Chris from England listening on the Catholic Answers app, you are on with
Jimmy Akin on open forum. And I have a question for you: What part of England
are you in? I'm from Manchester. Manchester, ok very good, awesome, great to
hear from you. Thank you. And so my question is, is that we have the belief
that the Holy Spirit is the primary author of Scripture. And so I would like
to know, how can we account for apparent factual contradictions? One story comes
to mind of the demon-possessed man in the Gospel of Mark and also in the
Gospel of Matthew. In the Gospel of Matthew there's two possessed men and
also the location seems to be different from the same story from the Gospel
of Mark. And so how can we counter the seeming factual contradictions? Ok, the
incident you're referring to is the... it's described in one place as the
Gadarene demoniac, because Jesus is in the area of Gadara; and so there are a
couple of things to note here, because you've asked about the location and
about the number of the possessed men. One of the things that we find in
Scripture is that the location terms often overlap. So you can describe--
because they didn't have, you know, geo-location coordinates back then,
geocaching was not a big thing in the first century--and so you could describe
locations in a variety of different ways. Sometimes you could describe them based
on where they were in terms of the region that they're in; sometimes you
could describe them in terms of what town they were close to; sometimes you
could describe them in terms of how you got there;
sometimes you could describe them in terms of what features geographically
were nearby; and so there were a bunch of ways that
you could more or less describe the same area, and because they weren't, you know,
trying to geocache these things, you could say, well this happened in this
region or in this approximate area. And different authors can take different
approaches to how they do that, and so that's how I would account for the
difference in location descriptions that you find in Matthew and Mark, both of
whom have a version of this incident. If you'd like to read more about that,
I'd suggest you check out my commentary on Mark which is called "Mark: A
Commentary" by Jimmy Akin, and it's available on Verbum Bible Software. I
have a--it's actually a really thorough commentary and I go through that
question, among others, in this. Also I go into the question of the the number of
the demoniacs, and that is one that's actually easier even to solve, because
one of the things that authors have to make a decision on when they're writing--and
this is true of all authors, certainly I know it's true of me when I'm writing--is
how much detail you're gonna go into. Because frequently you know way more
about something than you have space to go into, either because you've
gotten a word count from your editor that you have to meet, or you're
gonna run out of paper, or you simply don't want to bore your audience so they
lose interest and stop reading and you're writing for no purpose. So every
author is conscious of "How much detail am I gonna go into here?" And therefore
authors make different choices. They may choose, for example, to simplify an
account in terms of how many of the details they record, like, suppose
something happened with two guys, but...they're both demoniacs, they both get
exorcised by Jesus, they're both in the same location; do I really need to
mention both, or can I just make as an author the point that, okay, Jesus
exorcised a demoniac here. And that's the choice that Mark makes when Mark only
mentions one. He's using a simplified account. Now in Mark's case, he
may not have been the one who did the simplification, because Mark is dependent
in his Gospel on Peter's preaching. And so if Peter, in his preaching, simply decided,
"I'm gonna talk, for the sake of my audience, about one guy rather than
confuse him with two," then that could have been the form of the account that
Mark was familiar with, and so that's the one he wrote down. But either way, either
Peter or Mark is simplifying. Matthew, also as an eyewitness, would have known,
"Well okay, there is--" assuming he was there for this incident, assuming, you know, he
wasn't taking the day off, and that he was already a follower of Jesus by this
point, but as a witness of Jesus's ministry, could well have been there and he
could have said, "You know, there are actually two guys there, and I think
that'll suit my literary purposes in helping my audience in writing my Gospel,
so I'm not gonna use the simplified account I found in Mark; I'm gonna give a
little bit more detail than Mark did, and mention the second guy." So that's the
basic approach that I take in looking at those. It's not actually a contradiction,
it's just a question of how much detail are you gonna go into, and different
authors make different choices.