On a mountain top in Galilee.
Cited passages
But the eleven disciples went into Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had sent them.
Where did Jesus first appear to the eleven disciples after the resurrection?
- Jesus & the Gospels
- Parallel accounts (distinct sources)
- Within the New Testament
- Matthew
- Mark
- Luke
- John
The tension
Matthew 28:16 says the eleven met Jesus on a mountain in Galilee — a multi-day journey from the tomb. Mark 16:14, Luke 24:33-37, and John 20:19 all locate the first group appearance to the eleven in a room in Jerusalem, on the day of the resurrection itself. Same scene, two different cities seventy miles apart.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
In a room in Jerusalem.
Cited passages
Afterward he was revealed to the eleven themselves as they sat at the table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they didn’t believe those who had seen him after he had risen.
They rose up that very hour, returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and those who were with them, saying, “The Lord is risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!” They related the things that happened along the way, and how he was recognized by them in the breaking of the bread. As they said these things, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, “Peace be to you.” But they were terrified and filled with fear, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.
When therefore it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were locked where the disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the middle, and said to them, “Peace be to you.”
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.
This is the geographic problem of entry 482 brought to its sharpest point: not where Jesus told the disciples to go, but where the first group appearance to the eleven actually occurred. Matthew 28:16-17 reports exactly one appearance to the disciples, and it is on a mountain in Galilee — "the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them." Galilee is several days' travel from the tomb. Luke 24:33-37 and John 20:19, by contrast, locate the first appearance to the gathered eleven in Jerusalem on the very day of the resurrection. John is emphatic about the timing: "the same day at evening, being the first day of the week" (20:19), in a room whose "doors were shut." Luke is equally explicit that the disciples were still in Jerusalem "the same hour" they heard the Emmaus report (24:33). Mark 16:14, from the secondary longer ending, likewise places the rebuke of the eleven at table, with no journey north intervening.
The strongest harmonization, set out by John Wenham and Craig Blomberg, proposes that Matthew simply omits the Jerusalem appearances and leaps to a later Galilean one — that Matthew 28:16 narrates an event days or weeks after John 20:19, not in competition with it. Steel-manned, this draws on the genuine selectivity of ancient biography and on the fact that John 21 does record a later Galilean appearance, proving the disciples did eventually travel north. So the existence of a Galilean appearance is not in dispute.
What is in dispute is whether Matthew's mountaintop scene can be that later appearance. The Matthean text resists it. Matthew 28:16 reads as the disciples' direct obedience to the command of 28:7 and 28:10 — they "went away into Galilee" to the mountain Jesus had "appointed," and the scene functions as the narrative's climax and conclusion, delivering the Great Commission and ending the Gospel. Davies and Allison note that the unnamed mountain is a deliberate Matthean motif (cf. the Sermon on the Mount, the Transfiguration), a theological staging area, and that this single appearance bears the full weight of Matthew's resurrection theology; there is no textual seam suggesting it is a sequel to unreported Jerusalem events. Matthew shows no awareness of a Jerusalem appearance at all — no locked room, no Thomas, no ascension from Bethany, no Pentecost. To make 28:16 a late episode, the harmonizer must read into Matthew an entire Jerusalem phase the evangelist never mentions, and must treat "the eleven" of 28:16 as having already seen the risen Christ in Judea despite 28:17's note that "some doubted" — odd if they had already encountered him a week or more earlier.
The source-critical consensus, from Bultmann through Brown, reads this as the surface meeting of two independent traditions. The Galilean-appearance tradition surfaces in Mark 16:7 and is realized in Matthew 28 and John 21; the Jerusalem-appearance tradition governs Luke 24 and John 20. John, revealingly, contains both — Jerusalem in chapter 20, Galilee in chapter 21 — and chapter 21 is widely regarded as a later appendix precisely because 20:30-31 already reads as the Gospel's conclusion, suggesting the two traditions were stitched together at the redactional level. The harmonizing timeline is possible only by supplying connective material that the texts withhold.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction between an originally Galilean and an originally Jerusalemite first-appearance tradition.
Sources for this reading