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

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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