4.19 Accusation: Gospel discrepancy theory

Published by 1c15 on 4th December 20194th December 2019

Are there discrepancies amongst the resurrection accounts? Critics often tend to accuse the gospel writers of not even being able to agree with each other. Were there 1,2. Or three women who visited the tomb? One or two angels at the tomb? Did they see the angel before they told the disciples that Jesus’ body was gone? Or after? Because of such tensions, some critics suggest that we cannot know what really happened if the gospel writers contradict themselves and the alleged eyewitnesses cannot even correctly report the events. They say surely this renders the whole resurrection story as dubious?

Here’s the problems with such a theory…

1. Discrepancies in the gospels concerning Jesus’ resurrection, at most call into question the issue of complete accuracy of the gospels, but not their general trustworthiness when recording historical events

It’s just true.

2. Historians do not see discrepancies as problems for their conclusions. They can establish a basic layer of historical truth

E.g. Details of the burning of Rome vary. How big was the fire? Who started it? Do these discrepancies nullify the report that Rome was burned? Ancient history scholar Paul Maier, says In the book Fullness of Time: A Historian Looks at Christmas, Easter, and the Early Church that although the details about the fire in ancient accounts cannot be harmonized, the conclusion of historians that the fire itself occurred is what is referred to as a “basic layer of historical truth.” We may not have a great deal of historical confidence in details about Rome’s fire, but the basic layer of history we can accept is that the fire occurred. Historians believe they can identify this basic layer in the worst of third hand sources.

In a car crash at a busy intersection, if eyewitnesses differed on how many cars, how many individuals were in the cars, is it reasonable to say the accident didn’t occur? Would you buy that as a member of a jury? So even if you did grant all of these as discrepancies, you could still hold to the general trustworthiness of the account. New Testament scholar N. T. Wright puts it this way: “

If I read about the Prime Minister in the Telegraph, the Times, the Mail and the Guardian, there are four different views, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have [a pretty good idea] of what the Prime Minister did.

N.T. Wright, New Testament Scholar

Craig Blomberg, an eminent historian sums it up this way

The view held by some Bible students that admission of one error in a book makes all the rest of it equally suspect presupposes a method which no reputable historian would adopt”.

Craig Blomberg, New Testament Scholar

3. Discrepancies indicate these were independent accounts, since copiers would have been more unified on the facts

From a historians point of view, this diversity adds credibility since it indicates the event is being displayed by more than one source. J. Warner Wallace, a Cold Case detective makes clear that when you have multiple criminals at a crime scene, he doesn’t want them kept together so they can harmonise their testimony, he wants them kept apart so when they share their side of the story, there will be varying details because together, their stories will sound unnaturally similar. Blomberg says

Apparent discrepancies are just that—apparent and not genuine—and that they do not call into question the reliability of the Gospel witness. If anything, the minor variations that do occur, when coupled with the much greater amount of close agreement in detail, actually strengthen confidence in the evangelists’ trustworthiness. Verbatim parallelism, on the other hand, where it occurs, only proves that one writer has copied from another and offers no independent corroboration of his testimony.

Craig Blomberg, New Testament Scholar

4. While a discussion of alleged discrepancies is not part of our task here, coherent and plausible explanations exist that account for many, if not all of the discrepancies

So we can still hold to biblical inerrancy but that’s a tangent topic here. Mike Licona’s works on Discrepancies in the gospels show many of what we see as contradictions are merely literary devices that other authors of the same period used like Plutarch. Some of these literary devices are aimed at transferral of details, combining details & copy pasting them elsewhere. All these are perfectly acceptable within their literary genre. We do this today and are often ignorant if past writers use of it. For example, if six members England squad came to my house and shared their World Cup stories, it’d be super excited. Imagine later on I tell my wife I met Harry Kane, Jordan Pickford and Marcus Rashford and they told me X, Y or Z about the competition, am I contradicting myself for not mentioning the other three? No, I’m just compressing my story a little bit.

This is a larger topic and I’m convinced there’s no contradictions in the resurrection account when understood in their literary context.

Structured response

1. At most this challenges inerrancy, not the event itself
2. Historians do not see discrepancies as problems for their conclusions. They can establish a basic layer of historical truth
3. Differences indicate independent accounts, avoiding conspiracy 
4. These discrepancies can all be answered with a sound study of the texts in context

Sources for ‘Discrepancies’

• Craig Blomberg — The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1987), 236. This book is a summary of Blomberg, Gospel Perspectives, 6 vols. (Sheffield: JSOT, 1980–86).
• Paul Maier —  See A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 186.
• New Testament scholar N. T. Wright — David Van Biema, “The Gospel Truth,” Time Magazine, 8 April 1996, 58.
• Blomberg, Historical Reliability, 114
• Plausible explanations — On the Resurrection, see John Wenham, Easter Enigma: Are the Resurrection Accounts in Conflict? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984). Regarding discrepancies in general, see Norm Geisler and Thomas Howe, When Critics Ask: A Popular Handbook on Bible Difficulties (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor, 1992) and Gleason Archer, Encyclopedia of Biblical Difficulties (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982).