paul himself.

After this, it is surprising therefore to find that Father Roguet stigmatizes, in the same book, the ‘grandiloquent and puerile phantasms of certain Apocrypha’ when talking of the Resurrection. Surely these terms are perfectly appropriate to Matthew and Paul themselves: they are indeed in complete contradiction with the other Apostles on the subject of the appearances of Jesus raised from the dead.

Apart from this, there is a contradiction between Luke’s description, in the Acts of the Apostles, of Jesus’s appearance to Paul and what Paul himself succinctly tells us of it. This has led Father Kannengiesser in his book, Faith in the Resurrection, Resurrection of Faith, 1974, to stress that Paul, who was ‘the sole eyewitness of Christ’s resurrection, whose voice comes directly to us from his writings, never speaks of his personal encounter with Him Who was raised from the dead-‘. . . except for three extremely , ‘he refrains moreover from describing discreet references . . . it.’

The contradiction between Paul, who was the sole eyewitness but is dubious, and the Gospels is quite obvious.

O. Culmann in his book, The New Testament, notes the contradictions between Luke and Matthew. The first situates Jesus’s appearances in Judea, the second in Galilee.

One should also remember the Luke-John contradiction.

John (21, 1-14) relates an episode in which Jesus raised from the dead appears to the fishermen beside the Sea of Tiberias; they subsequently catch so many fish that they are unable to bring them all in. This is nothing other than a repetition of the miracle catch of fish episode which took place at the same spot and was also described by Luke
(5, 1-11), as an event of Jesus’s life.

When talking of these appearances, Father Roguet assures us in his book that ‘their disjointed, blurred and disordered character inspires confidence’ because all these facts go to show that there was no connivance between the evangelists, otherwise they would definitely have co-ordinated their stories. This is indeed a strange line of argument. In actual fact, they could all have recorded, with complete sincerity, traditions of the communities which (unknown to them) all contained elements of fantasy. This hypothesis in unavoidable when one is faced with so many contradictions and improbabilities in the description of of events.