Hi brother.
1) I'm not sanguine about you (or anyone) being able to "revise" the viewpoint your prof has settled into. So, I'm basically giving YOU counsel, not suggestions for doing battle with him.
2) Mt. & Mk. Jesus tells his disciples he's getting a meeting together in Galilee, which is where Mt tells us he gives the great commission. Certainly John also indicates that Jesus met with some of the disciples at the Sea shore. So all we know from Mt and Jn is that the disciples took an excursion to Galilee.
So, either they did so because they remembered Jesus command, or they did so in spite of what they thought Jesus said about staying in Jerusalem. But it is certainly a fact that they went back to Galilee for a short time.
3) Luke does not mention a trip to Galilee. Does this mean there was NO trip to Galilee? As I said before, LOOK AT ACTS 1:3. Luke HIMSELF states that there was a 40 DAY PERIOD before Jesus' ascension. So, DID LUKE FORGET WHAT HE WROTE ON THE OTHER SCROLL?!? Did he write first that Jesus ascended to heaven on Sunday or Monday after the Resurrection, and then OOPS, change that at the start of the new scroll? Obviously, he never meant his final words (our chapter 24) to be taken as a one day event.
Either from verse 44 on, or from verse 50 on, the concluding events of 40 DAYS are telescoped.
4) Frankly, given all the other evidence JUST FROM LUKE (see his Acts) at this point to insist that Jesus' terminology "stay in the city" MUST mean that the disciples were to be PLANTED in the city and imovable is just a blinkered, myopic reading of the text. Just making it say what he wants it to say, and not reading even the ONE author as an educated man of his day (he was a doctor after all). They all immediately went OUT of the city (disobeying?) and watched Jesus ascend up to heaven! The very context indicates that it wasn't a woodenly literal command.
There are two simple explanations for Jesus' words:
i) assuming they were stated on Easter they were not stated absolutely, but with an implied contingency, given a FUTURE planned meeting in Galilee. In other words, they were not to go off and start lives elsewhere. Of course you only know about the contingency when you read the other 3 gospels. So, was Luke hermetically sealed off from the apostolic witness (Luke 1:1-4)? So he's telescoping, an obvious fact from Acts 1. It is ARTIFICIAL to read Luke 24 as if he is deceptively pressing these events into a single day, when he clearly knew it was more than a day.
ii) An even more likely explanation (than that he told them to "stay in the city PRIOR to the meeting in Galilee) is that, although there is no OBVIOUS temporal break at verse 44 (due to the telescopic nature of the 40 days), the words of Jesus from that point were stated on day 40, and the disciples DID in fact stay in Jerusalem for 10 MORE days, until Pentecost, as Luke himself relates in Acts 1:13ff.
5) the truth is, the key to interpreting the text is in not treating Luke like a moron. The prof would have you believe Luke is a moron. So, do you believe Luke, or your prof? Does the prof even know that Luke's book is in two volumes? Does he even realize that Luke KNOWINGLY collapses 40 days into a few statements and activities of Jesus? Just a few sentences, which he in part unpacks and elaborates to begin PART 2? Is the prof a MORON? Or does he just treat his class like MORONS?
He probably doesn't even care. He probably doesn't even believe Luke was a real person. He probably doesn't believe he was a meticulous investigator. He just wants to tear down people's faith. And if he can do that with selective reading, with ignoring the connection of Luke 24 to Acts 1, hiding it from his class, etc., that makes him happy.
