The trick Richard has been trying to play here in his series of posts last night is to make it seem as though his quotes from Wikipedia are refuting me. If you've been following this (God only knows why you would), you know (and he knows) I have no dispute with anything Wikipedia says in the passages that he quotes.
The points in dispute are, or were, his original claim that Mary M. was "the first to see the Jesus rise up into the sky" (he's now admitted he made up the part about Jesus rising into the sky); and that all four Gospels say Mary M. was the first to see the risen Christ (he's now changed that, at least in some of his posts, to the first to realize Christ had risen, since she doesn't see him in Luke's account). As long as he sticks to "realize" rather than "see" with regard to Luke, and doesn't claim the Gospels say anything about Jesus "rising up into the sky" until the Ascension, we don't have any disagreements. Richard has known this all along but has dishonestly tried to suggest otherwise. << No, Mary was not the first person to see the risen Christ according to Luke. Luke does not dispute the other Gospels, even if he does not mention Mary Magdalene by name. John 20 and Mark 16:9 specifically name her as the first person to see Jesus after his Resurrection. Every child in Sunday School knows this, including St. Augustine. Nobody argues that Mary Magdalen was not the first person to see the risen Christ. Nobody. "She was at his burial, and she is the only person that all four Gospels say was first to realize that Jesus had risen and to testify to that central teaching of faith." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene >>
