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Matthew 28:9 says the first appearance was to the two Marys together. Mark 16:9 and John 20:14-17 say it was Mary Magdalene alone. Luke 24:13-31 has the first identified appearance happen to Cleopas and an unnamed companion on the road to Emmaus. Paul, writing the earliest of these texts, names Cephas (Peter) as the first witness in 1 Corinthians 15:5 and never mentions any of the women at all.
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Cited passages
Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb. As they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, “Rejoice!” They came and took hold of his feet, and worshiped him.
Cited passages
Now when he had risen early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.
But Mary was standing outside at the tomb weeping. So as she wept, she stooped and looked into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head, and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. They asked her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, and didn’t know that it was Jesus.
And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus.... And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering said unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days? ... And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.Luke 24:13-31
Cited passages
Behold, two of them were going that very day to a village named Emmaus, which was sixty stadia from Jerusalem. They talked with each other about all of these things which had happened. While they talked and questioned together, Jesus himself came near, and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him. He said to them, “What are you talking about as you walk, and are sad?” One of them, named Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who doesn’t know the things which have happened there in these days?” He said to them, “What things?” They said to him, “The things concerning Jesus, the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people; and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we were hoping that it was he who would redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened. Also, certain women of our company amazed us, having arrived early at the tomb; and when they didn’t find his body, they came saying that they had also seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of us went to the tomb, and found it just like the women had said, but they didn’t see him.”
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Cited passages
that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
Notes on manuscript readings that bear on this passage — where the surviving witnesses differ over what the text says. Presented for transparency as the textual critic’s description, not as GEBible’s conclusion about the tension.
Examining the tension
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.
Four early sources give four different answers to the most elementary question about Christianity's founding miracle: who saw the risen Jesus first. Matthew 28:9 has Jesus meet the two Marys together as they leave the tomb. Mark 16:9 and John 20:14-17 make Mary Magdalene alone the first witness. Luke 24:13-31 reserves the first fully narrated appearance for Cleopas and an unnamed companion on the Emmaus road. And Paul, writing the earliest of all these texts, names Cephas (Peter) first in the creedal list of 1 Corinthians 15:5 and mentions no woman at any point.
The usual harmonization, defended in detail by Gary Habermas, stacks the appearances chronologically — Magdalene first, then the two Marys, then Peter, then Emmaus — and treats Paul's silence on the women as a culturally motivated omission. Steel-manned, this is coherent on its own terms: the Gospels nowhere claim to give an exhaustive list, and a creed designed for public proclamation might reasonably foreground the recognized leaders. But three obstacles remain.
First, the conflict is internal, not merely a matter of selective emphasis. Mark 16:9 states that Jesus "appeared first (πρῶτον) to Mary Magdalene" — an explicit ordinal that directly contradicts both Matthew's two-woman scene and Paul's Cephas-first creed. These are not complementary silences; they are competing claims about who was first.
Second, that decisive Markan verse is text-critically insecure. Mark 16:9-20, the "longer ending," is absent from the two oldest and best Greek manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus (ℵ) and Codex Vaticanus (B), and Eusebius and Jerome report that the most accurate copies known to them ended at 16:8. Bruce Metzger's committee rated the omission a near-certainty and judged the longer ending a second-century supplement. The vocabulary and style diverge sharply from the rest of Mark. So an apologist who invokes Mark 16:9 to fix the chronology is leaning on a later addition to harmonize the first-century material.
Third, and most weighty, is Paul. 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 is by near-universal consensus the earliest written resurrection tradition, and the language is formal: Paul says he "received" (παρέλαβον) and "delivered" (παρέδωκα) it — the technical pair for transmitting fixed tradition. Most scholars, including Gerd Lüdemann and Dale Allison, date the underlying creed to within a few years of the crucifixion. It names Cephas first, then the twelve, then five hundred, then James, then all the apostles, then Paul himself. No women appear. The standard reply — that women's testimony was legally worthless, so the creed dropped them — fails on two counts. As Bart Ehrman observes, women's testimony was in fact admissible in numerous first-century Jewish settings, and in any case Paul is reciting a confession for the believing community, not deposing witnesses before a Roman magistrate. The legal-inadmissibility argument is also double-edged: scholars frequently cite the very prominence of women in the tomb narratives as a mark of authenticity precisely because it would have been embarrassing to invent — which cuts against the claim that early tradents felt free to delete them.
The more economical reading is that the empty-tomb-and-women tradition and the appearance-to-Cephas tradition arose independently in different communities, and each evangelist chose which to foreground; Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John then narrativized the women's role in mutually incompatible ways. Harmonizing the four requires both a textually doubtful verse and a strained account of Paul's silence.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction, compounded by a scribal expansion in Mark.
Sources for this reading