Was it OK to touch the risen Jesus before his ascension?

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: Leans toward reconciliation

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 an internal Johannine problem before it is a Synoptic-versus-John problem. John 20:17 has the risen Jesus tell Mary Magdalene not to touch him "for I am not yet ascended to my Father." John 20:26-27, in the same chapter and on the same temporal side of the ascension by John's own chronology, has Jesus invite Thomas to thrust his hand into his side. Same narrator, same week, opposite instructions. The contradiction therefore cannot be dissolved by appeals to different authors or different communities; it sits inside one literary unit.

The strongest harmonization runs through the Greek verb. John 20:17 reads mē mou haptou — a present imperative middle of haptomai. Greek present imperatives with the negative mē characteristically command the cessation of an action already in progress rather than prohibiting an action not yet begun. So the most natural force is "stop touching/clinging to me," not "do not begin to touch me." Raymond Brown in the Anchor commentary renders it "do not cling to me," reconstructing a scene in which Mary has already grasped the risen Jesus and will not let go; he tells her to release him because his return to the Father and the sending of the Spirit are not yet complete (cf. 20:22). On that reading 20:17 forbids clinging, not contact, and is fully consistent with Thomas being invited to touch a week later. C. K. Barrett and Craig Keener accept essentially this grammatical point. The harmonization is therefore strong for the Johannine internal tension, and it should be granted plainly.

What it does not resolve is Matthew 28:9. There the women, meeting Jesus on the road, "took hold of his feet and worshipped him" — ekratēsan autou tous podas, from krateō, "to grasp/hold firmly." That is precisely the clinging behavior John 20:17 is read as forbidding, and in Matthew it draws no rebuke whatsoever; Jesus simply tells them not to be afraid and to carry his message. So even granting the "stop clinging" reading of John, the two narratives frame the identical physical act in opposite ways: in John clinging must stop because the ascent is incomplete; in Matthew clinging in worship is the appropriate response and is left undisturbed. Luke 24:39 ("handle me and see") and the Thomas pericope both invite tactile verification of corporeality, which is yet a third emphasis.

The older apologetic tradition, represented by Matthew Henry and others, tried to harmonize Matthew against John by sequencing: John 20:17 occurred before some technical ascension and Matthew 28:9 after it, so the women could touch Jesus once he had "ascended" in the sense 20:17 had in view. This requires positing two distinct ascensions — an intermediate ascent to the Father on Easter morning and the final ascent of Acts 1 forty days later — a scheme the Gospels never develop and which Luke's own forty-day timetable (Acts 1:3) cuts against. The construct is built to relieve the tension rather than read out of the text.

The critical reading, in Brown and in Davies-Allison's ICC Matthew, is that Matthew and John preserve independent resurrection-appearance traditions with different theological centers of gravity. Matthew's tradition emphasizes embodied recognition, prostration, and worship at Jesus' feet; John's emphasizes a transition — recognition that gives way to mission, with touch deferred until after the resurrection-and-glorification cluster is conceptually closed. Both traditions narrate a Magdalene-centered first encounter (Matthew with the women, John with Mary alone), and the divergence over touch is one symptom of their separate development. The contradiction is real but milder than the unqualified "touch me not" framing suggests, because John 20:17 is plausibly about clinging rather than contact in general.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable within John (a present-imperative idiom), but a residual genuine tension with Matthew 28:9 that the grammar does not erase.