On the day of his resurrection.
Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. ... And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest. ... And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus.... ... And they rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together.... ... And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. ... And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven. Luke 24:1-51 Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. ... After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country. ... Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen. ... So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God. Mark 16:9-19
Cited passages
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they and some others came to the tomb, bringing the spices which they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb. They entered in, and didn’t find the Lord Jesus’ body. While they were greatly perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling clothing. Becoming terrified, they bowed their faces down to the earth. They said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He isn’t here, but is risen. Remember what he told you when he was still in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be delivered up into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and the third day rise again?” They remembered his words, returned from the tomb, and told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now they were Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James. The other women with them told these things to the apostles. These words seemed to them to be nonsense, and they didn’t believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb. Stooping and looking in, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he departed to his home, wondering what had happened.
Showing the first 12 verses of this passage. Read the full passage in context
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. She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. When they heard that he was alive, and had been seen by her, they disbelieved. After these things he was revealed in another form to two of them, as they walked, on their way into the country. They went away and told it to the rest. They didn’t believe them, either. 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. He said to them, “Go into all the world, and preach the Good News to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who disbelieves will be condemned. These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new languages; they will take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it will in no way hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.” So then the Lord, after he had spoken to them, was received up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God.
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.
The New Testament gives at least four incompatible timeframes for the ascension, and the sharpest problem is internal to a single author. Acts 1:3 states flatly that Jesus appeared 'forty days' (di' hemeron tesserakonta) before being taken up. Luke 24 — by the same author — narrates the resurrection morning, the Emmaus road, the appearance to the eleven, and the ascension as a continuous sequence with no temporal break: 'that same day' (24:13), 'the same hour' (24:33), and then 'while he blessed them, he was parted from them' (24:51). On its plain surface Luke 24 reads as a single day, Easter Sunday, ending in the ascension. The two Lukan volumes thus give different timelines.
The principal harmonization, argued in detail by F. F. Bruce, is that Luke 24:50-51 is a compressed narrative summary that contains no explicit time-marker fixing the ascension to Easter day; the gap between 24:43 and 24:50 can silently accommodate the forty days that Acts 1:3 supplies. This is textually possible — Luke does telescope — but it requires the reader to import the Acts chronology into a Gospel narrative whose connective tissue ('that same day,' 'the same hour') runs the other way. The compression reading rescues the timeline only by overriding Luke's own continuity markers.
John 20:26 is a harder obstacle. It places a post-resurrection appearance 'after eight days,' when Jesus shows Thomas his wounds — still in the pre-ascension, bodily-appearing state more than a week after Easter. Any reading that compresses the ascension into resurrection day collapses against this verse. For that reason most apologists abandon the single-day reading of Luke 24 and adopt Acts 1:3's forty days as the master schema, treating Luke 24, John 20, and Acts 13:31 ('seen many days') as compatible with a forty-day window. That move resolves John 20:26 but concedes that Luke 24 as written does not say what the harmonized chronology needs it to say.
The Mark 16:19 datum is textually compromised at the source. It belongs to the Longer Ending of Mark (16:9-20), which Metzger and the critical-text consensus judge a second-century addition: it is absent from the two oldest complete uncials, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, is marked or omitted in other witnesses, and contains non-Markan vocabulary. One of the four ascension timelines therefore derives from a secondary, non-original text and carries no weight as independent Markan testimony.
The critical-scholarly explanation, developed by Mikeal Parsons in The Departure of Jesus in Luke-Acts, is redactional. Luke faced a compositional problem: he wanted the ascension to serve as the climactic closure of his Gospel (Luke 24) and also as the hinge opening Acts and leading to Pentecost (Acts 1). He narrated it twice, shaped to the rhetorical needs of each volume — terse and conclusive at the end of the Gospel, expanded with the forty-day instruction period at the start of Acts. The two accounts do not represent two independent memories of when the event occurred; they represent one author deploying the same event differently. The 'forty days' is most plausibly a theological number: forty evokes Moses' forty days on Sinai (Exod 24:18; 34:28) and Elijah's forty days to Horeb (1 Kings 19:8), framing the resurrection appearances as a period of authoritative instruction rather than supplying a chronological datum.
Steel-manned, the apologetic case is at its strongest in noting that Luke 24 contains no sentence explicitly dating the ascension to Easter day, so the texts are not strictly self-contradicting word-for-word. But that defense survives only by reading Luke 24 against its own narrative flow and by privileging Acts 1:3 as the controlling text. The most economical account of the data is that the timelines diverge because Luke wrote the ascension twice for two different purposes, and that the Markan witness is a later interpolation.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction, rooted in Lukan compositional priorities and compounded by a secondary Markan ending.
Sources for this reading