The four Gospel resurrection accounts disagree on basic facts — how many women went to the tomb, how many angels appeared, whether the disciples were told to go to Galilee or stayed in Jerusalem — showing the accounts are unreliable fabrications, not sober history.

Why people find it persuasive

These aren't minor stylistic differences; they concern the number of people and beings present and where the disciples were instructed to go, which are exactly the kind of concrete factual details reliable eyewitness accounts should agree on if they're describing the same real event.

Important distinctions

• • Contradiction (mutually exclusive claims) vs. differing selective emphasis and compression across independent, non-collaborating sources.
• • Ancient biographical/historiographical conventions (compression, spotlighting one figure, non-exhaustive lists) vs. modern court-transcript expectations of completeness.
• • Discrepancies that undermine the core claim (that the tomb was empty and Jesus appeared alive) vs. discrepancies in incidental, secondary details.
• • Independent, uncoordinated witness testimony vs. collusive fabrication (the presence of discrepancy is actually a mark against the latter).

Christian response

• • The core claim — the tomb was empty, women discovered it first, and the risen Jesus subsequently appeared to multiple people, individually and in groups, in Jerusalem and Galilee — is unanimous across all four Gospels and the earlier Pauline creed in 1 Corinthians 15; what varies is peripheral detail (exact number of women, whether one or two angelic figures are mentioned, the compression of a multi-week sequence of appearances into a shorter narrative), which is precisely the pattern expected of independent, honest witnesses describing a complex real event from different vantage points and with different narrative purposes, not the pattern expected of a coordinated fabrication.
• • Ancient historians and legal scholars analyzing eyewitness testimony (e.g., the 'undesigned coincidences' work of scholars like Lydia McGrew, and classical work by J. J. Blunt) note that apparent discrepancies of this exact kind — one account mentioning one angel where another mentions two (not a strict contradiction, since mentioning one does not deny a second was present, just as saying 'a police officer arrived' doesn't deny a second officer was also there), or one account naming fewer women while another gives a fuller list — are the standard signature of independent, non-collusive testimony rather than evidence of fabrication; conspirators harmonize their story precisely to avoid this kind of surface variation, which the Gospels conspicuously do not do.
• • Ancient biographical writing (bios) routinely compressed timelines, selected material for thematic and theological purposes, and omitted details irrelevant to an author's specific aims without intending or being read by ancient audiences as thereby claiming those omitted details didn't happen — Matthew's spotlighting of certain instructions or Luke's compression of the ascension timeline reflect known, well-documented conventions of the genre (as shown in Richard Burridge's scholarly work on Gospels as ancient biography), not evidence of careless or dishonest reporting by the standards of their own time and genre.
• • Attempts at detailed harmonization (e.g., John Wenham's 'Easter Enigma') show the accounts can be woven into a single coherent, non-contradictory sequence without special pleading, which at minimum demonstrates the discrepancies are not logically irreconcilable, even if reasonable people can debate whether harmonization or acknowledging genuine imprecision in incidental detail is the more honest interpretive posture.
• • It's worth noting skeptical scholars themselves (including critical, non-evangelical historians like Bart Ehrman and Gerd Lüdemann) accept the core minimal facts — Jesus's death, the empty tomb tradition, and the disciples' sincere belief in resurrection appearances — as historically well-established despite these same detail-level discrepancies, which shows the discrepancies are not generally treated by serious historians as undermining the core historical claims, only as complicating exact harmonization of secondary details.

Christian counterresponse

This is a fair distinction to draw, and in fact many serious Christian scholars (not only skeptical ones) hold a 'core historical reliability without requiring inerrant harmonization of every incidental detail' position, treating the Gospels the way historians treat any other set of ancient sources — trustworthy on the substance while allowing that individual selection, compression, and possibly minor factual imprecision in secondary details are compatible with genuine historicity of the central events; one need not affirm strict verbal inerrancy to find the resurrection accounts historically compelling in their core claims.