The Gospels are full of contradictions. There, I said it. Take, for example, the differing accounts of the resurrection. In Matthew, the two Marys – Magdelene and Jesus’ mom – are at the empty tomb, greeted by an earthquake and an angel. In Luke, Joanna and other unnamed females are added to the mix, and they see two angels, rather than one. According to John, it is Mary Magdelene only, and after running to fetch Peter and John (the author), she sees Jesus, although she mistakes him at first for a gardener. Mark ends most strangely, with the two Marys and someone named Salome speaking to an angel and then fleeing the tomb – trembling, astonished, and afraid.
These contradictions, among others, have been used by some in an attempt to undermine the veracity of the Jesus story, but is that fair? Over the past few weeks I have been addicted to Serial, a new podcast from the producers of This American Life. As opposed to TAL, in which each episode tells several stories around a weekly theme, all the episodes of Serial relate a single story, specifically, the alleged 1999 murder of a high school girl by her ex-boyfriend. Each week, reporter Sarah Koenig leads us through an inquiry of the relevant moments and characters, trying to piece together what actually happened on one fateful Wednesday afternoon in Baltimore.
As I’ve listened to Serial, I have been struck by how much variety exists in the stories that different people tell about what occurred that day. I have heard it said that no two eyewitnesses will ever tell the same story (and if they do, they have probably been tampered with), but that truth has never before been made so clear. As Koenig looks back 15 years, she will probably never arrive at “exactly what happened,” but rather at a close approximation based on the overlapping testimony of many witnesses.
In this light, the Gospels suddenly seem astoundingly consistent, though never so much as to suggest collusion. The empty tomb was first discovered by women (itself a stunning detail in 1st century Palestine), angels were seen, but Jesus was not. The very fact that the Gospels have not harmonized their contradictions, but have left them bare, seems to me an act of courage – “here are our stories and we’re sticking to them!” – both on the part of the authors and the compilers of what we now call the New Testament. Perhaps the Jesus stories may hold some truth after all.
COMMENTS
24 responses to “Serial, Contradictions, and the Jesus Stories”
Leave a Reply
Differences in the detail of accounts are not contradictions unless the accounts themselves claim to be exhaustive or the differences are logically or practically impossible to reconcile. Of course, the vast majority of theologians in the non-evangelical Christian establishment see all of this as a quaint problem, since all of the gospel resurrection accounts are understood as telling a story of vague spiritual optimism through metaphor. There are different versions of the Prometheus story and there are different version of the Jesus resurrection story…no big deal.
Michael – fair enough. A bit hyperbolic, perhaps, but I still think the main point holds: differences in how the story is told doesn’t undermine it’s essential truth.
“The gospels are full of contradictions” is a bit more than a bit hyperbolic, and that is an understatement.
RJ:
That wasn’t the main point. You belabored the fact that the accounts are inconsistent, not in how they’re told. Contradiction, literally ‘against a word/speech’, is a world a part. The resurrection accounts are remarkably similar, though accentuating differences for a different story arc purpose. Like any good history. But, like Michael said, contradictions is more than a bit hyperbolic.
The title seems to be fishing for shock value
But seriously, Serial is amazing.
Great piece. Thanks.
Great piece. I think what you described are indeed “contradictions”. And as you explained, if anything the small differences in the accounts only support their reliability. What they don’t support is the notion that the scripture is “inerrant” communicated to the gospel writers via “holy telephone” straight from the mouth of God.
Maybe they did get it by “holy telephone” and God just enjoys contradicting herself in order to prove that she is telling the truth.
All kidding and smart arsedness aside, the problem that I see with this piece, aside from the fuzzy use of “contradictions”, is that none of the gospels were actually written by eye witnesses, and three of the four used now lost common source material which each writer or writers felt free to mess around with to suit their editorial purposes. So the analogy to the Serial series just does not hold water. We don’t have any eye witness accounts, so the differences don’t really mean anything other than each one threw in what they needed to make a point.
I think you make a great point about the courage the Church showed in allowing differing accounts to stand. That courage demonstrates both honesty and a trust in the Holy Spirit’s ability to communicate truth despite the admitted and inevitable imperfections of our own attempts even to report basic facts.
Last week a First Things post entitled “Errant Ehrman” quoted Craig Blomberg, professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary. Blomberg writes that “no orthodox doctrine or ethical practice of Christianity depends solely on any disputed wording. There are always undisputed passages one can consult that teach the same truths.”
Actually, the analogy here using the Serial series is perfect. The series starts with Sarah Koenig randomly interviewing teenagers – asking them what they did on a Friday six weeks ago. There were varying degrees of clarity and detail. The simple point was that no one person’s recall is flawless, and greater discrepancies abound when multiple accounts of the same incident are given – which is a big part of what makes the Serial story compelling.
I hadn’t thought of the parallels with the Gospel accounts of the resurrection, but the analogy isn’t fuzzy, it’s dead on. And, the Serial series is easy to download to phones – it’s a great listen!
None of the gospels are eyewitness accounts. They may be reworkings of eyewitness accounts, but we don’t have that material. So the gospels are not direct first person imperfect recollections because they are not first person recollections, period. At least that is my understanding of the current scholarly consensus. Am I missing something here?
I’m just saying that whether we’re recounting something we’ve “heard”, “seen”, or “done”, the details are inconsistent from one person to the next, which is all I think we’re affirming here.
Of course that is true, but I still don’t see the connection to the gospels if they are actually literary reworkings of some other unknown and unknowable source material, rather than being first person accounts of personal experiences.
For example, if I retell the novel Tom Jones in a different way than you would based on your recollection of the book, this does not tend to show that although our stories differ in the details, the events of the novel actually happened. Nor does a subsequent lack of effort by us or others to reconcile our versions tend to prove anything concerning whether the events of the novel really happened or not. It may just as well tend to show that no one really cares to reconcile our stories because they don’t think it matters whether the events of the novel actually happened, because that is not the point. I’m not saying I agree with any of this, but I do agree with the logic.
Wow! 15 comments! Crazy. I had no idea that my little piece would illicit such a reaction. Perhaps a better word than “contradiction” would have been “discrepancy,” but I agree with the sentiment that the Bible is not the Koran. It is the “cradle which holds the baby Jesus” (Luther) and “contains all things necessary for salvation” (39 articles) but it is not the direct/literal word of God (a 19th century idea), in the Koranic sense, or else we’d have to read it in Greek/Hebrew! At the end of the day, what matters is the Word made flesh, to which the words on the page bear witness.
Great comment. Having lived among Muslim inerrantists in the Middle East and among Evangelical inerrantists in the Southern Uplands, I know I’ve had my fill of the inerrancy debate! Let’s move on! The truth is so much better!
lol. I saw this post last week and thought “RJ has just pulled the pin of a grenade”.
lol indeed. These opinions about Holy Writ (that it is full of contradictions/discrepancies) when they are held by clergy in moderately conservative churches, are usually held close to the vest. I suspect it is to avoid unnecessarily upsetting the “body of Christ”, i.e. to keep the money flowing. I very much respect RJ’s honesty in this post.
Agreed, Benjamin: Great comment, R-J Heijmen! I live in the Southern Uplands too, and I suspect we may be in the same corner of those uplands. So before I let you move on…let me offer my two cents as a card-carrying inerrantist who really liked this piece.
I suspect that a lot of people who critique evangelicals — and even inerrantists ourselves — often think that the term “inerrancy” implies that the Bible is a seamless work that should be scrutinized in a twenty-first century, positivistic sense. I don’t think ancient readers took it that way, and I’m not so sure that we should. Often, I suspect, the gist of a story was good enough for ancient readers. I tend to think about the Bible in these terms: “what would God do if He wanted to reveal Himself in written form?” Given the little bit I know of Him and how I see Him act today, it makes perfect sense to me that He would write in the context of relationship (please don’t let Will McDavid see I used that word!), over a long period of time, through several authors, many of whom remain anonymous. It also makes sense that He is part of the narrative; in fact, I see that as necessary to our knowledge of Him. I get other respondents’ problem with the word “contradiction,” and I think I see Michael Cooper’s point about problems inherent in comparing Gospel accounts of the Resurrection we have today with the stories presented in the first person on Serial for the purpose of analogy. R-J Heijmen’s first sentence notwithstanding, I still like his piece, because it has the capability of setting people free from the need to make every little detail of the Bible match up to their standards of twentieth-century precision in order to believe it. Since I do history for a living I know that trying to discern “what actually happened” in the past is very tricky business, and I run into people who seem to think that determining “what actually happened” is simply a matter of objective, inductive reasoning: Simply look at “all” the evidence, they think, and we can dispel the “lies” perpetuated about history by presenting the “real” story. That sort of approach is rampant in popular U.S. history, and it has led to some bad publications that cherry pick information based upon the authors’ need for absolute consistency to support already decided conclusions.
That said, I think that If we work upon the premise that the Church has accepted for two millennia the historicity of the Resurrection as presented in the Gospels, and claim that the Gospels are God-breathed, it is helpful to observe how the accounts match up, regardless of whether they are first hand, second hand or whatever. And the fact that those accounts read somewhat differently encourages me in a way similar to R-J H: their inclusion in the Canon suggests that the early Church did not feel the need to do with accounts of the Resurrection what many people feel the need to do with, say, accounts of the founding of the United States. We can let the Bible stand as a glorious hodgepodge of books that all point to a loving Savior. The ultimate reason I believe Scripture is because it points me to a Person who claims within its pages to be the Truth.
I’d like to give a plug for the recent book “Gospel Writing” by Francis Watson. It’s a long book, but the issue of contradiction – real or apparent – is discussed extensively.
Personally, I go with Origin, when he says: “avail themselves of many things done and said by the wonderful and extraordinary power of Jesus, at times interweaving within their writing that which was disclosed to them in a purely spiritual manner in language apparently concerned with perceptible realities. I do not condemn them for incorporating material that is other than historical in the service of their innermost aim: transferring an event from one location to another, or from one time to another, and subjecting what was said in a particular way to certain modifications. Their intention was, where possible, to speak spiritual and empirical truth together, and, where that was not possible, to prefer the spiritual to the empirical, frequently preserving (as one might put it) the spiritual truth in the empirical falsehood” In Ioan. x.4.18-20
Todd, while there is much to like in the Origin you quote, would that not include, and approve, the idea that the gospel writers actually and deliberately manufactured the “empirical falsehood” of the resurrection accounts in order to “preserve the spiritual truth” of “resurrection” as some “spiritual” optimism about the future?
MC, the contradictions within the resurrection story were certainly the impetus for Reimarus’ discrediting of the event itself, a conclusion he reaches on the condition that these texts *must* be harmonized historically if they are to be believed at all.
But concerning OrigEn, that’s a bit of a red herring, at least as it pertains to what he’s is discussing. While certain discrepancies within the resurrection narratives could lead one to suggest that the particulars of the narratives have incorporated “material that is other than historical in the service of their innermost aim”, they all nevertheless agree that the event of the resurrection happened.
The more important question seems to be not whether the gospels “agree” or to what extent they “agree” but whether the writers of the gospels even cared whether the resurrection event actually happened. If we follow Origen’s logic, and his heavily allegorical and Platonic view of scripture, then we are left with not really caring whether anything “really happened”, as long the “spiritual message” of the texts “agree.” It’s like a sci-fi flick…the allegorical or spiritual message is the only thing that matters. That over-states Origen’s position, but this seems to me to be the position of many main line theologians, and why believing in an empty tomb seems not to matter much in terms of one’s self-identification as a “Christian” in many western theological circles. So, in this sense, and in light of the context of what else is out there, R-J’s post by contrast is almost fundamentalist in its assumptions, and I don’t mean that in a bad way!