Navigating Gospel Truth: A Guide to Faithfully Reading the Accounts of Jesus's LifeSample

The Differences

Yesterday, we met some of the eyewitnesses of Jesus’s life and ministry and considered how their testimonies about Jesus shaped the Gospels. But if the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimonies, what are we to make of the times when two Gospels tell the same story but seem to contradict each other?

Read Matthew 20:29-34 and Mark 10:46-52.

Rather than mentioning both blind men, Mark focused on one and told us his name—Bartimaeus—because this blind man evidently went on to be an eyewitness of Jesus’s ministry. We’ll think more about the languages of the Gospels tomorrow but note that Mark kept the Aramaic word Rabboni from Bartimaeus’s response, while Matthew gave a Greek equivalent, meaning “Lord.” We shouldn’t be surprised or concerned by differences like this.

Sometimes, we find similar-sounding teachings in the Gospels in different places or with different details. Again, we shouldn’t be surprised by this. Jesus spent about three years traveling around and preaching. This was long before the time when you could print books, let alone make audio recordings or post videos on social media of someone teaching! When you think about it, it’s obvious that Jesus would have given similar teachings in different towns and villages. The Gospel authors drew from three years’ worth of Jesus’s sermons. They sought to capture His teaching as best they could in the limited space they had so that future generations of Christians could learn from their Savior. There are teachings that one Gospel author summarized that another Gospel author gave us at greater length. At times, we’ll see two Gospel authors drawing from different versions of a sermon, delivered in different places. We can’t know for sure.

What’s more, sometimes the Gospel authors ordered their material to make a theological point, rather than just ordering it chronologically. For instance, right before Jesus had a run-in with the Pharisees about the Sabbath, Matthew recorded Jesus saying, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take up my yoke and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30). It’s possible Jesus said those words right before that very Sabbath. But it’s also very possible Matthew put that teaching immediately before the story that ends with Jesus’s claim that He is Lord of the Sabbath (Matt. 12:8).

All the Gospel authors give us faithful access to Jesus’s teachings. But like screenplay writers for a biopic, each Gospel author edited down all the possible stories about Jesus he could tell into a narrative that can be read in an hour and a half to two and a half hours. The message across all the Gospels is the same: the God of all the universe became a man and died for us so we could live eternally with Him. We shouldn’t be surprised by differences.