Category Archives: New Testament

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Differences in the Gospels, part 3

There are, as noted in parts 1 and 2, differences among the Gospels. So, picking up where we left off last time:

Second and third examples:

In Luke 7:3-6, after a significant sermon by Jesus, local Judean elders and the centurion’s friends intercede for and deliver messages for him; he does not come directly to Jesus. In Matt 8:5-7, shortly after Jesus’s parallel sermon, the centurion comes directly to Jesus, with no intermediaries.

Likewise, Matt 9:18 omits messengers in Mark 5; whereas in Mark messengers inform Jairus of his daughter’s death after he has asked Jesus to heal her (Mark 5:23, 35), in Matthew this synagogue official simply announces his daughter’s death to Jesus directly.

These examples fit not only ancient biographic conventions, but ordinary discourse. When we recount events to someone who may not want to hear every detail, we streamline a story down to the most essential points that we want to convey. I think that’s what Matthew’s doing here. If you disagree, that’s fine; you may in fact have better explanations. I have no personal stake in any particular way of explaining the differences. In some cases we are just guessing; in others, as in these second and third examples, a pattern appears to suggest one sort of explanation as more probable than another.

But whatever explanation you might prefer, please don’t try to deny what’s in the text, in the name of honoring it. That’s imposing your beliefs on the Bible, rather than submitting to what is actually there. That is not respectful to the biblical text. And certainly don’t deny what’s in the text in front of you while claiming that you are upholding biblical authority! Someone who denies what is in front of them in the text is not upholding biblical authority; they are denying it.

So here is my advice to those who, in the name of defending Scripture, don’t want to acknowledge differences. (Not that I meet many people like that; maybe I am preaching here to what I was right after my conversion.)

If they don’t see differences, it’s fairly obvious that they have never worked their way through a synopsis of the Gospels. Maybe it’s time that instead of hammering others with their theological or philosophical assumptions, they read the actual biblical text closely.

And here is my advice to those who, for the sake of attacking Scripture, see such differences as significant contradictions. (Not that those who do so normally consult me for advice.)

Look: if Matthew and Luke made changes in Mark, that means that they knew what Mark said and made the changes anyway. You yourself probably recognize that their audiences had probably already heard Mark. They obviously did not see a problem with this. Simply repeating their sources verbatim was not what they were trying to do. (In fact, most ancient historians paraphrased and adapted the wording of their sources more than the Gospel writers do in cases like this.) So chill out and quit making issues out of things that you know very well that your fellow scholars who are Christians do not find a problem with—especially since the Gospel writers and other writers of their milieu didn’t see a problem with it. What you accuse them of failing to do is not what they claimed to be doing.

For those of us who respect Scripture, let’s respect it enough to embrace it the way God gave it to us. He did not give Christians a Qur’an, dictated by a single prophet. He did not give us oracular utterances dictated by the Delphic priestess and put into nice Greek by Apollo’s priests. He didn’t even limit us to a single Gospel so that new converts would immediately understand that Jesus got crucified just once. He gave it to us the way that he gave it to us, and it’s our job to welcome it and then, by his grace, do our best to figure it out.

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Differences in the Gospels, part 2

There are differences among the Gospels. A Christian who wishes it to be otherwise might say, “I wish there was only one Gospel.” But God gave us four, and it is more respectful for us to hear them the way that God gave them to us, listening to the message of each on its own terms. That does not make their messages incompatible—just different (like, for example, my wife and me). By definition, they have to be at least somewhat different if we have four of them instead of four copies of the same Gospel.

There the matter might lay except that some people today have made a big issue out of the differences. Some popular speakers cognizant of some of the differences have used them to rhetorically terrorize (or at least scare the wits out of) many Christians who never read their Bibles enough to notice the differences to begin with. While some of us who have long seen these differences might be tempted to thank such speakers for pointing Christians to their Bibles, we wish that these Christians would have noticed these differences first in a friendlier setting. But scholars with high respect for Scripture now need to explain (and thus have the opportunity to explain) more about how Scripture is written, as well as its message.

Yes, there are differences

What is singularly unhelpful is when some Christians respond, “There are no differences there!” Again, had God wished us to have just one Gospel witness in the New Testament instead of four, he undoubtedly would have arranged for that. If the Gospels were precisely the same, they would not be different Gospels. While that observation is so simplistic that it should go without saying, responses vary in the degree of variation that the responders observe.

So what kinds of differences do we find? I shall offer in this series of posts only a very small number of samples. I am picking examples that are not very controversial, in hopes of pointing out to Christians who don’t read the Bible very much that there are in fact differences, and inviting them to respect the Bible that God gave us rather than one they wished he would have inspired differently.

I shall not spend much space addressing here those who think that such differences undermine Scripture (and sometimes use them to ridicule Christians) because I spend countless pages addressing those issues in my academic work. This blogsite is mostly for more popular level materials (since my publishers own my academic materials). (Still, I am borrowing these examples from a forthcoming book, because I really need most of my time to write the academic books, and it saves me time if I can borrow my own words from elsewhere.)

First example, the cursing of the fig tree:

Mark 11:12-25 Matt 21:12-13, 18-22
1. Jesus curses the fruitless fig tree (11:14) 2. Jesus challenges the temple (21:12-13)
2. Jesus challenges the temple (11:15-17) 1. Jesus curses the fruitless fig tree (21:19)
3. The next day, the disciples find the fig tree withered (11:20) 3. The fig tree withers at once (21:19)
4. The disciples are surprised (11:21) 4. The disciples are surprised (21:20)
5. Jesus gives a lesson on faith (11:23-25) 5. Jesus gives a lesson on faith (21:21-22)

Did Jesus curse two fig trees over the course of two days, though each Evangelist mentions only one, with one withering at once and the other withering later but the disciples needing precisely the same lesson on faith, in very similar words, each time?

But guess what? Ancient readers didn’t expect ancient biographies to be in chronological order, and moving material around was considered a matter of arrangement, not of accuracy.

And ancient expectations are what we need to consider: it is simply anachronistic to judge documents by standards that didn’t exist in their day, or genres that didn’t exist in their day, even when modern genres evolved from ancient ones with the same names. To ignore genre and the expectations that a writer could take for granted that his readers shared is like ignoring the language or culture in which a work is written. We can’t speak of the “historical reliability” of parables or psalms. Readers in the early Roman empire expected history-writing and biography to be reliable in substance, but not to have anything like verbatim recall of wording.

So critics who condemn biblical texts for differences are reading them anachronistically. So are defenders who pretend the differences aren’t there, unwilling to actually look honestly at the texts they claim to respect!

A couple more brief examples and a conclusion should wrap up this discussion—next time.

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Differences in the Gospels, part 1

I was converted from a non-Christian background, so I didn’t grow up hearing the Gospels. The first time I read through the Gospels as a new believer, I was shocked. Matthew was great, but then Jesus got crucified again at the end of Mark. “How often is this going to happen?” I wondered.

I was shocked because, having been told that the Bible is God’s Word, I assumed that this meant that God had dictated it in the first-person. You could insist on it being like that if you want, but if you do insist on that, everyone who has read it will know that you haven’t.

I didn’t understand the Christian perspective that God inspired Scripture through different human authors, who sometimes treated the same events. I had a wrong understanding of what inspiration meant, an understanding that needed to be adjusted by reading the actual biblical text.

Playing catch-up

Although most Christians do not misunderstand the nature of the Bible this severely, especially if they grew up taking the Bible’s character for granted, many do have misunderstandings. Yet the little kids in Sunday School knew the Bible better than I did, so I had to work to catch up. I had always craved knowledge, but now, believing that the Bible was God’s Word, I began craving understanding of Scripture that could only be satisfied by immersing myself in it.

Reading forty chapters of the Bible a day, and so through the New Testament once a week (or the Bible once a month), was very helpful to me. After a number of weeks I had a good overview of the New Testament. I understood much better how it fit together as a series of different works and letters, and began to hear what passages meant in their context.

Sometimes preachers quote verses faster than one can look them up in context. I wanted to know the Bible, or at least the New Testament, well enough that if someone quoted a verse, I would immediately know the full context. Of course, some verses sound a lot alike, such as many passages in the Gospels that treat the same events. I wanted to know those passages so well that I could, after hearing a single verse, know which of the Gospels it came from, and therefore know its context. (Admittedly, sometimes the best I can do is just mention the several passages that sound alike.)

Examining differences

After I had been a Christian for about seven years I finished my first degree in biblical studies. At that time I decided to work my way through a synopsis of the Gospels, passage by passage, to see if there were any patterns in the differences in wording. I found that the wording was often less close to verbatim than I had expected, although the Gospel writers were often recounting the same events. I also noticed that they often told accounts in a different sequence.

Because I was eager to submit to the Bible itself, whatever I found there, more than any presupposed theology about the way God should have inspired it, I simply adjusted my understanding of inspiration to fit what I found there. I want to submit to whatever God’s Word says, not impose a philosophic or theological straitjacket on it. That was because I believed that the Bible, rather than any inherited theology about the Bible, should direct our beliefs.

I was excited about what I was discovering and contemplated making it a major emphasis in my teaching. As I weighed the needs of the church, though, I decided that these observations were not that important compared to crucial biblical themes that the church needed. One can mention such observations in passing, but churches need to hear the message of the text. Literary-theological approaches, served by ancient background, help us get at that message better than simply observing the mechanics of how writers wrote.

Why the differences?

Of course, I took such observations for granted in my academic work; those who know the biblical text well and revel in discussing it dialogue about such observations. In detailed commentaries, where we have good reason to believe that one source adapted another in some respects we naturally ask, “Why? What was the purpose of this adaptation?”

Sometimes it was to condense narratives: thus Matthew omits the paralytic being let down through the roof, though he tells the more theologically crucial part of the story. (Unless we suppose that Matthew omitted it to protest the destruction of private property!) Sometimes it was to contextualize; many scholars think that Luke envisions an Aegean-style roof different from the more common Galilean-style roof maybe presupposed by Mark (Mark 2:4; Luke 5:19). More certainly and obviously, compare Matthew’s usual “kingdom of heaven” with Mark’s “kingdom of God,” especially in parallel passages.

Sometimes it was for greater precision of wording; Matthew and Luke recognize Herod Antipas as more precisely labeled a tetrarch (Matt 14:1; Luke 3:19; 9:7; Acts 13:1) than a king (Mark 6:14, 22).

Quite often it was for style: trying to raise the level of Greek, Luke removes most of Mark’s historical presents.

Still, in what is probably a majority of cases, except where we find a pattern, one scholar’s guess is as good as another’s. Maybe it was for style. Maybe it was to abbreviate. Maybe it was to provide a few more vivid details the author heard elsewhere. Maybe one author adapted some wording to bring out a different emphasis. Sometimes these observations help us preach a particular Gospel’s message more faithfully, but often we just scratch our heads. (Maybe that is why I am going bald.)

Such differences are common whenever we compare different accounts of events, whether directly from eyewitnesses or from those who knew them. You can probably notice this pattern even in conversations in our daily lives, once you start taking note of it.

So what’s the big deal? Tune in next time for part 2.

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The Jesus of history versus the Christ of faith?

New Testament scholars sometimes contrast the Jesus of history versus the Christ of faith. Not everyone means the same thing by this contrast. Christian scholars, for example, usually recognize that what we can know about Jesus by conventional historical methods is limited; it is therefore less important than how we worship him by faith. We know enough historically to believe him worthy of our trust, and so we embrace the rest of his message because we trust him and his faithfulness in commissioning the right agents (especially the first apostles) to give us their testimony about him.

But sometimes scholars value the historical Jesus that they reconstruct in opposition to, and as more real than, the Christ of faith. Jesus’s early followers would likely have seen this as a problem.

Consider 1 John 4:2-3:

By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world. (NRSV)

Or 2 John 7:

Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist! (NRSV)

According to this apostolic witness, the Jesus who came in history is the Jesus who rose from the dead and now sits exalted at God’s right hand. The Jesus who came in the flesh is not different from our faith; he is the very one who matters for our faith.

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Families Separated at the Border—Genesis 12 and Romans 13

This post is in response to U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions citing Romans 13:1-7 with respect to taking children from their parents at the border.

To be fair, the larger context of his statement is that nations need to be able to legally protect their borders. But the larger, larger context is response to the issue of separating families. Although this post will touch on biblical thoughts related to immigration policies (which will not be resolved here), it is the attorney general’s appeal to Scripture that has invited my wading into the issue.

(Also, up front about me: my wife and kids are legal immigrants from Africa. All came from very dangerous situations, but given the limited number of refugees brought into the U.S. each year, probably none of them could have come as refugees. As of two years ago, the estimated total of involuntarily displaced persons globally was 65 million. The U.S. currently has a cap of 50,000 refugees allowed per year, which would be just over 0.08 % of the total. In the special circumstances of 2016, Germany admitted perhaps ten times that number, mostly from the Middle East.)

But is there biblical precedent for separating families at borders?

Well, sort of: when Abram entered Egypt as an economic migrant or refugee, Pharaoh took Sarai from him (Genesis 12:10-16). God judged Pharaoh’s household for what Pharaoh did to God’s servants (12:17). Some families separated at the U.S. border today might also be God’s servants.

Obeying the Government in Romans 13

But the attorney general was referring instead to Romans 13:1-7. Unfortunately, there is plenty of precedent in church history for governments exploiting this passage to justify conformity to laws that they did not have to create or apply the way they did—including by slaveholders and the Nazi and apartheid regimes.

I am not implying moral equivalence with Hitler’s regime. I am just saying that quoting Romans 13 does not prove its applicability for every situation. Paul wrote that lengthy (paragraph-long) admonition to just one church—the one in the capital, where Christian witness and relations with the imperial government were most at stake. There had also been recent unrest about paying taxes. Add to that unrest in Judea, which in just over a decade would break out in war. It already had a number of other Jews trying to explain to the government that many Jews were loyal and not about to start a revolution.

Speaking of revolutions, the British applied Romans 13 differently than the colonists during the States’ War of Independence. (I personally think the British had a better case than does the attorney general. But now, aside from stepping outside my expertise, I may be getting too controversial …) For further comments on the proper context of Romans 13:1-7, see especially the comments of Wheaton College professor Lynn Cohick (soon to be provost/dean at Denver Seminary and president of the Institute of Biblical Research) in USA Today.

When I was a young Christian, my father at one point forbade me to talk further with my brothers about the Bible. When I tried to persuade him of his need to accept Christ, he said I was disobeying the verse that says to honor one’s parents. The Bible said to obey one’s parents. What was I to do? I felt guilty either way, but chose what I thought was the lesser of two evils. I met with my younger brother Chris to disciple him when my parents were asleep. I kept attending church and sharing Christ on the street despite being aware of my father’s displeasure. I wish I had understood back then that Jonathan and Michal were right to protect David from their father Saul, who wanted to kill him. My father and I eventually had a wonderful relationship. But I share this account reluctantly (and for the first time publicly) to point out that sometimes we have to disobey authorities, though it must be only when absolutely necessary.

The Bible and immigrants

There are more complex issues about immigration, Scripture, and security that I cannot address here, but I will survey some Scripture before going on to questions of application.

God commanded his people to welcome and care for foreigners (see especially Lev 19:34; 23:22; Deut 10:18; 14:29; 24:14, 17, 19-21; 26:13), even embracing as “citizens” (members of Israel) those willing to become part of their people (Num 9:14; 15:14, 16, 26, 29-30; 19:10; 35:15; Deut 1:16; 26:11; 31:12). (Thank God: this provides some of the Old Testament basis for gentiles being grafted into God’s people in the New Testament. Any of us who are ethnically gentile should appreciate God’s kindness in welcoming us as fellow citizens with his people—Eph 2:19.)

  • “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God” (Lev 19:34, NIV).
  • “And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt” (Deut 10:19, NIV).
  • “Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge” (Deut 24:17, NIV).
  • “Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow” (Deut 27:19, NIV).

What might apply to economic refugees might apply even more to refugees from violence, such as the family of Jesus traveling to Egypt to evade Herod’s brutal regime.

The hard part: how does this apply to public policy?

I will offer some suggestions about what I think, but a reader who protests, “You are outside your expertise!” would be correct. We all do our best to apply the Bible as wisely as possible. I am doing my best in this section, but this is not where my qualifications lie.

Security issues differ today from those in ancient Israel, and that I am not sufficiently qualified regarding modern public policy or economics to speak as directly to these issues. Most nations back then did not restrict entry or control borders to the extent practiced today. It would have violated ancient protocols of hospitality, not only for Israel, but also for most of their “pagan” neighbors. Of course, individuals or families migrating differed from a massive group like Israel passing through someone’s territory. Edom and some other nations perceived them as a threat and turned them away (Num 20:18-21).

So some rightly point out that Abram was not an “illegal” immigrant. (In fact, he was warmly welcomed, albeit partly because Pharaoh took a liking to his wife. A great “me too” passage, but that is for another time.) Neither, however, was Abram a “legal” immigrant in the modern sense. I don’t know how much paperwork he had to fill out, but he certainly didn’t have to wait six months or a number of years to enter the country.

I also recognize that part of the stated reason the U.S. government is separating children from their parents is to prevent detaining them with their parents in unhealthy or penal settings. Part of the stated reason for detaining the parents is that the influx of immigrants is becoming too great for the social systems around the border to handle. (I dislike this reasoning, but while my biblical expertise informs my ethical convictions, nobody consults me on public policy matters.)

It is also true that few nations can think of absorbing all the tens of millions of refugees fleeing violence around the world today, whether from governments or gangs. Happily, some nations, such as Germany, Lebanon, Uganda and Jordan, have been accepting and sometimes absorbing massive numbers of refugees, despite many problems along the way. More prosperous and stable nations naturally do become greater magnets for those in need.

I do not have a solution, but I believe that one ethical component of such a solution that would benefit everyone is to invest heavily in improving the stability of economic development of other nations, not least those at one’s borders. We all know that various factors make this ideal impossible in many places, but a country that could invest in building a massive wall on its southern border (for probably much more than $20 billion) might also be able to make staying at home more attractive for people in some countries.

According to the intergovernmental Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which supports democracy and market economics, the U.S. ranks a respectable second (at some $31 billion) only to the European Union (at some $92 billion) in development aid to other countries. In terms of its development aid per capita, however, it ranks eighteenth, and in gross national income, it spends closer to 0.17%, ranking twentieth. That is almost $100 for every U.S. resident; many of us as Christians give far more than that through Christian or other NGOs. But Norway, by comparison, invests more than $800 per resident. What we learn from such figures certainly is limited: how money is used often matters more than how much money is used. But my point in citing these figures is to remind us that there remains room for us to do better—at least for those of us with biblical values.

Applying biblical ethics to secular governments?

Again, I have to concede that my above considerations from Scripture do not dictate what the United States must do. Ancient Israel was a theocracy supposed to obey God’s virtues; as an individual Christian I recognize that non-Christian nations will not abide by specifically biblical virtues, such as loving one’s neighbor as oneself (Lev 19:18), loving foreigners as oneself (Lev 19:34; cf. Deut 10:19), or loving or defending the value of all human life. Aside from the issue at hand, I also understand why a nation not exclusively composed of Jesus’s followers might not want to practice Jesus’s even stronger ethic, given to his disciples, of turning the other cheek (Matthew 5:39; Luke 6:29).

Secular nations or businesses or other institutions will not work by Christian ethics. Still, those of us who are Christians had sure better heed these principles ourselves. Moreover, those of us who live in democracies are expected to use our voice and vote to promote values that we hold. Love of neighbor, by the way, also appears as the epitome of biblical ethics later in the chapter that Jeff Sessions cited, in Romans 13:8-10.

Before returning to matters of immigration, one more digression for U.S. readers: what precipitated this post was a Bible quotation used in a political context, not a particular U.S. political party. I believe that, for those of us who do not believe that human life begins only at birth, caring for the vulnerable includes caring for the unborn. Loyalty to Christ must trump any partisan loyalties, whether on the right or the left.

Immigrants in life-threatening situations

Obviously, many people migrate for better economic opportunities rather than life-threatening circumstances; further, some nations might limit others’ immigration for the sake of the economic welfare of current residents (I admit my lack of expertise here).

Nevertheless, sometimes people’s lives are in danger, as is the case for at least some immigrants to the United States from Central America. A law restricting entry in their case would be clearly unjust. I for one would ignore such a law if genuinely necessary to save lives, and would recommend other endangered persons to do so.

Before some readers take me as a political subversive, let’s make that hypothetical situation more concrete. U.S. immigration policies during the Nazi genocide in Europe denied entry to thousands of Jewish refugees, many of whom then died under Hitler. The U.S. did not yet know about the gas chambers or ovens, but by 1938 they knew very well that Germany was persecuting Jews. Congress, apparently in keeping with the general sentiment of the U.S. public, rejected a bipartisan bill to admit 20,000 Jewish refugee children in 1939. You know what came afterward.

What about famine? Abram didn’t face danger from violence, but he did face danger from famine, which can kill people. My wife’s entire neighborhood became refugees during the civil war she was involved in (further details in our book, Impossible Love). They lacked adequate food and clean drinking water. When, after the war, she returned to the ruins of her home, she was overwhelmed by the silence. Most of the neighbor children had died.

Does Romans 13 justify the issue at hand?

Some issues might be debatable, but others are not. The question that started this post is not just immigration. It is the use of the Bible to justify, as ethical, detaining families at the border even to the point of separating children from their parents. The attorney general may have been quoting the verse simply to say that it’s unethical to break a nation’s laws by entering it illegally. In ordinary cases might be true, though again, most Christians would make exceptions for danger to life, smuggling Bibles for persecuted Christians, and so forth.

But Romans 13 hardly resolves the question of whether those laws themselves are ethical. And when given in answer to questions about separating children at the border, an answer implicitly addressed instead to the immigrants is beside the point.