Gospels Part 038

What about some of the occasions when the Gospel authors record events in different order? Matthew may say that it happened in the order A, B and C, and Luke may give the order of events as A, C and then B. They don’t have the same order of events. Differences such as these can be troubling to some people.      

In situations like this it depends on how you view your understanding of biblical inspiration. Some people believe that the Bible writers were inspired by the Holy Spirit word for word. They believe that essentially God’s Holy Spirit dictated every word to the authors, and the writers were essentially taking dictation. But if you’ve read the Gospels all the way through, that view clearly doesn’t work. We see the shortcoming with that view when the different Gospels quote Jesus Christ in the same event, but they record His words differently. The sense is the same and the meaning is the same, but the words are definitely different. The authors are clearly giving us indirect quotations of Jesus rather than direct word-for-word quotations, and that’s why the words are not the same.     

And what about when one of the Gospel authors puts the sequence of events in a different order from another writer? These are things that biblical critics will bring up. Sometimes we can be caught without an answer if we haven’t really thought it through. But these things don’t pose a problem when we understand the reason why God the Father and Jesus Christ did this the way They did.    

Let’s consider what it means to bear testimony to the life and ministry of Jesus. First, we’ll consider the matter of evidence. We will view this as though we are sitting in a courtroom listening to witnesses to an event. It will be our job as the jury to decide what took place. For our example, let’s assume we are sitting in a jury determining guilt or innocence in the case of a man accused of shooting a cashier at a convenience store. We’ll listen to four witnesses, all of whom were there when the crime took place.    

The four witnesses take the stand one after another, and they all give testimony that is word for word identical. Even their grammatical mistakes are the same. As a member of the jury, we’ve got a problem. It’s clear that these are not independent witnesses. Their testimony is exactly the same even down to grammatical mistakes. It’s clear there is some kind of collusion between these four witnesses.     

On cross-examination, it comes out that the four witnesses have been coached by the prosecution. They’ve all memorized the same account even down to the grammatical mistakes. What we really have here is one witness, not four. Is the prosecution’s case credible? Probably not, because they’ve been tampering with the witnesses. The witnesses are not credible or believable.    

Let’s present a slightly different scenario. Again, we have four witnesses appearing before the jury. Witness A was standing at the counter when the defendant burst through the door, shouted at the cashier, fired a shot into the ceiling, then shot the cashier dead, grabbed the cash from the cash register and ran out the door.    

Witness B takes the stand. He was standing nearby when the defendant burst through the door, shot the cashier, grabbed the money from the cash register, fired a shot at another customer, then ran out the door. Note that there are differences in the order and in what happened. He didn’t notice the defendant shouting at the cashier, and he says the gunman shot at another customer instead of into the ceiling.   

Witness C takes the stand. She was partway down one of the aisles. According to her, the defendant was in the store, started an argument with the cashier, shot him twice, and slowly walked out the door. Again, there are differences in the order and what happened. She thought the man and the cashier had an argument and that he shot at the cashier twice.    

Witness D was outside the store gassing up his car. He heard several gunshots inside the store, heard several people yelling, looked up and saw the man walked out the door, point his gun at him, then get in a waiting car which drove away. Again, there are differences in the order and what happened. He heard the gunshots, then the yelling, and says the man fled in a car, which no one inside saw.