Did the disciples understand the Gospel?

Summary

Forty days after the resurrection, the disciples ask if Jesus will now restore the kingdom to Israel, and He answers with power, the spirit, witnesses, and places to go, including Samaria. They hear Him through one claim, that Yhwh is God, so a messiah who does not expel Rome and restore Israel does not count as Yhwh's messiah. Mark says their hearts were hardened, and Luke 18 says they understood none of the plain words that He would be handed over, mocked, flogged, killed, and raised. After His death they say they had hoped He was the one to redeem Israel, because a messiah who dies did not match the one they were expecting.

When Peter gets the confession right, Jesus credits the Father, not flesh and blood. Peter is still learning on a rooftop more than ten years after Pentecost, and in Galatians 2 he withdraws from Gentile believers when men arrive from James. Chalcedon in 451 forbids any other creed, and the Latin West adds words about where the spirit comes from anyway. In 1950 Mary is declared taken bodily into Heaven, a moving earth is ruled heretical in 1616, a Baptist leader in 1822 defends holding slaves from the text, and in 1960 Bob Jones preaches segregation from Acts 17.

The church fathers print Deuteronomy 32 and never ask how the one who hands out the nations can be the one who receives Jacob, which is the conclusion Michael Heiser also refuses. John Locke, in 1707, is cited for the point that hardly anyone lets the text test their opinions, and that most people bend the text to fit what they already think. In John 8 those men worship Yhwh, keep his law, and run his temple, and Jesus says they do not know His Father and that their father is the devil. Acts 1 leaves twelve men, after three years and forty days, asking about the wrong kingdom, so being close to Jesus is not proof of understanding Him.