Where did Jesus tell his disciples to go after his resurrection?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The tension here is geographically and grammatically clean, which is why it resists resolution. Galilee lies roughly 70 miles north of Jerusalem — a journey of several days on foot. One cannot coherently command the same people, within the same narrative window, both to depart a city for the north and to remain in that city. Matthew 28:10 has the risen Jesus tell the women, "go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see me," echoing the angelic message of Matthew 28:7 and the pre-passion prediction of Matthew 26:32. Mark 16:7 carries the same instruction at the empty tomb: "he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him." Against this, Luke 24:49 has Jesus order the disciples to "tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem" until empowered, and Acts 1:4 — Luke's second volume — sharpens it: he "commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem." The Greek of Acts 1:4 is unambiguous: μὴ χωρίζεσθαι, a present infinitive of prohibition, "not to be separating themselves" from Jerusalem. This is not "return after a brief excursion north"; it is a standing prohibition on leaving.

The strongest harmonization, advanced by Craig Blomberg and at book length by John Wenham, runs the appearances as a single itinerary: the women's report sends the disciples to Galilee for the Matthean mountaintop appearance and the lakeside scene of John 21, after which they return to Jerusalem in time for the Luke 24 commission and Pentecost. Steel-manned, the argument leans on the fact that the resurrection window in Acts 1:3 stretches across forty days, ample time for a round trip, and on the observation that Luke is demonstrably selective elsewhere. The case is not frivolous.

It founders, however, on what Luke actually wrote. Luke 24 compresses the entire post-resurrection sequence — the Emmaus road, the return to Jerusalem, the appearance to the eleven, the ascension — into what reads as a single day ("that same day," 24:13; "the same hour," 24:33). Joseph Fitzmyer notes that Luke has deliberately telescoped the chronology and excised Galilee from the resurrection geography altogether; even the angelic words at the tomb are redacted, so that Mark's "he goeth before you into Galilee" (Mark 16:7) becomes in Luke 24:6 a backward-looking reminder of what Jesus said "when he was yet in Galilee." Hans Conzelmann demonstrated that this is programmatic: for Luke, Jerusalem is the theological pivot, the place where salvation is accomplished and from which the Gentile mission radiates outward (Luke 24:47; Acts 1:8). Galilee is closed off precisely so that the narrative arc can run Jerusalem-to-Rome. Inserting a Galilean round trip into Luke 24 is not filling a gap Luke left open; it is overwriting a structure Luke built on purpose, and it must override the explicit prohibition of Acts 1:4 to do so.

Source-critically, the consensus diagnosis — from Rudolf Bultmann through Raymond Brown and Dale Allison — is that two independent and incompatible resurrection traditions stand behind the canonical Gospels: a Galilean-appearance strand (Mark, Matthew) and a Jerusalem-appearance strand (Luke, John 20). The Galilean strand is plausibly the earlier and more historical, since Galilee is where the movement originated and where the disciples would naturally have returned after the crisis in Jerusalem; the Jerusalem strand serves the theological need to anchor the church's birth at the cultic and prophetic center. The harmonizing itinerary requires the reader to supply a journey that one evangelist shows no awareness of and another explicitly forbids. That is reconstruction in service of a conclusion, not exegesis of the text as given.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction, reflecting two divergent traditions.