Got a question? Email me. I don’t have all the answers; God does. (If you want someone who thinks they’re infallible, I can point you to those blogs.) So as usual, all errors are mine.
Here’s a question newbies ask whenever they notice a discrepancy in the gospels. One of the things which strikes ’em as odd is how we have four gospels: Four different books, four different points of view, about the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. We don’t have one absolute, authoritative book about Jesus: We have four. (You noticed we have four, right? The bible isn’t one book; it’s an anthology of 66 books.) Newbies, same as most immature people, assume one authoritative point of view is all you need. Four views, on the other hand, will just confuse people.
It gets especially confusing when your preacher insists the bible is a perfect book with no contradictions in it, anywhere… yet from time to time you’re trying to find this one particular thing Jesus said or did, and you find two instances of it, and they don’t match. Like the resurrection stories. If anything, you’d think they could get that story straight: The whole of Christianity hinges on whether Jesus really did rise from the dead. But it’s not the only passage in the gospels which doesn’t jibe. Sometimes they do, but a lot of times they don’t. And skeptics love to pull out these discrepancies and mock us with them. What’s the deal?
Multiple points of view.
I spent a lot of years as a reporter. When you interview the eyewitnesses to a scene, you’re gonna hear a lot of people talk about the very same thing. But they’re all gonna describe it, or emphasize it, from their own point of view. They watched the event from different angles. They each have their own interpretation of what happened: One thinks it’s the most traumatic thing he’s ever seen, and another thinks she’s seen way worse in 20 years on the police force. Analytical people will be detail-oriented. Emotive people will mostly tell you how they felt about it, and won’t care so much about the details or the timeline. And all of them will be telling the truth. Their truth.
Which of these points of view is the truth? The absolute, unfiltered, unbiased, objective, real truth? Well, I gotta break this to you: There is no such thing. That’s a myth.
Everybody is biased. Everybody. Even God. (Especially God; he really hates sin.) The gospel-writers weren’t unbiased, objective historians. They wrote gospels—declarations that a good, wise, beneficial king is coming. All four of them believed Jesus of Nazareth is that king: The Messiah, the son of God, the one who brings the Kingdom of God into the world, the best and greatest teacher ever, and our Lord and savior. You want an objective point of view? There is no such thing. And even if there were, the bible definitely ain’t it.
Why couldn’t the gospel-writers get their facts straight? Because the gospels weren’t about getting their facts straight. They’re about getting their facts out. The four men who wrote the gospels each wanted to tell the gospel of Jesus, and each of them told the truth. Their truth. God-infused truth, filtered through their personal points of view. Their individual views don’t make the truth any less true. But it does mean their stories sometimes won’t line up perfectly. Doesn’t matter.
But it does matter to those people who—despite all evidence and experience to the contrary—believe objective facts really do exist. The reason they make such a fuss about them, and the reason pagans stumble over them, is because these people believe objective facts are the key to understanding God. If they can just get to the real, unmassaged, unvarnished, absolute truth, they can get to God.
They don’t realize facts aren’t the key to God: The Holy Spirit is.
What inspiration means.
The Holy Spirit leads us to truth. One of the ways he does so is with the bible. The scriptures are inspired by God. Problem is, Christians don’t always understand what inspired means: It means breathed into. It means God permeates it. The folks who wrote bible had valid personal experiences of God, and wrote about ’em in such a way that we can see God all over them. We can read the bible and recognize God in it.
How do we recognize God in it? Simple: We read the scriptures, compare them with our personal experiences of God, and recognize the authors were writing about one and the same God. His attitudes are consistent in both the scriptures and our lives. Yeah, sometimes we won’t see the consistency—’cause we misunderstood God—but the bible is a corrective for that sort of thing. We can see what sort of relationship he wanted with the ancient Hebrews and Christians, and we can recognize he wants the very same thing with us. A God-permeated life is gonna resonate with the God-permeated writings.
But if you aren’t looking for relationship in the bible—you’re just looking for cold hard facts, and you figure “inspiration” means God made certain these facts are extra-extra-true—the bible’s gonna frustrate you. Because while Jesus is the truth, you’ve missed the point: You’re seeking a truth which has been divorced of relationship. Which might be factual—but it’s not true. There is a difference, you know: True means something which accurately interprets reality, and a fact is that reality—but isn’t necessarily interpreted. You can find plenty of facts but interpret them wrong. And those folks who demand the gospels line up perfectly, are doing just that: They’re seeking a bible which suits their definition of perfect. They’re not seeking God.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Facts are important. Just like drinking water is important. But if you’re fixated on the water instead of what water means, you’re not gonna realize the difference between drinking your two liters of water a day, and drowning your internal organs by overdoing it. We read the bible to get to know God, not to get to know data. And sometimes God is best revealed through slightly conflicting data—because each fact emphasizes a part of the whole, but we know better than to assume the whole is gonna get revealed by the bible. God is infinitely bigger than the bible.
Your favorite gospel.
Most Christians have a favorite gospel. They like Mark ’cause it’s so raw, John ’cause it’s so intellectual, Luke ’cause it’s so comprehensive, Matthew ’cause it’s so organized. One of these gospels will best suit your personality type, and as a result you’ll tend to go to it, and quote it, more often than the others.
So why do we have four gospels? Because humans are diverse. Because the early Christians were diverse. Each of them had a favorite gospel, and didn’t want to do away with their favorite—and didn’t want to do away with the other Christians’ favorites either. They realized there’s room in Christianity for multiple points of view. That’s the whole point of the body of Christ anyway: Our differences make us better, not weaker. More capable, not less.
So just as it’s okay to have different Christians, it’s okay to have four different gospels in the bible. Are they gonna line up in every way? Nah. Nor do they need to. They line up in the important ways, and each of them is inspired, and reveals Jesus, and through Jesus the Father. Don’t get hung up on their differences.