Can the Resurrection Accounts be Harmonized?

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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March 30, 2021

00:03: Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
00:07: This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
00:15: Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
00:21: Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
00:24: Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
00:27: My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
00:30: Today is March 31st, 2021.
00:35: It is Wednesday of Holy Week and this week we have been dedicating all of our programs to talking about Holy Week and the events surrounding this important time of year.
00:47: We celebrate from Palm Sunday to Resurrection Sunday.
00:54: We celebrate looking forward to the resurrection of Jesus and all of the events leading up to that important moment.
01:04: And today what I want to talk about on the program is actually something that Christians don't talk about very much.
01:11: In fact, I would say that some Christians never talk about it and I think that that is unfortunate because it is important to understand what we're going to talk about today and that is the concept of harmonization when it comes to the narrative accounts that are found in the Bible.
01:36: One of the interesting realities about the New Testament is that we don't have one biography of Jesus.
01:47: We have four Gospels and those Gospels are not really biographies in the most simple terms.
01:58: They're more than biographies.
02:00: Certainly they give accounts of Jesus' life, but they're not rigidly biographical in the sense that they're not necessarily always told in chronological order.
02:13: They're not always specifically meant to tell every detail of a particular situation.
02:21: And we have four different Gospels and each of the Gospels present Jesus within a specific context.
02:30: And it's interesting when you think about it because if we look at other biblical narratives, we don't have that same situation such as the Exodus and the account of the life of Moses.
02:43: We really only have what's there in the Pentateuch.
02:50: We don't have several different accounts of the life of Moses.
02:54: We have the one account and therefore we don't run into difficulties when it comes to harmonization of the life of Moses or the life of Abraham.
03:06: Not to say that there aren't some questions and difficulties that arise.
03:10: There always are when you're dealing with ancient historical documents and especially documents that are narrative in nature and they tell a story.
03:19: But when we come to Jesus, we have four different Gospels and each of those Gospels presents Jesus a different way.
03:27: Matthew, as many of you probably know, Matthew presents Jesus focusing on his being the king of the Jews.
03:35: Matthew uses a lot of Old Testament passages proving Jesus is fulfilling prophecies.
03:44: Mark presents Jesus as the suffering servant.
03:49: Luke presents Jesus as truly man, truly the son of man and in his humanity.
03:57: And of course the Gospel of John presents Jesus in his full divinity.
04:03: And all of the Gospels are true.
04:05: I want to say this from the outset.
04:08: I believe in the complete inspiration, inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible.
04:15: Inspiration means it is God-breathed, it comes from God.
04:19: Inerrant means it is without error because God has preserved it.
04:24: And infallible means it cannot err because of the source.
04:28: It comes from God.
04:30: God is perfect and therefore it cannot make an error.
04:35: So I believe those things and I believe them because of what I believe the Bible is.
04:43: I believe the Bible is God's word.
04:46: And so when I come to the Gospels and a few months ago I taught a survey of the New Testament in Sovereign Grace Academy and I talked about harmonization.
04:55: I said one of the most difficult things that we do as Christians is we read multiple accounts of an event in Jesus' life and sometimes those accounts seem to have differences and those differences have to be understood and harmonized.
05:11: And sometimes it's very small things such as with the demoniac, there's a story of Jesus going to the country of the Gerasenes and he goes and he meets with a demoniac and casts the demons into the pigs.
05:30: But in another Gospel narrative there are two demoniacs but one only mentions one and somebody says well that's a contradiction.
05:40: It's not a contradiction because it seems apparent to me at least that one of the demoniacs certainly had more prominence.
05:49: Probably he was more vocal than the other and so one Gospel writer only gives us the account of the one.
06:01: And we see this several times in the Gospels.
06:04: We see several times where Jesus is in a situation where one way one tells another, even such as the death of Judas.
06:18: One talks about him hanging himself, another talks about his gut spilling out and of course when you harmonize the story meaning you look at it from all sides and understand that it's coming from various perspectives, it's simply that when Judas hung himself the rope again probably broke or the limb broke and he fell headlong and his intestines spilled out.
06:44: So it's not impossible to harmonize those two things.
06:50: Well when we come to the narrative of the resurrection, the resurrection narrative is four different accounts of the same story.
07:04: But all four of those accounts read a little differently and we need to understand that some harmonizing has to be done to understand exactly what's happening and understand exactly how the story fits together.
07:21: I remember years ago I was teaching Sunday school probably about 12, 13 years ago and we had a visiting family.
07:30: It was on a resurrection Sunday morning.
07:32: I was teaching Sunday school.
07:33: We had a visiting family in Sunday school and I said this morning we're going to read all four resurrection narratives.
07:39: We're going to look at the differences and we're going to write them all down on the chalkboard and we're going to harmonize these four accounts.
07:48: And I remember when we were all done I talked about the fact that all of them point to the fact that women went to the tomb first.
07:56: All of them mention angels.
07:59: All of them have the resurrected Jesus.
08:02: All of them reference Jesus appearing to his disciples.
08:06: So we have these, there are big picture items that are in all four Gospels.
08:14: But the question is well how many angels were they? Were they outside the tomb? Were they inside the tomb? Which women went and how many were there and which disciples did they go and talk to and did they divide and break up and did one go one way and one go the other.
08:31: So there are these questions about the story.
08:34: But again the whole narrative comes down to there were women at the tomb, there were angels at the tomb, Jesus' body was not there, he had risen and they went and told the disciples.
08:47: The disciples inspected the tomb and the tomb was empty.
08:50: That's the most important thing and that's the thing that all four Gospels tell us.
08:56: That is the, that's the part that we know.
09:01: But like I said there are some things that are different.
09:05: And anyway going back to my story about the Sunday school class.
09:07: When I finished the Sunday school class the visitor walked up to me and he was so, he was so, he had so much consternation in his face and he said I never ever knew what you said today.
09:25: I never heard this before.
09:27: I've never thought of this before and I'm stunned.
09:32: And I could tell by his face that he was truly stunned.
09:35: And I thought to myself and I thought well maybe he just doesn't read his Bible.
09:41: Maybe he doesn't, has not taken the opportunity to really examine the different narratives and how they go together.
09:50: It surprised me that he was surprised.
09:54: And I don't say that in any way to sound arrogant or aloof.
09:58: It just, it surprised me that people don't know this.
10:03: And so one of the things I want to share with you today is when it comes to how people attack the Bible.
10:14: It's often attacking things like this.
10:16: Oh well these stories contradict one another.
10:19: A contradiction is when two things cannot be at the same time and in the same relationship.
10:25: It's called the law of non-contradiction.
10:27: You cannot have something and not have something at the same time and in the same relationship.
10:33: So for instance I cannot be in my house and not be in my house at the same time and in the same relationship.
10:40: That is a contradiction.
10:42: But it's not a contradiction if one narrative writer tells part of the story and another narrative writer tells another part of the story and we can take those two parts and put them together.
10:54: Or those four parts as it is with the four Gospels.
10:56: It's not a contradiction when the four parts can be fit together even if the fitting it together seems a little awkward.
11:04: I've given this example so many times where I will tell somebody what happened in my day.
11:12: Like today for instance.
11:15: I spent the majority of my morning working on my sermon which is for this Sunday.
11:24: I spent some time reading and I had dinner with my family.
11:33: And I ate at a Chinese restaurant for dinner.
11:41: Now all of those things are true.
11:44: But if I told the story slightly differently.
11:47: If I told the story like this.
11:49: If I said my wife had to take my daughter to the doctor today.
11:54: So I spent the afternoon watching my other children so that my wife could take my daughter to the doctor.
12:02: And then we went to dinner and my wife ate some Mexican food.
12:12: Now are those are both stories true? Absolutely.
12:19: But the reason why is because in the first instance I was focusing on my perspective of the day.
12:27: I got up.
12:28: I worked on my sermon.
12:31: I read some things and I ate Chinese food.
12:37: And then on the second time on the story I told it from my wife's perspective.
12:41: My wife went to the doctor with my daughter.
12:44: I watched the kids while she was gone and then she had Mexican food.
12:48: And you say well why did you you didn't go to two different restaurants.
12:51: Actually we did.
12:53: We had to go into town together this evening and I wanted Chinese food.
12:58: So I went to Panda Express and it was right next to Moe's.
13:02: So my wife went over to Moe's and we both ate together at the church.
13:06: But neither one of us ate from the same restaurant.
13:10: So what might seem like a contradiction in the story is really just having to harmonize all the things that took place today.
13:19: So this is another way to look at how do we harmonize the four Gospels.
13:26: And somebody says well why would God make it so hard? God didn't make it hard.
13:31: God's not intentionally trying to confuse or disrupt our thinking.
13:36: We simply have the writers of Scripture writing down the things that by the inspiration of the Spirit were important in their writing about the person and work of Jesus Christ.
13:52: And so you know this is just four different perspectives as if four people were standing and I know many have heard this expression but I think it's helpful.
14:01: Four people standing on a street corner.
14:03: All of them see a vehicle get into a car accident and each of them explaining what they have seen from their perspective.
14:10: You're going to get four different accounts of the same event.
14:14: None of the accounts are going to be exactly the same.
14:16: There's going to be some crossover.
14:17: There's going to be some things that are all the same but there's going to be some things that are slightly different because of them looking from different perspectives.
14:24: And that is that should not cause us to question the tenacity or the veracity of the text of the Bible.
14:31: Simply should remind us that God has used the instrument of human beings as the writers of his text.
14:41: The Bible says that holy men were carried along by the Spirit as they were writing these things.
14:49: So they're without error but they're not copying off of one another's.
14:56: They're not looking over each other's shoulder and copying what the other one wrote.
15:00: They're writing from their own perspective.
15:03: I want to read a short paragraph and then I'll be done.
15:08: This is actually from one of my favorite websites and I haven't mentioned this on the program very much but I want to point it out.
15:16: One of my favorite websites is gotquestions.org.
15:20: Gotquestions.org is just filled with great articles.
15:23: I've even talked to the pastor who puts these articles together.
15:28: He doesn't write them all but he certainly collates and there's thousands of articles on this website.
15:32: If you have a question about the Bible, I always say go to GotQuestions.
15:38: It may not be the only source you look up but it certainly can be one source that you can find.
15:44: It's certainly better than Wikipedia.
15:46: It's certainly better sourced than that.
15:49: But this is what it says in regard to the different accounts of the resurrection.
15:54: This is just one paragraph.
15:55: It's a longer article and I encourage you to read it.
15:59: It says, can the various resurrection accounts from the four gospels be harmonized? This is what it says in regard to skeptics.
16:08: In the battle with skeptics regarding Jesus' resurrection, Christians are in a no-win situation.
16:13: If the resurrection accounts harmonize perfectly, skeptics will claim that the writers of the gospels conspire together.
16:19: If the resurrection accounts have some differences, skeptics will claim that the gospels contradict each other and therefore cannot be trusted.
16:26: It is our contention that the resurrection accounts can be harmonized and do not contradict each other.
16:34: And I will say I agree with that paragraph and I agree with what they're saying.
16:39: When a skeptic comes up and, oh, well, these stories contradict.
16:43: No, they don't contradict.
16:44: You have to look at them from every perspective and understand that they're each telling the story in a different way, but they're all telling the same story.
16:52: And that story is simple.
16:55: He is risen.
16:58: Thank you for listening today to Coffee with a Calvinist.
17:01: I hope this has been helpful.
17:03: I'm Keith Foskey and I've been your Calvinist.
17:05: May God bless you.
17:06: Thank you for listening to today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.
17:11: If you enjoyed the program, please take a moment to subscribe and provide us feedback.
17:16: We love to receive your comments and questions and may even engage with them in a future episode.
17:24: As you go about your day, remember this, Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
17:29: All who come to Him in repentance and faith will find Him to be a perfect Savior.
17:36: He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
17:42: May God be with you.