John 20:17 — My Father and Your Father, My God and Your God
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John 20:17 records Jesus saying to Mary Magdalene: “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” The verse raises two distinct problems: a direct contradiction between the Gospel accounts of Matthew and John regarding the first post-resurrection appearance, and a theological problem the Coptic priest’s explanation inadvertently deepens rather than resolves.
The Priest’s Explanation and Its Problems
The priest presented Saint Augustine’s interpretation of “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father” as meaning: do not approach me with the thought that my body was stolen, as if I had not risen. Augustine concluded with the phrase: “because I have not yet ascended to the level of my Father in your thought.”
Augustine’s interpretation resolves the contradiction The priest argued that John’s prohibition was not physical but cognitive — Jesus was correcting Mary’s unbelief, not forbidding physical contact. The previous touching in Matthew (28:9) was permitted because it happened first, when Mary was joyful and certain of the resurrection.
This interpretation collapses for several reasons. First, Second, Augustine’s phrase — “because I have not yet ascended to the level of my Father in your thought” — raises an unanswered question: when exactly did Mary raise Jesus to the level of the Father in her thought? The text gives no such moment. Third, the priest’s timeline requires Matthew to come before John, yet Matthew’s account is the one where Jesus permits the touching, while John’s is the one where he forbids it. A professional apologist would have reversed the order.
The Contradiction Between Matthew and John
Both Gospel accounts describe the first meeting between Mary Magdalene and the risen Jesus on the morning of the resurrection. They are not two separate encounters.
Matthew’s Account (Matthew 28:1–10)
Matthew 28:1 places Mary Magdalene and the other Mary coming to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week. They witness a great earthquake, an angel descending from heaven, rolling back the stone, and sitting on it. The guards collapse with fear. The angel addresses the women:
Matthew 28:5–7 (ESV) “Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, just as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, tell his disciples, ‘He has risen from the dead. Behold, he is going before you into Galilee; there you will see him.’”
The women leave the tomb with fear and great joy and run to tell the disciples. Immediately, Jesus meets them on the way:
Matthew 28:9–10 (ESV) “And behold, Jesus met them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’ And they came and took hold of his feet and worshipped him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. Go tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.’”
The women here are joyful, not weeping. There is no confusion about who Jesus is. They grasp his feet immediately, and he permits it.
John’s Account (John 20:1–18)
John 20:1 places Mary Magdalene alone at the tomb, early while it was still dark, finding the stone already removed — with no earthquake, no descending angel, and no angelic address to the women together. Mary runs to Peter and the beloved disciple, saying:
John 20:2 (ESV) “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”
Peter and the beloved disciple run to the tomb, inspect the burial cloths, and leave. Mary remains outside weeping. She stoops down and sees two angels — not one — sitting where the body had been. She then turns and sees Jesus standing, but does not recognise him, taking him for the gardener. Only when he calls her name does she recognise him:
John 20:16–17 (ESV) “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ She turned and said to him, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Here she does not grasp his feet. She does not prostrate. She does not recognise him on sight. And he explicitly forbids physical contact.
Summary of the Contradictions
These two accounts cannot both be accurate descriptions of the same first meeting. Matthew has: two women together, an earthquake and descending angel, one angel, a joyful departure, immediate recognition of Jesus, physical contact permitted. John has: Mary alone, no earthquake, no descending angel, two angels, weeping, failure to recognise Jesus on sight, physical contact forbidden.
The priest’s claim that these are two separate meetings The priest argued that Matthew’s account happened first — when Mary touched Jesus — and John’s happened later, when he forbade her.
This reversal is internal to the priest’s argument and has no textual support. Both accounts describe the first encounter between Mary Magdalene and the risen Jesus on the morning of the first day of the week. In Matthew’s account, Jesus is met on the road while the women are running to tell the disciples — meaning it is the initial departure from the tomb. In John’s account, Mary is weeping outside the tomb itself, sees the angels for the first time, and then sees Jesus for the first time. Neither account leaves room for a prior encounter. The priest’s ordering also creates a deeper problem: if Matthew happened first and Mary had already seen and touched the risen Jesus, her weeping in John and her statement “I do not know where they have laid him” would be an extraordinary regression of faith with no explanation.
The “My God” Problem and the One-Nature Theology
The priest’s explanation of “my God and your God” introduces a further internal contradiction within Coptic Christology.
The priest’s explanation of “my God” The priest argued that Jesus said “my God” in his capacity as the Son of Man — speaking from his human nature. As a human being who “took the form of a servant,” he had God as his God in his humanity. The Father is the God of Christ in the sense of his human nature.
If Christ has one unified nature, the incarnate God, then it is impossible to selectively apply “my God” to his humanity while excluding his divinity. The priest cannot appeal to a human nature as a distinct subject of speech without implicitly adopting a two-nature framework he officially rejects. Furthermore, if the humanity in Christ is not God in itself — which the priest concedes — then it follows that what was crucified was a purely human being. A purely human being dying cannot constitute a ransom for humanity on the theological logic the priest is using. The priest has backed himself into precisely the corner he was trying to avoid: either Christ’s humanity is also divine (in which case “my God” is incoherent), or Christ’s humanity is purely human (in which case his crucifixion is the death of a man, not God, and the redemption narrative fails on its own terms).
The priest also applied the phrase in two directions: as humanity, Jesus called the Father “my God” because God created him as a man. But the question is not whether God created Jesus’s human nature — the question is: when Christ speaks, who is speaking? The priest answered this in one direction (“whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” — that is the one incarnate Word speaking) but in the opposite direction for “my God” — there, only the humanity is speaking. This is selective attribution with no consistent principle.
The Pantheism Objection and Biblical Evidence on God’s Location
The priest stated: “Ascension does not pertain to divinity at all, because God neither ascends nor descends, because He fills everything, He is present everywhere. There is no place above that is empty of Him, so that He ascends to it.”
This claim — that God is omnipresent and therefore cannot literally ascend or descend — is directly contradicted by repeated and explicit Biblical testimony.
God Descends and Has a Location
Genesis 11:5 (ESV) “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men were building.”
The commentator Anthony Fikry, cited in the priest’s own tradition, explained this verse by saying: “He came down indicates how lowly their thinking is.” This interpretation attributes the statement to the lowliness of the human narrator’s thinking — but the text presents this as the word of the Lord himself. If the narrator is a human writer, then the priest may characterise it as limited language. But if this is the word of God, then describing God’s own statement as reflecting “lowly thinking” is a problem the priest has not resolved.
Exodus 20:21–22 (ESV) “So the people stood afar off, but Moses approached the thick darkness where God was. And the Lord said to Moses: ‘You have seen that I have spoken to you from heaven.’”
The text places God in a specific location — the thick darkness — while simultaneously saying he spoke from heaven. The people stood far away from where God was. This is incompatible with the claim that God is undifferentiatedly present everywhere.
Deuteronomy 4:35–36 (ESV) “You have been shown, that you may know that the Lord is God. There is no other besides Him. From heaven He made you hear His voice to warn you, and on earth He showed you His great fire, and you heard His words from the midst of the fire.”
The voice came from heaven specifically. If God were equally everywhere, the directional phrase “from heaven” would be meaningless.
Deuteronomy 26:15 (ESV) “Look out from Your holy dwelling place, from heaven, and bless Your people Israel.”
The prayer addresses God in a specific dwelling place: heaven. The text does not say “Look out from Your dwelling place which is everywhere.”
2 Samuel 22:10 (ESV) “He bowed the heavens, and came down; thick darkness was under His feet.”
God comes down from heaven. The directionality is explicit.
1 Kings 8:32, 36, 49 (ESV) “Then hear in heaven, and act, and judge your servants… Then hear in heaven, and forgive the sin of your servants… Then hear in heaven, your dwelling place, their prayer and their supplication.”
Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the Temple repeatedly addresses God in heaven as his dwelling place — not as being equally present everywhere.
Nehemiah 9:13 (ESV) “And you came down on Mount Sinai and spoke to them from heaven.”
God both came down to Mount Sinai and spoke from heaven — these are directional, spatial descriptions.
Job 22:12–14 (ESV) “Behold, God is in the height of the heavens. And behold the head of the stars, what is above. Then I said, How does God know? Does He judge from behind the thick darkness? The clouds are His cover, so He cannot be seen, and He walks in the circle of heaven.”
God is located in the heights, covered by clouds, walking the circuit of heaven — not diffused everywhere.
The New Testament Book of Revelation similarly contains detailed heavenly scenes — a throne, a court, specific spatial arrangements — that do not support the view that God is an undifferentiated omnipresence with no location. Furthermore, 1 John 5:7 — “And there are three who bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” — was acknowledged by Trinitarian scholarship as a later addition to the text, not original to the Greek manuscripts. Its presence as a proof-text for the Trinity’s heavenly location is itself textually compromised.
Conclusion
The priest’s response to John 20:17 fails on three levels. First, the contradiction between Matthew and John cannot be resolved by sequencing the accounts, because both describe the first encounter at the tomb on resurrection morning — and Mary’s state of ignorance and weeping in John is irreconcilable with her joyful grasping of Jesus in Matthew. Second, Augustine’s interpretation of “do not touch me” as a cognitive correction rather than a physical prohibition raises its own unanswered question and does not account for Mary’s apparent regression into unbelief between the two accounts. Third, the priest’s appeal to Christ’s human nature to explain “my God” contradicts his own one-nature Christology and opens a theological gap: if what speaks in “my God” is a purely human nature, then what was crucified was a man — and the redemption framework breaks from within. Finally, the claim that God’s omnipresence means he cannot literally descend or ascend is directly and repeatedly contradicted by the text of the Hebrew Bible the priest accepts as scripture.