My friend bart ehrman recently posted the following entry when christian apologists
say things that don't seem to make sense are they being honest or do they genuinely believe
what they're saying bart says that he's been asked this question from another a number of
people who follow him and he mentions a christian apologetics conference that took place in chicago
it was put on by veracity hill and kurt jarris in october 2019 a number of us were some of the
speakers there craig keener rob bowman bart ehrman and myself and we would talk on issues such as
how we would explain the differences the discrepancies in the gospels and uh what about are
the gospels historically reliable there are other speakers there too i met elizabeth urbanovitz at
this conference and got to know her a little bit and there were some other speakers there
it was a good conference uh it culminated with a panel discussion moderated by kurt jarris
and there were a number of really thoughtful questions that were asked in fact i'll point a uh
i'll put a link up where you can go to that panel discussion now one of the questions was
asked about when jesus commissioned his disciples and sent them out on a mission what they were to
take with them or not take with them and again this is one of the questions and this is the one
gospel difference discrepancy to which bart refers in his uh post he says there are many others and
of course there are there are many others that could be discussed but this one in particular is
kind of interesting let's take a look at what's said in mark chapter 6 verses 8 and 9 it reads
and jesus instructed them the disciples that they may take nothing on the way except a staff not
bread not a bag not money in the belt but although wearing sandals you may not wear two tunics
now that differs a little bit from what matthew writes in chapter 10 verses 9 and 10.
he says do not obtain gold or silver or bronze for your belts not a bag for the way not two tunics
not sandals not a staff for the worker is worthy of his food and although bart doesn't mention it
we also have a parallel account in luke's gospel chapter 9 verse 3 and he said to them
take nothing for the way not a staff not a bag not bread not silver not to have two tunics now
what's going on here there's a difference between the way these three accounts are
certainly the wording is not the same the gist of course is the same but there's one major
difference and that has to do with the staff so you have mark saying jesus said that they can
take a staff whereas matthew and luke jesus says do not take a staff so we were all asked what do
you think about this and both rob and craig said they thought this could be harmonized i forgot
how they tried to harmonize it in fact i think craig even said he agreed with the way i tried to
uh resolve it bart said he thought uh mark presented it in the right way and that matthew
i think he said matthew changed it i don't remember um and when it came to me i said i
think that mark preserves if we had been there this is the way jesus said it but that matthew
and luke luke either used matthew or matthew and luke are drawing on a common source that either
matthew or that common source merely simplified and what i mean by that is this the overall
message that jesus is sending here when he tells them not to take food and extra clothing with them
and things like that is look god's going to take care of you just trust god this is going to be a
lesson for you when you go out and you're going to see god provide for you you just don't need
to take these things that's why i'm telling you don't take them so you can learn to trust god
well matthew or his source is just doing the same thing here jesus is doing the same thing but
matthew or his source is adjusting it eliminating the qualification of the staff because it just
seems at that point to be irrelevant and they do it just to simplify the account and to make
the point all the more clear trust god for everything he's going to provide for you
now that's the answer that i gave in a nutshell
here's how bart responded to that he writes in his blog so in this view matthew reports the opposite
both of what jesus actually said and reverses what mark correctly in mike's view reports he said but
that is not an error i was a bit incredulous if you want to know what jesus said and you read
matthew you would think he said the opposite of what he really did say how could that not
be a contradiction of mark and if mark is right in what jesus said matthew is wrong how could
that not be an error mike had an explanation in his view matthew was fully cognizant of what he
was doing when he changed mark's account this was standard practice among ancient biographers
to alter accounts that they had inherited when they wanted to emphasize one point or another
since matthew was doing it on purpose it was not an error i suppose on one level that might kind of
sort of make sense in this view matthew didn't make an unconscious mistake he made a deliberate
alteration but well really it's not an error it gives a false report of what jesus said sure
seems like an error to me whether matthew meant to contradict mark or just did it by accident
in my view it's like this if i give you a piece of false information for example if i say that
after he lost the election in 1980 jimmy carter divorced his wife rosalind which he did not
then well it's not true it's an error maybe i simply made a mistake i thought they had gotten
a divorce but i was wrong or maybe i intentionally said that they did because i had some agenda
or wanted to make a point but in either case whether i say it on purpose or by accident
my report is wrong you would not say that my statement was inerrant or more simply if you
ask someone for directions and they intentionally give you the wrong ones would you say that the
directions are completely accurate without error since the person had reasons for what she said
for bart this is a real head scratcher well i think he overdoes this in a big way there is a
big difference between maintaining an accurate gist by some slight simplifications and and uh
paraphrasing there's a big difference between that and what's going on with the staff here then
saying the falsity that jimmy carter divorced his wife rosalind immediately after the election
when it didn't happen that would be to tell a total untruth but to paraphrase and to simplify
you could say that it's a contradiction at least on the surface but it's not too
much of a meaningful one because an accurate gist is still preserved in all the accounts
perhaps i can give an illustration that i learned about two decades ago when
my family lived in virginia beach my wife and i were friends with four other couples
really close friends with them we were all involved in christian ministry to some extent
and we met at one of our homes we swapped homes and things like that meeting at different homes
and we'd meet every couple of weeks we'd have dinner together and then we'd just talk about
what we did since the last time we met and we'd pray and maybe do some bible study but we just
hung out and had some fun and had our batteries recharged it was a great time well it didn't take
long for us to observe a pattern in the way stories were told so it'd be like this when
a one of the girls would tell a story some of us guys might at some point roll our eyes and say
it's too many details we don't need this come on the game's coming on in 10 minutes
whereas if a guy told the story one of the ladies would speak up and say well now wait a minute you
left out this part and the guy would say well yeah i did that on purpose because it's not
really relevant and the the girl would say but it is relevant and then after a while you know things
like this happening one of the other women would say yeah let's hear it give me the girl version
and it's like ah yeah there is definitely a difference generally speaking in the way girls
tell stories and the way guys tell stories girls like a lot of details guys like bullet
points just give me the bottom line especially i'm talking about when it's small talk kind of things
and of course there are many many exceptions to the rule here but generally speaking i think it's
an accurate stereotype to say that girls like a lot of more details than guys when they're just
telling relay in a story there's the girl version of the story and there's the guy version of the
story i generally like the guy version of a story um sure i would if if i were back in jesus day and
i would want to know exactly precisely what was said in other words me in the 21st century i would
like to know precisely what was said and what was done i wish that all the historians in antiquity
the gospel authors and all of the historians and biographers reported with the accuracy of watching
it on a video but they didn't do that it wasn't within their even their literary conventions to
do so and so i'm not going to expect them to do that i am looking for an accurate gist of what
happened i'm looking for the guy version of the story now fortunately when we come to mark he
generally gives us the girl version he gives us a lot more detailed uh details of a story than
usually matthew and luke do luke has a tendency to abbreviate matthew has a tendency to simplify
we see this since on several occasions throughout his gospel and so honestly i don't really refer
to these as contradictions they would be you could say on a technical basis on the surface
but not really in much of the meaning that is going on so my view is that the differences very
often though not always result from the author paraphrasing using the things that they had been
taught when they were taught to read taught to write using the compositional textbooks that were
commonplace back then this is the kind of stuff that ancient biographers were taught to do and we
should expect the gospel authors no less than any of the other ancient biographers and historians
to do it the funny thing though is when you compare how the gospel authors use their sources
like for example when matthew and luke use mark and you compare that with how other authors like
plutarch and suaytonius and josephus and philo the two jewish authors at that time historians when
how they use their sources we find that the gospel authors actually stick closer to their source mark
than other historians and biographers do to their sources even closer to mark than how
josephus and philo stay to scripture so i think that's kind of interesting so so the matter of
whether jesus told them to take a staff or not take a staff is that really a head scratcher
well i at least don't see why it should be now let me turn things around here for a moment bart says
that there are people who come to him and says do these christian apologies they really believe some
of the things they say well i can't answer for other christian apologists any more than bart can
answer uh for any of his fellow atheist friends but i i will say there are you know the people
when they ask me does bart really believe these things that he says many of the things he says
um and they they ask this because they suspect on that on many occasions he's just being pedantic
and trying to proliferate his skeptical views um so when they ask me if if they think this is
the case with bart i mean i just say look i can't know the heart of another but i do think that bart
actually believes these things that he says that these are contradictions and as a result of them
being there they undermine uh the confidence that we can put in the reliability of these accounts
honestly i think that such an approach to reliability and contradictions is just stale
wooden and lacks literary sensitivities i think bart is a great guy but i think this is just a
weakness in his approach to looking at ancient literature whether it's the gospels or other
ancient literature anyway that's my opinion let me know what you think in the comments
you