Apparent Contradictions

So the first Christian generation had plenty of reasons to want to preserve accurate information about Jesus. They certainly had the ability to do so as well. But did they succeed in accomplishing their objectives? The main obstacle to affirming that they did succeed involves the apparent contradictions between parallel accounts of episodes in Christ’s life. Space does not permit us to look at anything like a comprehensive list of these seeming problems.²⁶ But the vast majority of them fall into predictable categories.

The largest group simply reflects the natural variations in storytelling and writing that characterize most partially independent accounts of the same event, without calling into question the historicity of the event itself. Many involve inclusion (or omission) of those details most relevant (or irrelevant) to a given Gospel writer’s purposes, particularly his theological emphases. Only rarely do these create dramatic differences between two parallels, but even then one can understand how both perspectives may remain true. For example, were the disciples still misunderstanding Jesus due to hard hearts even after he walked to them on the water on the Sea of Galilee (Mark 6:52) or did they worship him and call him the Son of God (Matt 14:33)? It takes only a little imagination to put oneself in their position and see how acts of worship and titular acclamation, each without much understanding or truly empathetic hearts, would be a natural reaction. And once one learns that the disciples’ failures and misunderstandings are a recurrent theme in Mark, while Matthew tends to portray their moments of greater faith and worship more often, one can see why each writer has chosen to narrate things the way he has.

Some of the most dramatic apparent contradictions simply involve different conventions for reporting events in the ancient world. Does the centurion himself come to ask for Jesus to heal his servant (Matt 8:5–9) or does he send his friends (Luke 7:1–8)? Presumably the latter, because it was perfectly natural to speak of someone saying or doing something even if literally it occurred through duly appointed agents. The same is still true in certain modern contexts as, for example, when a press secretary reads to the media what a speech writer has composed, yet news reports maintain that “the President today said. . . .” Does Jairus come to ask Jesus to heal his daughter while she is still alive only to find out later that she has just died (Mark 5:22–23, 35), or does he come only after her death (Matt 9:18)? Because Matthew regularly abbreviates Mark’s longer stories, he has probably also done so here, so that Mark gives the fullest, most accurate detail. But even if Matthew does not satisfy modern, scientific standards of precision, it is unfair to impose those standards on a first-century world that had not yet invented them. None of the differences affects the point of the story, which is the miraculous resurrection of the girl.

For some reason, one of the more popular recurring charges of contradiction between Gospel parallels involves the identity of those individuals seen by the women who went to Jesus’ tomb early on that Sunday morning we now celebrate on Easter. Mark 16:5 has them seeing a young man dressed in a white robe, Matthew 28:2–3 refers to an angel with clothing white as snow, while Luke 24:4 speaks of two men in dazzling apparel. Since angels are regularly depicted in the Bible as men, often in white or shining clothing, there is no reason that Mark or Luke needed to mention explicitly that angels were present. As for the number of them, if there were two it is hardly inaccurate to say that the women saw a young man who spoke to them, especially if one was the consistent spokesman for the two. Only if Mark or Matthew had said that the women saw one person all by himself would there be an actual contradiction.²⁷

Ehrman describes his own personal pilgrimage when, after writing a paper in graduate school trying to harmonize Mark’s reference to Abiathar as the high priest in the account of David eating the sacred showbread (Mark 2:26) with the clear statement in the Old Testament that says it was Ahimelech (1 Sam 21:1ff.), his professor asked him why he couldn’t just admit that Mark made a mistake. This, Ehrman claims, then opened the floodgates for him to recognize the Bible as nothing but a human book with errors all over the place.²⁸ Ironically, this “all or nothing” approach is exactly what some ultraconservatives have (illogically) insisted on as well. But no historian of any other ancient document operates this way. A document that has proved generally reliable is not suddenly discounted because of just one demonstrable mistake. At the same time, it is not at all clear that Mark did make a mistake. The expression he uses in the Greek is a highly unusual one if he meant to indicate time, since it is the preposition epi that he places before Abiathar’s name, which normally means over, on top of, on, near, toward, or some other word denoting location.²⁹ But in Mark 12:26, when the identical construction appears in the context of Jesus’ recounting the story of Moses and the burning bush, most translations render the Greek, “in the passage” or “in the account” of the bush. Probably, in 2:26, Mark likewise intended Jesus to be understood as referring to the passage about Abiathar. Of course, this raises the follow-up objection that Abiathar doesn’t appear in 1 Samuel until chapter 22. But ancient Judaism divided up Scripture into “passages” according to how much was read each week in the synagogues in order to get through all of the Law annually and all of the rest of the Old Testament once every three years. This required several chapters to be grouped together as a “passage” in most cases. Moreover, we know that each passage was given a brief title, often based on the name of a key character in it, and overall Abiathar was a better known figure than Ahimelech. So it would not be unusual if a several-chapter stretch of 1 Samuel had been labeled “Abiathar.” We cannot prove this, but it is plausible enough that we need not resort to assuming that Mark just made a mistake.³⁰

We could continue giving numerous examples akin to these that we have treated briefly. Some of the proposed solutions seem more persuasive than others. Some seeming discrepancies have more than one possible solution, and different interpreters may opt for differing proposals as the most plausible. Occasionally, one runs across a problem where none of the proposed solutions seems free from difficulties. Much depends at this juncture on how much benefit of the doubt one is willing to give the Gospel writers. Completely apart from any prior convictions about whether a certain text is “inspired” or not, historians regularly seek for credible harmonizations along very similar lines as we have illustrated when they encounter seemingly contradictory testimony among ancient writers when they have established themselves elsewhere as reasonably competent and in a position to be “in the know.”³¹ And it is not as if any of the problem passages are new—Christians have been aware of them for two millennia. Both Augustine in the fifth century and Calvin in the sixteenth wrote detailed commentaries on harmonies of the Gospels and regularly addressed the texts that skeptics today find problematic. More conservative contemporary commentaries, along with scholarly monographs and articles, contain plausible solutions for every “error” that blogs can list. People whose faith is shaken as easily as Ehrman suggests his was over the supposed discovery of a solitary error must be fervently looking for reasons to abandon their faith, rather than engaging in dispassionate, historical investigation.

In sum, we may affirm that the Synoptic Gospel writers would have wanted to preserve accurate history, according to the standards of their day, that they had every likelihood of being able to do so, and that the overall pattern of widespread agreement on the essential contours of Jesus’ life and ministry coupled with enough variation of detail to demonstrate at least some independent sources and tradents on which each drew, makes it very probable that they did in fact compose trustworthy historical and biographical documents. Certainly no insoluble contradictions appear.

The Gospel of John

But what about the Fourth Gospel? Here the differences with the Synoptics appear to outweigh the similarities. Noticeably more passages in John than not find no parallel in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. John contains no parables, no exorcisms, and almost no teaching about the kingdom, and he fails to mention that Jesus was baptized by John or instituted the Lord’s Supper during the last meal of his earthly life with his disciples. On the other hand, he contains two chapters about Jesus’ ministry before the major period of popularity with the Galilean crowds that dominates the Synoptics (John 2–4). During that period of popularity, he focuses primarily on Jesus’ trips to Jerusalem at festival time, which are entirely absent from the Synoptics, and the claims he made for himself and conflicts he precipitated with various Jewish leaders there, along with his most spectacular miracle of all—the resurrection of Lazarus (John 5–11). Throughout his ministry, John’s Jesus makes the most explicit references to his own exalted nature, implying his deity, of anywhere in the canonical Gospels. For all these and related reasons, many scholars, including those open to a fair amount of history in the Synoptics, are often more skeptical of the historical trustworthiness of John. Is this justified?

General Considerations

For much of church history, Christians simply assumed that John, as the last and latest of the four New Testament Gospels, saw no need to repeat what was covered well in the Synoptics and intended largely to supplement their narratives. In the early twentieth century, however, in the heyday of biblical source criticism, scholars observed that even when John and the Synoptics did include parallel accounts of the same event, very few exact words were ever repeated, much different from the results of a comparison of parallels among the Synoptics. So the pendulum swung to the opposite conviction: John was so different from the Synoptics because he wrote independently of them, whereas Matthew, Mark, and Luke were related to each other at least partly via some form of literary dependence. At the end of the twentieth century, a mediating perspective was being increasingly promoted that may well do most justice to the most data. By the end of the first century, most Christians around the empire would have been familiar with the main accounts that the Synoptics retold, whether they had ever heard an actual copy of Matthew, Mark, or Luke read aloud to them in church or not. So, while John does seem to be literarily independent of the Synoptics, the older argument about him not needing to repeat a lot of what they treated well may be reinstated too.³²

John’s unique setting also accounts for much of his distinctive contents. Good early church tradition ascribes this Gospel to the aged apostle, brother of James and son of Zebedee, writing from Ephesus to the Christian churches in and around that community, who were experiencing the twin challenges of an increasingly hostile Judaism that excommunicated synagogue members who confessed Jesus as Messiah and of an incipient Gnosticism (see below, pp. 19–24) that had no problem affirming Jesus’ deity but denied his true humanity. Thus we should not be surprised to see John stressing how Jesus was indeed the fulfillment of major Jewish festivals and rituals (as in John 5–10), despite the conflict that it caused with the religious leadership of his people. The loftier claims about his deity may well have been John’s way of establishing common ground with those overly influenced by the Gnostics, with a needed corrective emphasis on how “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14).³³

A particularly intriguing phenomenon that demonstrates how much more both John and the Synoptists actually knew and how complementary rather than contradictory their Gospels are has sometimes been called their “interlocking.” This phenomenon involves instances in which John refers to something so cryptically as to raise all kinds of questions that he nowhere else answers but that the Synoptics do, or vice-versa. For example, John 3:24 refers in passing to the Baptist’s imprisonment, but only the Synoptists ever narrate that event (Mark 6:14–29 and parallels). John knows Jesus was tried before the high priest Caiaphas (John 18:24, 28) but only the Synoptics ever describe this trial’s proceedings or its outcome (Mark 14:53–65 pars.) Conversely, the Synoptics claim that witnesses twisted Jesus’ words to accuse him of claiming that he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days (Mark 14:18–19). But nothing elsewhere in their narratives prepares the reader for this charge. John 2:19, on the other hand, includes Jesus’ allegation that if the Jewish leaders destroyed “this temple,” he would rebuild it in three days, but it goes on to explain that he was speaking of the temple of his body, that is, an allusion to his death and resurrection. This, however, is a saying that could easily be twisted into what the Synoptics claim the false witnesses declared. Or, again, why did the Jewish leaders enlist the help of the Roman governor, Pilate (Mark 15:1–3 and parallels), when their Law was clear enough in prescribing the death penalty—by stoning—for blasphemers? Only John gives us the answer: under Roman occupation the Jews were forbidden from carrying out this portion of their Law (John 18:31). Many more examples of such interlocking, in both directions, can be adduced.³⁴

Specific Passages

We may also proceed sequentially through the Fourth Gospel, noting strong historical reasons for accepting at least a solid core of most of the main episodes as authentic, including those unique to this Gospel. Unique to John 1 is the period in which Jesus’ ministry overlaps with John the Baptist before Jesus clearly “outshines” his predecessor. But the early church is unlikely to have invented a time when John needed to “become less” so that Christ could “become greater” (John 3:30), as concerned as they were to exalt Jesus over everyone. Chapter 2 begins with the remarkable miracle of turning water into wine, yet it coheres perfectly with the little parable, regularly viewed as authentic, of new wine (Jesus’ kingdom teaching) needing new wineskins (new religious forms). John 3 highlights Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, a rare Jewish name that appears repeatedly in the rabbinic literature about the wealthy, powerful, Pharisaic ben-Gurion family. The story of Jesus’ surprising solicitousness for the Samaritan woman in chapter 4 coheres closely with his compassion for outcasts throughout the Synoptics. The distinctive synagogue homily in John 6 on Jesus as the bread of life matches perfectly with a standard rabbinic exegetical form known as a proem midrash. Jesus’ claims at the Festival of Tabernacles to be living water and the light of the world (in chapters 7–9) fit exactly two central rituals from that feast—a water-drawing ceremony and daily temple services with a giant candelabrum installed just for this occasion. And one could continue in similar fashion throughout the Gospel identifying key reasons for the probable authenticity of a key core of each main segment.³⁵

What, then, of apparent contradictions between John and the Synoptics? Many of them may be dealt with via a similar cross-section of the methods applied to the seeming discrepancies among the Synoptics. Quite a few have to do with Mark’s choice to include only one visit of the adult Jesus to Jerusalem, at the Passover during which he was crucified, a choice that Matthew and Luke then followed. It is inherently probable that his ministry lasted longer than the few months it would have taken to do everything the Synoptics record and, as a Jew who kept the written Laws of Moses, Jesus would have surely attended the various annual festivals in Jerusalem prescribed in the Torah. Indeed, John appears more consistently chronological in the sequence of his accounts than do the Synoptics, who often group material together by theme or form, especially during Jesus’ great Galilean ministry. Because Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus took place in Judea just before Jesus’ final journey to Jerusalem, once the Synoptics had decided on their outlines, this miracle simply did not fit into them. Parables may have been omitted because they were a uniquely Jewish form less relevant in Ephesus, to which John’s Gospel was written according to early church tradition. Exorcisms may have been left out because they were often viewed more as manipulative religious “magic” in the Greco-Roman world. The concept of the kingdom is largely replaced by the theme of eternal life, but this is a legitimate substitution because already in Matthew 19:16, 23–24 Jesus uses them interchangeably.

It is often alleged that John and the Synoptics contradict each other over the day of the Last Supper. The Synoptics reasonably clearly describe it as a Passover meal (e.g., Mark 14:12, 14, 16), whereas it is often alleged that John places it the day before the beginning of the Passover festival (esp. in light of John 13:1, 29; 18:28; 19:14, 31). But when John 13:1 explains “it was just before the Passover Feast” and then a verse later refers simply to the evening meal in progress, it is at least as natural to assume that the Passover has now arrived than that this is a different, earlier meal. When Judas leaves the meal and the other disciples think he is going to buy “what was needed for the feast” (13:29), he could easily be thought to be securing provisions for the rest of the week-long festivities, especially since some also thought he was going to give something to the poor, precisely a tradition central to the opening evening of Passover. That the Jewish leaders on Friday morning do not want to defile themselves because of the upcoming Passover meal (18:28) suggests that the mid-day meal is in view rather than that evening’s dinner, since a new day started at sundown in Jewish reckoning and removed the defilement of the previous day. John 19:14 is often translated “It was the day of Preparation of the Passover,” but it could equally be rendered, “It was the day of Preparation during Passover week,” that is, the Friday of Passover week, because Friday was the day of preparation for the Jewish Sabbath or Saturday. Verse 31 actually supports this interpretation since it explicitly declares that the next day was to be a Sabbath. So again, a more careful reading of the text undermines the charge of contradictions.

What then of John’s “high Christology”—his exalted view of Jesus which frequently equates him with God? We must always remember that statements from the lips of Jesus that sound so exalted to us with twenty-twenty hindsight, such as “I am the light of the world,” “the true vine,” “the sheep gate,” “the good shepherd,” “the way and the truth and the life,” or “the resurrection and the life,” were all metaphors that did not initially communicate without ambiguity. Even John’s appeal to the divine “I am” of Exodus 3:14 (John 8:58) no doubt puzzled many. After all, even the Twelve could remark as late in Jesus’ ministry as the last night of this life that only then was he finally “speaking clearly and without figures of speech” (16:29). And even then, Jesus’ reply, anticipating their reaction to his death, suggests that they still do not fully understand (vv. 31–32). Conversely, only the Synoptics narrate the virginal conception, which surely represents high Christology. And they, too, have Jesus using the language of “I am,” sometimes masked in translation by the English, “I am he” or “It is I.” But in passages like Mark 6:50 in the context of his walking on the water or Mark 14:62 as he replies to the Sanhedrin concerning his Messiahship, it is hard not to believe that a stronger self-revelation of his divinity is not being at least hinted at.³⁶

Topography and Archaeology

Intriguingly, while John is the most overtly theological of the canonical Gospels, it also supplies the greatest amount of geographical information about the locations where events occur. Precisely because such references do not reflect John’s main purposes in writing (see 20:31 for those), they are all the more significant when they consistently turn out to be historically accurate. Most sites can still be visited today, and archaeological discoveries disproportionately illuminate John’s Gospel compared to the Synoptics: the pool of Bethesda with its five porticoes near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem (5:2), the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem (9:7), Jacob’s well at Sychar (4:5–6), the paving stones of Gabbatha (19:13), inscriptional evidence for Pontius Pilate (18:29), evidence of Roman use of nails through the ankles for crucified victims (cf. Luke 24:39 with John 20:25), and the like.³⁷

Literary Genre

There is no question that on a spectrum from bare, uninterpreted historical chronicle to total fiction, John stands a little further removed from the former extreme than do the Synoptics.³⁸ John uses his own linguistic style in recounting Jesus’ words, so that at times it is almost impossible to know where Jesus stops speaking and John starts narrating (see, classically, John 3:13–21). In keeping with historiographical conventions of the day, he is often more overtly theological than the Synoptists. But in terms of literary genre, his work still remains closer to Matthew, Mark, and Luke in form than to any other known writing of the ancient Mediterranean world. And a strong case has been made that this form most closely mirrored relatively trustworthy biographies.³⁹ A passage-by-passage comparison of John with the Synoptics points out conceptual parallels at almost every juncture, even if they do not reflect literary dependence and even if they are often narrated in a more dramatic fashion. The very emphasis of John’s Gospel on providing trustworthy testimony to the truthfulness of the Christian message (21:24–25) makes its historical reliability that much more important and probable.