Harmonization of the Gospels

Why Harmonization Matters for the Gospels

If you weren't here, it'll be absolutely necessary to cover these things. And I would say that even for those of you who were, and as I sit here, I see, you know, our Minister of Music over here, Brother George.

And brother, it's stuck. You've got the position. And ironically, about the only people who don't know why are Don and Roxy. So that's, I've only heard third hand as to why you're now the official Minister of Music.

Yes, at PRBC. Then, of course, over here, we have Codex Ricotonius, which was here. We did the introduction along with its owner, and Brick. And so some of you were here. But I would imagine that we all need a refresher concerning some of the basics of looking at the Synoptic Gospels, especially as we go into the most difficult section.

Now, let me remind us all again of one of the reasons that I felt it absolutely necessary to once again call us all into some very, very difficult waters. I don't do this for the fun of it. I don't do this because it's the easiest thing to do.

Believe you me, I went to a Southern Baptist Church for a long time. I know how to produce fluff studies, which are real easy and don't take any time or effort on my part at all, and won't take any time or effort on yours either.

I know how to do that. I don't do this just because this is the fun way of doing things. It isn't. As you know, I'm an apologist. I listen to those who attack the faith with regularity. I spent yesterday morning in the dark riding out to New River and back, listening to Achmed Didat, and once again familiarizing myself with what a purposeful deceiver the man was, and was reminded once again of the common nature of the kinds of attacks that are prevalent upon the faith, and of course now in the days of the Internet, are downright ubiquitous.

I would feel it to be a horrific failure on my part if any person who attended the means of grace at this church, in other words, who was here regularly, desired to be instructed out of the Word of God, could spend any serious amount of time in our midst, and not be given a foundational basis for knowing why we believe what we believe, and being able to give an answer to the common attacks that are launched against our faith in our society today.

None of us, if we want to speak to the world at all, can avoid these things anymore. As I've said so often, my parents' generation, a generation before that, really didn't have to think about these things.

There was a general, still in the populace, respect for the Bible, and you didn't have the Internet, and you didn't have Bart Ehrman, and you didn't have all that kind of stuff running around, and that's not the case any longer.

And so there are all sorts of things that we have to think about, and we have to study that the preceding generations did not, but that's simply where the Lord has put us. And so the question is, will we do the work that's necessary?

These are not the most enjoyable things. As I said, they're not fluffy. But at the same time, when you talk to a person, and they say, well, we can't trust that Jesus Christ was crucified, because there are so many contradictions between the Gospels.

Where did they get that? Well, they probably got it in their class at ASU, or Glendale Community, or someplace like that, from a professor who read Bart Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted, or Misquoting Jesus, or something like that.

And since he is implicitly trusted, then they're repeating that. Have they done much work on their own to verify these things? Of course not. But upon whom does the weight fall to know enough of the background to dispel the fog of ignorance?

It falls on us. It doesn't fall on them. And I hear people all the time saying, well, all you've got to do is just give your testimony. Well, the Lord can use a lot of things, but we live in a day where there's so much factual error out there, that a Christian who has not thought these things through and looked at these things is going to be a very silent Christian.

And so, in my reading, in my study, it is very plain to me that within the general field of saying the Bible is unreliable, one of the primary assertions that is made that silence is Christians is derived from alleged contradictions, from alleged discrepancies amongst the Gospels.

This certainly is Bart Ehrman's perspective. This is certainly a part of his presentation. And therefore, it will be something that you will encounter over and over again. So, being able to look someone in the eye and say, well, you know what?

At our church, well, back up a minute. One of the things that you will hear, the way in which it will be presented, as I mentioned, Bart Ehrman is one of the primary people that does this, is they'll say, well, look, Christians study the New Testament.

They read Matthew, and they go, okay. And then they read Mark, and say, well, that sounds like Matthew. And they read Luke, and say, well, that sounds like Matthew and Mark. And they read John, that sounds a little bit different, but okay.

Pretty much the same story. They, if you want to really see what's going on, they say, you need to read those Gospels in parallel. Not in series, but in parallel, so that they are right next to each other as you listen to what they're saying.

Well, that's exactly what we've been doing for a number of years. Sort of took a year off to do John there, to catch up with John anyways. But that's pretty much what we have done all the way through this study.

And that is where you see the issues. And those issues we've already dealt with. We recognize that these are not MP3 recordings of any one particular event in the sense of, okay, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Well, okay, Matthew and Luke's the historian, and Mark's there, and Matthew's there. But John's there, but they're getting their information, and Luke says he's compiling information from different sources.

And we've already talked about the fact they have different audiences. Matthew's writing primarily to a Jewish audience, and so he's emphasizing those aspects that are relevant to the Jews. And so we compare Matthew and Mark.

We discover that Mark's normally in a hurry, so he's skipping a lot of the transitionary material. But when Mark records the same incident that Matthew does, normally he does it with much more detail than Matthew does.

So you remember we spent a long time on Jairus's daughter, and what happens when the men come, and Jairus comes and asks Jesus to go, and as Jesus is going, the woman touches him and heals him, and people come to his house, and the child's dead, and they get there, and he kicks everybody out, and they're laughing and mocking, and he raises the dog.

And we looked at the fact that Mark gives a much fuller account of this than Matthew does. Matthew telescopes the material. In fact, he doesn't even have the guys coming and meeting and telling him he's dead.

When he just gets to Jesus, she's dead, and then Jesus goes and raises him. And so you've got the concept of telescoping, and you've got the fact that you've got authors who are emphasizing, you know, Matthew's spending all this time talking about fulfilled prophecy, and therefore it was necessary this happened because this happened.

Mark's not doing that because his audience isn't sitting there with the Greek Septuagint where they can go, oh yeah, I remember that, because they're not Jewish. So they don't have that kind of background, so he doesn't include that kind of information.

And Luke's emphasizing the son of man stuff, and Luke's emphasizing a lot about women. And so there's all sorts of different emphases amongst these writers, which explains why they include certain elements of information that other people do not.

And so we've looked at all of that, and we've struggled with the idea that, well, okay, we're also looking at a translation. That is, in the majority of these instances, when Jesus is standing by the Sea of Galilee teaching, did Jesus know Greek?

Yes, I believe that he did. Did Jesus teach in Greek regularly? Doubtful, because then the Vassaritid people wouldn't have understood. I mean, they could muddle along if the Roman soldier yelled at you in Greek.

You might want to know what in the world he was yelling at you about. But as far as actual teaching and things like that, very clearly there would have been Aramaic. And so now these Gospels, though, they're written in Greek, and so there's already a translation there.

We've talked about the concept of oral tradition. We've talked about the fact that as these Gospels are being written at different times for different audiences, that there is an oral tradition, that the Church had been preaching for years before these things were written down.

They're written down at different times. We talked about the dating of the Gospels. All this is stuff that we looked at at the beginning and then had to continue looking at throughout the course of the analysis of this material as well, especially as we got into some of the more challenging sections.

And so there's been all sorts of that kind of stuff, which again, thankfully, in a lot of good churches is mentioned. But let's be honest ourselves, in the vast majority of Sunday School classes this morning, this is not the topic of discussion.

There may be some brief mention made of background issues and things like that, but really looking at the issue from this perspective is much more what you'll get, ask our Grand Canyon students in Old and New Testament backgrounds and things like that, than you would normally have in a Sunday morning Sunday School class.

And some of you might say, that's why I'm not even sure why I'm here. But again, it is really a sign of how seriously we want to take the Word and also a sign of respect for you. I reject the idea that you do not call God's people to do serious work in understanding God's Word.

I reject that idea. I don't think that it has any value or merit. And again, if we're going to want to make the impact that we want to have in our society, we need to know these things. We need to think these things through.

The Two-Source Theory and the Literary Dependence of the Gospels

So, with that in mind, when we come to the issue of this last portion, once again the issue arises, what is the interrelationship between these books? And if you may recall, we've addressed this subject.

The large majority of modern New Testament scholarship follows what is in essence known as the two-source theory, that there are two primary sources. That is Mark's Gospel and something called Q. Does anyone remember what Q meant?

Quella, and which Quella means what? It's a German word. It means source. Quella means source, the Q source. And the theory is that when you see, the theory is that Matthew and Luke have Mark. But they also have something that no one's ever seen, there's no written record of, but that is theorized to have existed at least in some semi-written form.

And that is the Q source. And when Matthew and Luke go off together, away from what Mark is saying, add the parable materials and things like that, the material that's not found in Mark, they're deriving that from Q.

And so Q is sort of a collation of Jesus' sayings, in essence, that Matthew and Luke are using that Mark did not have access to. And so in that theory, which is very, very prevalent, once again, if you find a local Christian bookstore or you go online, you go to Amazon, you go to CBD, wherever it is you go to get your books, and you buy a commentary on Matthew today, there is a very, very high chance, if it was written over the past 150 years, that in some way, shape, or form, it will either mention or be completely dependent upon or not even question the idea of the literary dependence of the Gospels upon each other.

And so what that means is you only have two lines of information. And what it also means, then, is that you have to somehow climb into the minds of Matthew and Luke to see why they're editing Mark, and contradicting Mark, and changing Mark, and improving Mark, and all the rest of this stuff.

And so these commentaries end up being mind-reading sessions, basically. And so often, they'll spend a whole lot of time in the actual meaning of the text, but a whole lot of time theorizing about things like this, based upon these overarching theories that have been promulgated over the years.

And again, it's not that the early church, no one came up with that specific idea in the early church, but the differences between the Gospels in the early church prompted early harmonizations. Tatian's Diatessaron, for example, was a very early attempt to create a single Gospel out of the four.

Well, we do have to admit that creating a single Gospel out of the four means you don't really have any one as it was originally written or intended. If you take four books on the Trinity, and then try to squish them into one, having written one of them, that doesn't end up being my book any longer.

The emphasis that I was making in writing my book on the Trinity is going to be lost when you try to squish it together, and take some of my stuff out, and stick somebody else's stuff in, and so on and so forth.

So, it is a proper observation to say that if you try to create a single Gospel out of the four, you really don't have the voice of any one of those four fully there any longer. It's artificial, I would agree.

However, the assumption that is made by the vast majority of modern scholarship today is that there is no consistent message of these books. There is no core historical reality that they are accurately portraying.

Eyewitness Testimony and Oral Tradition in Gospel Origins

Now, on just a simple naturalistic level, when we think about how people report historical events, we have so much example of the fact that you can have numerous eyewitnesses describing the same event, who for various reasons will emphasize different aspects of the event, forget certain aspects, only in the presence of another eyewitness remember certain things, help correct each other, etc., etc., etc.

We know how that works. And if you approach the New Testament documents in the same way, if you approach them merely from a naturalistic perspective and say, well, these are four imperfect pictures of Jesus, then you're going to end up with where modern New Testament scholarship is, and that is when you ask modern New Testament scholarship as a whole, who was Jesus and what did he really teach?

About as far as they can go is stick a finger up a nose. They don't know. Because, well, this scholar emphasizes this and this scholar emphasizes that, and when the Jesus Seminar gets together, it's funny, the Jesus they come up with looks a whole lot like a bunch of liberal Jesus Seminar scholars, and no one really knows.

And so, if there is not a conviction that there is an underlying historical reality and that each one of these is pointing us to that and we need to allow them to do so in their own way without abandoning the accuracy of each one, the whole idea of trying to harmonize is an abandoned project by the vast majority of modern New Testament scholarship.

It's considered old school. You're not going to get tenure at the seminary and university, and the vast majority of them anyways, talking about harmonization because that's what they did in the olden days.

If you want tenure, if you want to be published, back when I was in seminary, there was a book that came out, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, Dunsworth. And everybody was like, oh, this is great, this is wonderful.

The problem is that when people today talk about unity and diversity, the unity is a real basic, least common denominator, bland, vanilla thing. And the diversity is this big, huge list of alleged contradictions.

And that's the mindset of modern scholarship. The buzzword is diversity. That's the buzzword in the culture, so it works as a buzzword in academia too. We want to talk about diversity, diversity, diversity.

And the material we're going to be plowing into now is going to be one of the primary places where someone's going to go to point out diversity. And I guess I need to bring it in. I might need to see if I can figure out why the projector that we hide around here, the little foot thing is stuck out.

There's something, I may just have to take it with me and see if I can figure out what's going on with it. But I may need to bring a few visual aids in for a few things. But when you listen to Bart Ehrman's standard presentations, and trust me, he hasn't had to come up with anything new for about ten years now.

When you listen to his standard presentation to demonstrate the inaccuracy of the Gospels, it's all based, all based in the section we're about to go into. He doesn't even bother with the rest of it. Everything he presents is just, well, was there one angel or two angels?

Depends on which Gospel you read. Was there this or was there that? Depends on which Gospel you read. It's all based in the crucifixion accounts, what's written above Jesus' head, blah, blah, blah. It's all this section.

And so this is where the diversity stuff is going to be coming from. And, of course, it starts with the assumption that you do not seek to harmonize. You do not seek to allow for these writers to actually be speaking with the accuracy that would be truthful for them in their context.

Now, what do I mean by that? These men are not seeking to pass a journalism test at some modern university. Well, okay, at a modern university 50 years ago, when factuality and lack of bias and prejudice was still allegedly considered to be part of journalism.

They weren't seeking to do that. They were specifically seeking to communicate a message. They were proclaiming the Gospel. And so they are not pretending to be writers for Wikipedia. They're not pretending to be modern, unbiased, unprejudiced, or anything else.

But it's a long leap from recognizing that to saying, oh, that means that everything they say is utterly worthless, has no historical meaning to it, and can be thrown into the arena of myth. That's normally what ends up happening today.

Clearly, like I said, when one telescopes and another one doesn't, part of the reason is they have to sit there. The book can only be so long. So the author has in mind, okay, I want to be able to produce a book.

These are going to be handwritten books. Even the Gospel of Mark, the shortest, in a handwritten form, is going to be about as big as any of our New Testaments, just simply papyri-wise bound together.

And so Matthew and Luke even longer. And so decisions have to be made by the author as to how detailed I'm going to become and how I'm going to present something. And every one of us has personal experience, I'm sure, in recounting things in our own lives where someone might ask you, what did you do on your vacation this year?

And if you had a bad day, you don't know this person all that well, you are going to telescope a lot in your response. But if you're in a good mood and you're sitting down with a good friend who you know has a lot of interest in what you did on your vacation, you're going to give a very, very, very, very, very different account.

Now, were you lying when you gave the shorter account? Or were you lying when you gave the longer account? Well, you weren't lying in either one. And yet that's exactly what we get accused of having in the New Testament is, well, there's difference.

Obviously, you know, we're sort of, darned if we do and darned if we don't. When Matthew, Mark, and Luke say the same thing, see, you can't trust that. They're just copying from each other. When they say different things, see, they're contradicting each other.

You know, if they were carbon copies of each other, we wouldn't need four of them. And yet I have talked to many a person who feels that unless they're carbon copies, then that indicates the Bible cannot be the Word of God.

At the same time, the person sitting next to them would say, well, they say the same things and they're obviously copying from each other, so they're unreliable. So that's the situation we deal with. The large portion of the people that you would be dialoguing with have either never seriously thought through this at all, probably never even read the New Testament, or if they have read a book on it, it's been a book that presupposed the error of the New Testament and was probably written by someone who would not even give serious attention to the many books that have been written that are not nearly as popular as Bart Ehrman's that address these particular issues from a conservative perspective.

I've told you many times, in conservative seminaries and conservative classes, we read the liberals and discuss their perspectives and interact with them. In liberal seminaries and liberal contexts, we don't exist.

Our books are not read. We are considered to be drooling Neanderthals. It is a one-size-fits-all, one-perspective-is-it educational system in liberal seminaries and schools. Trust me, I know. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

So one side listens to the other and interacts with it, one side does not. And that has been my experience. I can march hours worth of DVDs in here of men that I have debated who did not so much as Google my name before we debated.

They were so vain and so arrogant and so convicted and convinced that someone who actually believes the Bible is the word of God could not possibly have anything meaningful to say. That has just been my experience over and over and over and over again.

And it comes out in the written work as well. So that was about 35 minutes of stream-of-consciousness background material to remind you of some of the things that are relevant in what we're coming to here.

But now for what I really wanted to get to, why is there? Why do we find this section to be the one that presents us with the most challenging issues and most challenging time in trying to come up with a meaningful chronology or harmony?

The general theory from those who believe in literary dependence, and by the way, I never sort of finished discussing that. Let me just mention, Luke says he used multiple sources. So if Luke was using written sources as he says he was using written sources, if Mark was one of them, I don't have any problem with that.

He says, remember Luke chapter 1, the first thing we looked at? Many people have compiled sources, and he's interviewed people, and he's talked with eyewitnesses, and he's a historian. He's done his work.

So that would, you know, some people, my Muslim friends, use that as an argument against the inspiration of Luke. Because if it's inspired, God just simply says it. You don't have to research it. So they don't have the idea that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

God doesn't actually use men in history or things like that. But that, of course, comes from abject ignorance of both the Old and the New Testament in the first place. But that's the perspective that some people have.

Luke specifically says that he does that. But it came out, I think, right before we started this series. But Richard Balcom put out a book a long time ago. Richard Balcom is on the angels' side, but he's not nearly as conservative as we are.

But he's on the side of the angels. He wrote a book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. And in it, he really bucked the trends of modern New Testament scholarship. And he's considered one of the upper crust scholars in the world today.

He really bucked the trends by basically saying, well, you know, you've got to realize the New Testament was written while the eyewitnesses are still around. And those eyewitnesses were very important people in the early Christian community.

And if you think that people were just making stuff up, and then this stuff starts getting read in the Christian community while the eyewitnesses are still around, don't you think the eyewitnesses would have gone, excuse me, I was there, that ain't what happened.

And so he writes this big, huge book that caused all sorts of in New Testament studies by basically saying, some of the assumptions we've been working on don't make any sense in light of what would really have been going on.

The eyewitnesses remained very important individuals for many decades after the time of Christ. And so there is stuff like that out there that emphasizes that there was an oral tradition that, you know, Paul talked about.

I have delivered to you what was delivered to me. And then he gives the summary of the gospel in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. Well, that wasn't written down yet. Paul's writing that early 50s. So you're talking 20 years have gone by, approximately.

And do I think Mark was probably coming into existence at that point? Yeah, I think Mark could be as early as the late 40s. I really do. Most of the time it's put at least pre -70 by even liberal scholarship today.

But the point was, there was an oral teaching for quite some time. It went all over the world. And personally, I think that the best way of looking at the relationship of the Gospels is that each one of them is independently drawing from that oral tradition.

And that the differences are from what strain of that oral tradition you were drawing from. Where it came from. Who the preacher was. What the emphasis was, etc., etc. Not that there was literary dependence in the sense of slavishly having, you know, the finished Gospel of Mark, and now I'm going to edit this, and so on and so forth.

I think that raises far more questions than it actually ends up answering, though it's very, very common today. Okay, so with that in mind, the standard theory today is that the reason that the three start going different directions, especially at the cross and afterwards, is that Mark ends at Mark 16, 8.

9 through 20 is clearly a later edition. And therefore, Matthew and Luke have to sort of fill in. And they don't have much to fill in from, which is weird. I guess Q Source doesn't have anything in that area either, and so they're just making it up as they go along.

I think there's a much better theory for that, and that is that these stories, as they were being told, were often being told by eyewitnesses themselves. Can you imagine what it was like in the early church when one of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus happened to visit your church that morning?

And they get to tell you the story of Luke 24 from the first person. They get to tell you the story of what it was like to walk with Jesus on the road to Emmaus, and what it was like when he broke the bread and their eyes were opened, and that's why nobody fell asleep during that one.

That would have been pretty amazing. And when somebody was in the congregation that had eaten of the bread and the fish in the feeding of the 5 ,000, John chapter 6, and could relate what Jesus was talking about that day, and some of the parables that he told, and what it looked like on the green hillside, and the clouds in the sky, and the colorful dress of the people, and how many hours Jesus spoke, and all that kind of stuff.

What an amazing thing that would have been. These people just didn't get beamed up to the enterprise. They were still involved in the church, and they were speaking, and I personally think that one of the primary reasons that we have the divergences we do, and I think the reason that Mark ends where Mark ends, is that these were meant to be read within the context of the witness of the early church, and at that point, the individuals to be giving their testimony, their proclamation of having encountered the risen Christ, either as one of the witnesses themselves, or as now one who through faith in Christ has come to know him, just as we have come to know him.

And so, it wasn't meant to just exist as a book on a shelf in a library someplace. These books were meant to exist within the living church, within a proclaiming church, and so when you get to the end, and Jesus is risen, well, what's he doing now?

Well, that's what we're supposed to tell you about. That's where we come in. We have placed our faith in him, and now by his spirit, he is active within us, and he is empowering us, and emboldening us, and giving us the authority to proclaim to you the forgiveness of sins, if you will repent and believe in him, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And so, it really depends on, very much on how you approach the text. If you assume a naturalistic worldview, that this is just simply the writings of some guy, or a group of guys, over time, then you're going to assume all sorts of error from the beginning.

That's why the vast majority of the books in this subject do not even enter into a discussion, or just mock in passing, the idea that there is actually a historical reality that each one of these is pointing to in their own way, and yet with accuracy, and with faithfulness and truthfulness.

They don't even engage that stuff. They don't engage that stuff. I can tell you, I spent hours listening to Bart Ehrman before I debated him, and when he would address alleged synoptic issues, once I remember him mockingly mentioning a harmonization of one particular incident, and it wasn't even a harmonization that made a lick of sense, but it was good enough to convince his students that anybody who believed in harmonization is an idiot.

And that was that. He didn't even mention the meaningful harmonization of that particular text. But that's just how they function. That's how they work. So, as we dive into this, and as we dive into Section 305 next time, which I was going to today, but I think it is important to remind ourselves of a lot of the background stuff so that we've got a basis to pursue this on.

As we dive into it, there will be times when the conclusions I come to will be based upon the presuppositions that I've brought to the study. And your challenges in dealing with someone on these issues will likewise require you to think presuppositionally.

We've talked about it a lot, but it's absolutely necessary to hear what someone is assuming in their statements and their interaction with the Word of God, and we're the ones that need to be hearing those things and being prepared to respond to them.

Okay? Now, I know that wasn't overly enjoyable, but it hopefully will allow you to have some foundation to stand on as we start diving into these next few sections. Okay? Let's close Word of Prayer. Father, we thank you for the freedom we have to prepare.

We thank you for your Word. We do thank you for the opportunities you give to us to speak to others. May this study be honoring and glorifying in your sight. May you increase our faith, increase our understanding, Lord, that we might handle your Word aright.

Be with us now as we go into worship. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.