What Contradictions Teach Us About The Gospels

Beyond Harmonisation: Part One

What do discrepancies teach us about the Gospels?

Many evangelical Christians, particularly in the United States, believe in a view of biblical inspiration known as inerrancy.¹ Broadly speaking, this is the idea that Bible is miraculously preserved from error – scientific, historical, and moral – since it presents the very words of God. And as Scripture says, God does not lie (Titus 1:2).

On this view, it is impossible for the Bible to contradict itself. This gives rise to books like the Encyclopaedia of Bible Difficulties, which surprisingly aims not to discredit, but rather to harmonise biblical texts.² Sometimes, it is conceded that the manner of their agreement is beyond comprehension. Perhaps they agree in ways that only the autographs, the original manuscripts, reflect. But that they agree is beyond doubt.

When we turn towards the Gospels specifically, the idea of inerrant texts often plays out in a particular model: that the Gospels are like four different eyewitnesses of the same event. While they choose different words to describe the same story – and therefore may appear to diverge, in the way eyewitnesses do – they fundamentally agree on what happened.

Beyond Harmonisation

Suffice to say, many Christians find that this (modern) doctrine of inerrancy doesn’t reflect the way the Bible actually behaves.³ A thinker like C.S. Lewis – widely considered the greatest expositor of the faith in the twentieth century – saw the Bible as ‘an untidy and leaky vehicle’ for divine revelation. For Lewis, the Scriptures are not the Word of God in a univocal sense; rather, they ‘carry’ the word of God.⁴

When it comes to the Gospels, the suggestion that the evangelists are four different eyewitness accounts, which complement but do not contradict one another, is misleading. Outside of certain theological silos, dominated by the convictions outlined above, scholars generally view the Gospels as formally anonymous works which stand in a direct literary relationship. Matthew and Luke relied upon a version of Mark, and John may be reworking earlier Gospels too.⁵