An 11-Day Study On Challenges To Biblical AuthorityNäide

ARE THE GOSPELS FULL OF CONTRADICTIONS?

DEALING WITH APPARENT CONTRADICTIONS: TWO PRINCIPLES TO REMEMBER

As we begin to turn our attention from more general and foundational questions to more specific challenging texts, the following two principles will serve as reliable guides.

First, differences don’t necessarily equal errors. We can easily imagine different perspectives of the same event. For example, let’s say you and your friend go and see The Hobbit movie, and then both of you explain to your friends at different times later that week what happened. Odds are there will be differences in what you chose to share, but that doesn’t mean that one of you is mistaken. This second principle was a game-changer for me: An account can be accurate—a broader category—without being as precise as it could be. Take the everyday example of a wife asking her husband, “How was your day?” The reply? “Good.” Now, this is accurate perhaps, but not precise. There are a lot of details that have been left out, but it is still accurate, nonetheless. As an aside, the doctrine of inerrancy requires accuracy but not always precision.

ARE THE RED LETTERS IN MY BIBLE THE EXACT WORDS OF JESUS?

If you have been tracking my discussion so far, then you probably know where I am going with this one. The answer to this question is maybe. Jesus probably gave most of his teaching in Aramaic, which was the dominant public language of first-century Palestine. The New Testament is written in Greek, which was the dominant language of the larger first-century Greco-Roman World to which the Gospels were addressed. Therefore, most of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels is already a translation.

When scholars discuss this question, what they are asking is, Do the Gospels record the “words of Jesus” or “the voice of Jesus” (ipsissima verba vs. ipsissima vox)? Actually, we have both (though we are not always sure which is which). As already noted above, the Gospel writers intended in most cases to give us the gist of Jesus’ teaching, not a verbatim audio recording.

From a Christian point of view, we have the words/voice of Jesus that God wanted us to have and that we would need for living, spiritual formation, and accomplishing our mission (2 Timothy 3:16–17).