In 1983, biblical scholar Robert Gundry was ousted from the Evangelical Theological Society.
Gundry, in his lengthy commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, had suggested that Matthew tailored stories about Jesus to his specific audience, sometimes in nonhistorical ways. Theologian Norman Geisler, who spearheaded the ouster, believed this “undermine[d] confidence in the complete truthfulness of all of Scripture.” Gundry disagreed with this assessment—he affirmed the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and argued the authors of Scripture were using accepted literary standards of their day. But he was expelled nonetheless.
Thirty years later, New Testament scholar Michael Licona found himself embroiled in a similar controversy. Licona had questioned the literal historicity of Matthew’s reference to saints rising from the grave after Jesus’ resurrection (Matt. 27:52–53). Here, too, Geisler led a campaign against the perceived threat to biblical inerrancy. As a result, Licona voluntarily resigned from Southern Evangelical Seminary and left his position at the North American Mission Board. (Today, he teaches at Houston Christian University.)
The doctrine of inerrancy may be a historically recent development, but some consider it essential to the faith. In fact, Geisler believed the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture was “the foundation of all other doctrines.”
But what happens when cracks appear in that foundation? I can tell you: It’s unsettling.
During my transition from high school to college, I deconstructed the Catholic faith of my upbringing but eventually reaffirmed my belief in God and converted to Protestantism. One of the foundational building blocks of my reconstructed faith was the authority of Scripture—including my idea of inerrancy.
But then that idea was contested. Though Christians have been dealing with the topic of biblical contradictions since there was a Bible, I started earlier this year. My exposure to contradictions occurred on TikTok, where I found clips (like this one) of critical biblical scholars challenging my beliefs about what the Bible is and how it works. I learned about the two different lists of animals on the ark (Gen. 6:19–20 and 7:2–3), the potential discrepancy between 1 Chronicles and 1 Samuel about who killed Goliath, and the differing genealogies of Jesus Christ. In my high school apologetics class, I was taught that there are only apparent contradictions in the Bible, not real ones. But what if there actually are real ones?
Licona takes up this question as it relates to the Gospels in his new book, Jesus, Contradicted: Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently—a shorter and more accessible version of his 2016 academic book, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? From the beginning, he’s clear where the problem lies: “Contradictions offer a challenge to the historical reliability of the Gospels and to some versions of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.” Yet he argues that they “do not necessarily call into question the truth of the Christian faith.”
The rules of ancient biography
The most skeptical position on inerrancy, as advanced by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, treats contradictions between Gospel accounts as a reason for doubting their accuracy altogether. If the authors can’t get the minor details right, why trust them at all?
On the flip side, attempts at harmonizing the Gospels have been a popular (though not unanimous) Christian response. While some harmonizations may be legitimate, others seem far-fetched (like Peter denying Jesus six times, not three) and risk “subjecting the Gospel texts to a sort of hermeneutical waterboarding until they tell the exegete what he or she wants to hear,” as Licona put it in his 2016 book. Harmonization in the wrong place may very well lead us astray—and damage our credibility.
A third camp sees Gospel differences as grounds for rejecting the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. This was my initial reaction as I wrestled with the biblical scholarship. The Bible, I believed, was the very Word of God, his speech in written form. But if God cannot err and the Bible has errors, then how could the Bible be divinely inspired at all? I began to think this collection of books by human authors might be just that: human.
Worse, the doubts spread. If what I had been told about the Bible was untrue, what else about Christianity was untrue? My conception of inerrancy and inspiration put my faith on shaky ground. But Licona lays out an alternative to this inflexible view of the Bible, hopefully preventing a good many Christians from falling away when they encounter contradictions too.
According to Licona, there’s a better way to handle Gospel differences, and it starts with understanding why they’re there in the first place. Licona provides a plausible explanation: Most of the differences between Gospels are due to literary conventions common to the genre of Greco-Roman (or “ancient”) biography and thus are not really contradictions or errors at all.
Importantly, ancient biography is not modern biography. Ancient biographies are playing by different rules and have different purposes. “Ancient biographers,” Licona explains, “sought to narrate sayings and deeds of the biographee that illuminated his character.” They’re portraits, not legal transcripts. The “essence” and “life” of a person are what matter, not precise details. Therefore, “Imposing modern expectations on ancient texts and authors is anachronistic since it assumes a standard not aligned with their objectives.” In ancient historiography, facts can be “reported with some elasticity.”
Matthew’s genealogy is a case in point. Luke and Matthew both contain genealogies for Jesus, but they don’t match. A popular explanation (though, as Licona points out, not among scholars) is that Matthew’s genealogy applies to Mary while Luke’s applies to Joseph. However, Matthew’s math suggests this is the wrong approach.
Despite claiming to include all the generations from Abraham to Jesus, Matthew omits multiple generations and uses “Jeconiah” twice (1:11–12). Why? He may be using a rhetorical device called “gematria,” where numbers are assigned to letters in the alphabet. In the Hebrew alphabet, the letters in “David” yield the number 14. By listing three sets of 14 generations, Licona argues, “Matthew appears to have arranged his genealogy artistically in order to communicate to his Jewish readers that Jesus is the Son of David, the Messiah.”
Understanding the rules of the game is essential to understanding what’s going on in the Gospels. Licona draws from ancient Roman compositional textbooks and Plutarch’s Lives to demonstrate six rules (or “compositional devices”) common to the genre:
- Compression: presenting an event as occurring over a shorter time frame than its actual duration.
- Displacement: removing an event from its original context and placing it in a different one.
- Transferal: taking an action done by (or to) one person and attributing it to someone else.
- Conflation: combining elements of two or more events but narrating them as one.
- Simplification: omitting or altering details to abbreviate a story.
- Literary spotlighting: only mentioning the person(s) in focus while being aware of others present.
When read in light of these compositional devices, many of the apparent contradictions between the Gospels disappear. Take the story about Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter from the dead: Is she about to die (as in Mark and Luke) or has she already died (as in Matthew)? While those with a preference for harmonization might posit that Jairus said both, this is more likely an example of Matthew compressing a story, as is his tendency.
For instance, in the story of Jesus healing the centurion’s servant, Luke records the centurion sending emissaries on his behalf (7:1–10), while Matthew cuts out the middlemen and has the centurion go himself (8:5–13). Likewise, Matthew compresses Mark’s account of the events following the triumphal entry (compare Mark 11:1–23 and Matt. 21:1–21). In Matthew’s version, Jesus appears at the temple once rather than twice, and the fig tree he curses withers immediately, not on the next day.
We find other examples of compositional devices at play in the Resurrection narratives. The Gospels differ in recording the number of women who visited the tomb, the number of angels at the tomb, and the number of male disciples who visited the tomb afterward. Are these errors, or merely examples of literary spotlighting?
The human element
While compositional devices clear up apparent contradictions and “errors”—calming concerns that differences between the Gospels undermine their historical reliability—they also raise issues for how we understand Scripture. They introduce a distinctly human element. The Gospel authors use sources. They paraphrase. They modify words and actions, even those of Jesus. Matthew and Luke improve upon Mark’s grammar, and Luke exhibits “editorial fatigue” (where he changes a story, but leaves leftover portions from the original, as with the parable of the talents).
Patterns like these flatly contradict the “divine dictation” view of inspiration—that the evangelists were heavenly stenographers taking down every word they received from the Holy Spirit. And though most evangelical Christians who affirm the inspiration and total inerrancy of Scripture would deny “divine dictation,” this model remains influential.
For example, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy states that “the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration” (emphasis added). The glaring question is “How?” While the authors concede, “The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us,” their view of inerrancy implies a very small role for the human authors themselves.
There’s a danger in holding such a rigid view of inerrancy. If you cannot square what you believe about Scripture with what you read in Scripture, something has to give. And if you put this view of Scripture at the foundation of all your beliefs—as Geisler recommended—then the whole edifice might come tumbling down.
Licona calls his alternative “flexible inerrancy.” Under this view, “the Bible is true, trustworthy, authoritative, and without error in all that it teaches” (emphasis added). Whereas traditional inerrancy says the Bible cannot err in any way, including in the details, flexible inerrancy says the message of God is preserved despite human involvement in the composition and preservation of the biblical texts.
How is Scripture divinely inspired then? Licona proposes a theory:
God, having foreknown all possible worlds, chose to actualize the one in which the biblical authors would write what they did. On some occasions, God may have planted ideas, concepts, perhaps even the very words they would write. However, the human element is present throughout and includes imperfections.
This view isn’t entirely original. In 1999, Christian philosopher William Lane Craig argued that God orchestrated the circumstances whereby the biblical authors would write what they did, and in that sense guided the process. Similarly, Reformed theologian B. B. Warfield thought inspiration looked like “[bringing] the right men to the right places at the right times, with the right endowments, impulses, acquirements, to write just the books which were designed for them.”
The Bible doesn’t spell out how inspiration works, and we can only speculate, but such statements at least don’t contradict Scripture. For example, Licona conducts a word study of theopneustos (the word for “inspired” or “God-breathed” found in 2 Timothy 3:16) and finds, “Perhaps the closest way of describing the meaning of theopneustos is to say the thing it describes derives from God or that God is its ultimate and special origin.”
Due to the Bible’s ambiguity regarding inspiration and inerrancy, we ought not demand conformity to the most rigid conceptions of either. There should be room to question. And we should remember that there were followers of Jesus before there was a New Testament. If believing in traditional inerrancy is a litmus test for being a Christian, then Jesus’ disciples wouldn’t pass. Nor would Paul, or any members of the early church.
The Gospels as we have them accomplish what their authors intended. Though they may supply tinted windows into Jesus’ life and teachings, what we see is true and compelling. They show us who Jesus is, what he was like, and what he taught. They establish his authority and the beauty of his way of life.
If the words and deeds of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels had contradicted the living memory of Jesus, it’s unlikely they would have found such broad acceptance across the early churches. They were preserved because they taught readers how to be disciples—and they can do the same for us today, no matter our view of inerrancy.
Noah M. Peterson is a philosophy of religion graduate student at the University of Birmingham and the editor of a think tank based in Washington, DC.
