Fixing Gospel Contradictions: 2nd Century to Now

Key takeaways

• Gospel harmonies combine Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into a single narrative, smoothing out contradictions—but Ehrman argues this erases each author's distinct voice and theological purpose, since Luke explicitly says he's writing his own accurate account rather than one meant to blend with others.
• Early church fathers took different approaches to Gospel contradictions: Origen believed the Holy Spirit deliberately planted contradictions to signal readers should interpret certain passages figuratively rather than literally, while Augustine wrote an entire book arguing the contradictions weren't really contradictions at all if examined closely enough.
• The Gospel of the Ebionites, quoted only by the 4th-century writer Epiphanius, appears to be an even earlier harmony attempt; it reconciles three different versions of what God's voice said at Jesus's baptism (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) by having the voice speak three separate times with three different messages.
• Tatian, a Syrian convert and student of Justin Martyr, created the Diatessaron ("through the four") around 170 CE by merging all four Gospels into one continuous book, likely written in Greek despite his Syriac background, and it became the dominant Gospel text used in parts of Syria.
• No copy of the Diatessaron survives. A 5th-century Syrian bishop ordered roughly 200 copies collected and destroyed after Tatian later embraced ascetic views considered heretical, though scholars don't know whether the destruction targeted specific content or simply Tatian's tainted reputation.
• Scholars reconstruct the Diatessaron indirectly, using a surviving Syriac commentary by Ephraim, a 5th-century Latin harmony manuscript thought to derive from it, and medieval translations in languages from Persian to Old English; a process Ehrman calls "one of the thorniest issues in New Testament studies."
• Modern critical scholarship, emerging from the Enlightenment, reversed the ancient preference for harmonization by treating Gospel differences as valuable evidence of each author's distinct theological agenda rather than problems to be smoothed away.

Notable moments

• Ehrman describes buying a modern harmony called "The Life of Christ in Stereo" as a teenager, which resolved Peter's denial discrepancy by having him deny Jesus six times instead of three.
• "Nobody thought I'd become a scholar"; Ehrman on realizing at 17, during a Gospel of John class at Moody Bible Institute, that people got paid to study this material.
• The pancakes-versus-locusts detail: a single-letter Greek change in the Gospel of the Ebionites turns John the Baptist's diet from locusts into pancakes, likely reflecting the sect's vegetarian values.
• Origen's radical claim that both a scribe's altered text and the original could be simultaneously inspired, each teaching a different lesson.
• Tatian is described as originally "Assyrian" but likely from northeastern Syria near Mesopotamia, later studying under Justin Martyr in Rome before returning east.
• "It is one of the thorniest issues in New Testament studies"; Ehrman warning graduate students away from choosing Diatessaron research as a dissertation topic.
• The closing spotlight on the late E.P. Sanders, credited with overturning Christian misreadings of Judaism as a "religion of works" and reshaping scholarly understanding of both Paul and the historical Jesus.

Time saved: 34 minutes.