Who was first to see the resurrected Jesus?

Answer 1

Another answer from our community:

According to the gospels, the first non-divine person to see the resurrected Jesus was Mary Magdalene. (In Matthew's gospel, another woman named Mary (not Jesus's mother) is with Mary Magdalene.)

Answer 2

In Matthew's Gospel, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were the first to see Jesus, as they returned to tell the disciples that the tomb was empty and Jesus was risen.

Mark's Gospel, in its original form, ended at verse 16:8, with the young man telling the women that Jesus was risen, and they fled in terror telling no one - so it appears no one saw the risen Jesus. In the 'Long Ending' (verses 16:9-20) subsequently added to Mark's Gospel, Jesus appeared later to Mary Magdalene, who was the first to see him.

In Luke's Gospel, the first to see Jesus were the two men, one of whom was Cleopas and the other may have been Peter, on the road to Emmaeus.

In John's Gospel, the first to see Jesus was Mary Magdalene at the tomb, but she at first thought he was the gardener.

Archbishop Peter Carnley, in The Structure of Resurrection Belief, explains the presence of these discrepancies:The presence of discrepancies might be a sign of historicity if we had four clearly independent but slightly different versions of the story, if only for the reason that four witnesses are better than one. But, of course, it is now impossible to argue that what we have in the four gospel accounts of the empty tomb are four contemporaneous but independent accounts of the one event. Modern redactional studies of the traditions account for the discrepancies as literary developments at the hand of later redactors of what was originally one report of the empty tomb...
There is no suggestion that the tomb was discovered by different witnesses on four different occasions, so it is in fact impossible to argue that the discrepancies were introduced by different witnesses of the one event; rather, they can be explained as four different redactions for apologetic and kerygmatic reasons of a single story originating from one source.