J. C. Jackson

There's a discrepancy between the Gospel of Luke on the one hand, and the Gospels of Mark and Matthew on the other, as to where Jesus' disciples were instructed to stay after Jesus' resurrection. Luke has the post-Resurrection Jesus instructing them to stay in Jerusalem, whereas Mark and Matthew have him telling them to stay in Galilee. In an article for Apologetics Press, Eric Lyons attempts to explain away this discrepancy by positing that Jesus' post-Resurrection instructions to his disciples in Luke didn't necessarily happen on Easter Sunday, but could have happened on a subsequent day. In this response to Apologetics Press, however, J. C. Jackson points out that this interpretation is flatly inconsistent with the conclusions of innumerable Christian scholars and theologians. Worse still, it's inconsistent with the understanding of early Christians themselves, who were willing to simply remove references to an event in Luke's Gospel altogether in order to smooth over the timeline problems that keeping them would lay bare. But most damning of all, Jackson's direct analysis of the context clearly demonstrates that Apologetics Press' rationalization of the discrepancy immediately falls apart.