Hard on the heels of Larry Hurtado’s outstanding Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World comes acclaimed apologist Michael Licona’s most significant publication to date, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? This singularly important book offers a powerful apologetic to New Testament skeptics, as well as a needed corrective to biblicist paradigms.
The early twentieth century saw New Testament scholars repeat the claim that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were their own literary genre—Gospels. What was prevailing scholarly opinion became an entrenched idea, and reading the Gospels in light of the methodologies and conventions of ancient biography became neglected. Consequently, when numerous discrepancies between the Gospels (particularly the Synoptics, but also John) were scrutinized in the minutia and deemed to be “errors,” the Gospels were alleged to be unreliable in terms of historical content and biographical material—so much so that even the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth became questioned as the Gospels were judged to be little more than confected religious mythology. The impact on Protestantism was especially dramatic and frequently catastrophic as Scripture was downgraded to merely an anthropological artifact.
To counter progressives’ lists of so-called Gospel discrepancies, defenders of Holy Scripture have attempted to harmonize what have been, in numerous instances, “unharmonizable” narratives—sometimes by way of implausible proposals, sometimes by way of hermeneutical gymnastics, but always out of an appropriate desire to defend an infallible, inerrant, and inspired divine text.
But such efforts did not keep pace with critical scholarship or, indeed, the dissection of the Gospels by learned detractors such as Bart Ehrman and Gerd Lüdemann. Skeptics pounced on conflicts in the crucifixion and resurrection accounts, while believers strove to navigate these compositional minefields to present an unblemished text. Skeptics remained unconvinced: there were far too many discrepancies between the Gospels to consider them reliable witnesses of history or biography, to say nothing of theological truth, much less the word of God. So while the documentary evidence of the New Testament per se became more certain, reconciling the differences between the Gospels became less so.
Michael Licona takes the conversation in an entirely different direction, not for the first time but certainly to a much broader audience (including nonspecialists) with clarity that even my junior high children appreciated. He opens with two often ignored but obvious facts: first, that moderns have different expectations of what constitutes historiography than when the Evangelists wrote; and second, there was an existing methodology for ancient biographical and historical writing in which the Gospels categorically belong. This means that the Gospels are not a distinct genre, and that should be adjudicated and respected in terms of both the compositional approach to their biographical and historical content about Jesus and the events of his life in a way consonant with the existing corpus of ancient biography proximate in time and location to the Gospels.
There are nearly one hundred extant biographies from approximately one hundred fifty years on each side of the time of Jesus. The preliminary exercises in rhetoric (progymnasmata), preserved in seven compositional textbooks from antiquity, specify compositional devices that may be employed for an acceptably reliable account of history or biography. Plutarch’s Lives exemplify these devices, which include transferal of words or deeds from one person to another, displacement of an event to a new location, conflation of two or more events or people into one, the compression of events and time, spotlighting individuals, adaptation by simplification, expansion of narrative details, and paraphrasing. Plutarch utilizes these standard conventions of Greco-Roman biography yielding pericopes that are sometimes impossible to harmonize—not to deceive or pervert the truth, but out of an obligation to the law of biographical relevance; that is, so he may tell the story in a manner most relevant to the main character.
Following the brief introduction, Licona familiarizes his readers with Plutarch and then, in chapter 3, unveils not discrepancies within dozens of parallel pericopes in Plutarch’s Lives, but rather his faithful adherence to the literary conventions of his day. The repetition within this chapter of reading/analyzing/summarizing Plutarch’s parallel pericopes enable the reader to intuitively recognize the aforementioned devices along with Plutarch’s purposes in their employment—to report actual events and spotlight the relevant person at center and their significance.
Chapter 4 signals a transition from Plutarch to nineteen parallel pericopes in the Gospels. The findings are nothing short of remarkable—all four Evangelists employ the same techniques observed in the compositional textbooks, very much in the same way as Plutarch, evidencing that they bear unmistakable affinity to Greco-Roman biography with few provisos.
This study asserts that the Gospels can no longer be viewed as a genre unto themselves, but rather that they should be assigned to a genre that legitimately permitted a degree of elasticity in how stories were reported. The Evangelists, not unlike Plutarch, may therefore be appraised as fine—not sloppy or contradictory—biographers composing texts according to the legitimate and compelling standards of their day. Adapting details on occasion was entirely permissible to communicate the truth more effectively: thus John’s grand assertion that “these things were written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ” (20:31).
With this understanding of Greco-Roman biography, the questions about the Gospels may shift from asking, for example, “Why is Luke’s particular pericope not a copy of Mark’s pericope?” to “Why did Luke bother to change this or that?” It turns out that there may be far more information, more history, and more theology to be unpacked from the parallel accounts than anticipated.
“Greco-Roman biography was a broad and flexible genre” (5). These devices stand in stark contrast to the methodologies of modern historiography and biography developed in the nineteenth century and following. Simply put, ancient biographical conventions provided authors “a license to depart from the degree of precision in reporting that many of us moderns” (5) expect and prefer and so account for the great variations within the Gospels as they report the truth about Jesus Christ to their world. To superimpose exacting modern standards on texts written in an ancient culture and context according to their legitimate conventions brutishly forces a square peg into a round hole.
The impact of Licona’s findings upon the notion of divine inspiration is negligible. There are no contradictions in the Gospels and no errors in these biblical texts. Rather, under divine inspiration and through the revelation of God in Christ Jesus, the biblical authors did not write with the degree of accuracy and “almost forensic precision we desire and expect today” (201). Instead, the Evangelists employed the legitimate literary conventions that were in existence. Biblical scholars have long recognized this with respect to New Testament epistolary studies, and Licona’s work prompts us to do the same with the Gospels.
With Plutarch writing approximately half of extant ancient biographies, that leaves nearly fifty from other authors to be analyzed and compared. Licona therefore opens the door to a host of possible master’s and doctoral dissertations, further exploring and substantiating the comparative conformity of the Evangelists to their counterparts as ancient biographers.
Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? is a worthy consideration for the Christian Book of the Year. As such, this volume is essential, necessary reading for all seminarians, all pastors, and anyone engaged in apologetic endeavors.
John J. Bombaro is senior pastor at Grace Lutheran Church, San Diego, and coeditor with Dr. Adam Francisco of The Resurrection Fact: Responding to Modern Critics (New Reformation Publications, 2016).
