Ask · Jesus

Why do the four Gospels tell some stories differently?

The short answer

The four Gospels differ because they are four real testimonies, each selecting, arranging and emphasising material for its own purpose, as Luke states openly and John admits freely. Differences in detail sit alongside deep agreement on the story itself, the pattern expected of honest witnesses rather than of a single scripted account.

The fuller answer

The differences are real and there is no need to minimise them. One Gospel gives one blind man at Jericho, another gives two; genealogies are traced differently; the wording on the cross inscription varies slightly. The first question to ask is what kind of books these are. They are not four copies of one official report. They are four testimonies, written by different men, for different readers, from overlapping pools of remembered teaching.

Luke opens by explaining his method with unusual candour. Others had written accounts; eyewitnesses and ministers of the word handed the material down; he investigated carefully and wrote an orderly account so his reader could have certainty. Orderly is his own word, and it signals selection and arrangement for a purpose. An author who openly arranges material will not match, detail for detail, an author arranging the same material differently.

John is equally open about the editing. Jesus did many other signs, he writes, which are not in this book, and if everything were written down the world itself could not hold the books. He selected his material so that readers would believe Jesus is the Christ and have life in his name. Selection explains most so called contradictions: a difference in what is included is not a disagreement about what happened.

The early church faced the choice directly and refused to merge the four into one smoothed narrative as its rule, treasuring instead what Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180, called the fourfold Gospel, held together like the four faces of the cherubim. Four distinct voices agreeing on the birth, teaching, cross and empty tomb, while differing in detail, is what independent testimony actually looks like, in a courtroom or in a canon.

Sources

• Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
• Irenaeus, Against Heresies

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