What It’s About

The title says it all. In Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? New Testament scholar Michael R. Licona addresses the longstanding issue of the numerous differences between the four Gospels of the Christian Biblical canon: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.¹Licona, Michael R., Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Drawing on the work of others in the field of New Testament studies, Licona begins with the hypothesis that the canonical Gospels can best be understood as belonging to a particular literary genre, that of ancient Greco-Roman biography. He maintains this has important implications for how the original authors of the Gospels would have gone about writing their texts, including what literary conventions they may have followed. He argues that these conventions, which differ significantly from those of modern biographical or historical writing, can help account for many of the differences between the Gospel accounts. He demonstrates the explanatory power of this argument with an in-depth analysis of differences between nine biographies of ancient Roman author Plutarch, in which he identifies literary conventions that account for those differences. Licona then does the same with the Gospels, analyzing differences and identifying literary conventions that account for them. He concludes that they do indeed appear to follow the same conventions of ancient Greco-Roman biography and adds that this insight is important to understanding why many of the differences exist between the Gospels and how they should be read and understood more generally by both skeptics and believers.

As mentioned above, Licona’s starting hypothesis – that the Gospels should be considered part of the genre of Greco-Roman biography – is largely built on the work of other scholars,²Most notable is probably Richard Burridge, who Licona cites somewhat frequently and who is responsible for “the definitive treatment on the subject,” 3. See Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels?: A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, 2^nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). but he does briefly provide some of the reasons for this belief: “First, the Gospels contain many of the characteristics of Greco-Roman biography,” including being centered on the lfe of one person (rather than on a group, era, or an historical event), a focus on the public life of that person (rather than background or early life), the combining of individual anecdotes and speeches into one continuous narrative, and an emphasis on illuminating that person’s character “as a model for readers to either emulate or avoid.”³3-4 Second, with one possible exception, “there are no clear examples of biographies of Jewish sages written around the time of Jesus.”⁴4. The implication here seems to be that, since there doesn’t appear to have been an established genre of ancient Jewish or Rabbinic biography into which the Gospels would have fit, if they fit anywhere it was into Greco-Roman biography. Licona acknowledges that placing the Gospel texts snuggly into any one genre is not without it’s problems, but he maintains that for his purposes in this book, it is sufficient to “recognize that the New Testament Gospels bear a strong affinity to Greco-Roman biography.”⁵5.

Before digging in to the texts, Licona lays one more piece of groundwork by identifying and outlining some of the specific literary conventions and devices that make up the ancient Greco-Roman biographer’s repetoire. To do so, he draws on two sets of evidence: textbooks of preliminary exercises in rhetoric, or progymnasmata, used during the early centuries CE by students in developing their writing skills, and compositional devices and conventions of ancient historical and biographical writing identified by both ancient authors themselves and by modern scholars. As he shows, one of the most significant features of Greco-Roman biography overall is that it has as its primary objective the illumination of the character of the person who is the subject of each biography. This objective is emphasized to such an extent and in such a way that it is acceptable for the author to alter details, creatively reconstruct events, and/or add or omit parts of an event if it suits their end.

In analyzing Plutarch’s biographies, Licona selects nine which have overlapping timelines⁶The nine Lives are those of “Sertorius, Lucullus, Cicero, Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, younger Cato, Brutus and Antony,” 22. and, within these nine, analyzes 30 parallel pericopes, or smaller selections of narrative, which appear in two or more biographies and which contain notable differences. For each pericope he provides a version of the narrative, an analysis of the differences between versions and what literary conventions might account for them, and then summarizes these findings. Moving from Plutarch to the Gospels, Licona follows the same format and applies it to 19 pericopes which appear in two or more of the four Gospels, and which contain notable differences.⁷In contrast to his treatment of Plutarch, here Licona appears a bit more selective. As he puts it, “Although there are many more than those that follow, I have limited myself to those pericopes I regard as having the best chance of containing differences resulting from the same type of compositional devices described in the compositional textbooks and inferred from the pericopes we examined in Plutarch’s Lives,” 117-18. For more thoughts on this decision, see paragraph 7 of my thoughts below. Throughout, Licona is careful to acknowledge points where it is unclear which literary device(s) may have been in use or where there is otherwise ambiguity or controversy over the composition of the text. This side-by-side analysis constitutes the vast majority of the book – 174 of the main text’s 202 pages.

Finally, Licona makes a few concluding observations regarding the Gospel differences. The first, most basic conclusion is simply that the Gospel authors and Plutarch do indeed seem to employ many of the same literary devices and conventions in composing their respective works. However, Licona notes that the Gospel authors appear to employ such devices far more sparingly than Plutarch and other ancient authors. In fact, the Gospel accounts (especially in the Synoptic Gospels)⁸For anyone unfamiliar with this distinction, the “Synoptic” Gospels – Mark, Matthew, and Luke – are so called because they bear close similarities with each other, even, in places, to the level of precise wording, whereas John differs significantly from these in multiple respects. For more on this distinction and it’s impact on the book, see note 14 below. contain far more similarities with each other, and most of the differences observed in Licona’s study appear to be in “peripheral details.”⁹200. So, while the Gospel authors may have a looser commitment to bare factual accuracy than modern historians, they appear to have a greater commitment than many other authors of their time.

What do these findings mean for those of us trying to read and understand the Gospels today? Here Licona suggests that both Christians and non-Christians have lessons to take away. For Christians, these findings should serve both as a way to better explain some differences that may otherwise seem troubling, and as a caution against attempts to over-harmonize the different Gospel accounts, which can lead to a distortion of the text as it was originally written and intended.¹⁰As he puts it, “A truly high view of the Gospels as holy writ requires us to accept and respect them as God has given them to us rather than to force them into a frame shaped by how we think he should have,” 201. For non-Christians, especially skeptics, these findings should serve as a caution against overly critical readings of the Gospels, which might draw into question the historical reliability of the overall narrative on the basis that some differences are present between accounts.¹¹In Licona’s words, “If our assessments in this volume are correct, appealing to Gospel differences as a reason for dismissing the general historical accuracy of what they report should be abandoned,” 201. For readers of the Gospels in both camps, this may require something of a paradigm shift, but it is a shift that is needed if we are to reduce the “historical noise”¹²202. between us and the Gospels and come to a clearer understanding of their original composition and meaning.

A Few Thoughts

I found Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? to be an enlightening and thought-provoking read. It was not, however, an easy read. As mentioned above, the vast majority of the book constitutes a side-by-side analysis of differences between Plutarch’s Lives and the Gospels, which Licona carries out systematically and thoroughly, sparing the reader seemingly no detail. This can make slogging through the middle chapters difficult, even tedious at times, especially for those unfamiliar with either ancient Roman political history or new Testament studies.¹³And, I should think just about all of us are less than familiar with at least one of the two. Stylistically, too, Licona’s writing tends to be rather dry, with the welcome exceptions of his brief introduction and conclusion. These complaints reveal something of a double-edged sword since these same characteristics which make the book such an arduous read also make it so valuable in terms of rigor and independent verifiability. As a case study, an evidence-based test of a hypothesis, and a work of reference, the book is quite an accomplishment. The organization is straightforward and easy to follow, and included is a glossary of a handful of more obscure or technical terms as well as several appendices and indexes to help readers keep track of and locate information on particular pericopes, historical figures, authors, Biblical passages, and ancient sources. All of this makes the book quite useful as something one might keep on a shelf and refer to regarding specific Gospel stories or passages as they come up in study or discussion.

In reflecting back on the book as a whole, one of the things that stands out to me most is actually how limited it is in scope. Licona is focused in on what ends up being a rather narrow question, and he is careful not to venture too far outside this with overreaching speculations or conclusions. He does not, for example, attempt to provide or even hint at an explanation for all the differences between the Gospels, much less provide definitive answers to questions about authorship, date or relative timing of composition, or historicity of events. This is a bit complicated because these questions are of course relevant to the study, and he is forced to deal with them at certain points,¹⁴In fact, Licona is up-front in his acknowledgment of these concerns. Before delving into his analysis of the Gospels, he provides a brief summarization of the main theories concerning the order and method of composition of the Synoptics, or“the Synoptic problem,” and takes some time to acknowledge the significant differences between John and the Synoptics and the questions these differences raise concerning John‘s authorship, method of composition, and overall veracity, 113-16. Regarding the Synoptic problem, he states, “I assume Markan priority in this study [i.e. that Mark was written prior to the other Synoptic Gospels] and that Matthew and Luke often use Mark as their source,” 118. Regarding questions about John, Licona makes it clear he has “no objective to solve the Johannine puzzle in this volume,” and instead merely notes many of the differences between John and the other Gospels “with little or no attempt to account for why [they] exist,” 116. Licona also acknowledges the difficulty in refraining from judgements concerning the historicity of miracles or theological claims about Jesus, and he openly identifies his own perspective as that of a Christian. But, he also states, “I have attempted to describe the Gospel texts in a manner that is largely neutral of partisan theological and philosophical commitments, focusing on their differences while making judgment calls pertaining to historicity only on occasion,” 118. but the main focus throughout remains on the narrow question of whether the Gospel authors appear to have used the conventions of Greco-Roman biography in their writing.

So, what of this central question? Does Licona make an adequate case that the Gospel authors write using the conventions of Greco-Roman biographers?

I would have to say yes. The evidence presented throughout the study certainly seems to point in that direction, or, at least, I have trouble imagining a better explanation to account for the same evidence. In reading through the whole Gospel analysis, it first of all becomes clear just how many differences exist in the pericopes under consideration. While some of these are no doubt explainable as simple errors, differences in available testimony, or differences in authorial perspective, it seems to me these can’t account for all the differences, and at least some element of intentional alteration or creative license must be at play. I’d like to suggest two main reasons for this (in addition to what is argued explicitly in the book). First, consider that, at least among the Synoptics, there appears to have been an intentional attempt on the part of the authors to closely copy much of the same material, whether directly one from another or from another common source. That even in the midst of this intentional close copying there are so many points of clear divergence causes me to suspect that some of the divergences were likewise intentional – that is, the author had an account from which he was copying and intentionally chose to make certain changes for whatever reason. In other words, I find it unlikely, given how much care seems to have been taken in matching accounts, that all of those points that don’t match were accidental.

A second reason to buy into the literary convention hypothesis is that it seems to hold such great explanatory power. That the differences exist is indisputable; whether we are able to explain their existence is the question, and this hypothesis seems to do just that. In many cases, a difference can be plausibly accounted for by considering what type of picture the author might have been trying to paint of Jesus or his life’s events and what literary device they may have employed in such a way as to better paint that picture. As Licona himself notes, there are only a few significant differences which do not readily lend themselves to a plausible explanation of this sort,¹⁵See discussion on 184. in which cases we are left a bit puzzled, without any one particularly convincing explanation. If the literary convention hypothesis is correct, it explains for us in most cases how each of the Gospel authors had both motive – an interest in illuminating the character of Jesus in a particular light – and means – the literary conventions already established within Geco-Roman biographical writing – to have written the divergent accounts as they did. This all leaves me pretty well convinced of the main lines of Licona’s thesis.

Of course, there are limitations and problems to consider. For one thing, this whole endeavor is by nature speculative, and any explanation of a difference, no matter how plausible or reasonable, may miss the mark of being actually true. We simply have no way of doing more than making educated guesses, which means our degree of certainty should have severe limits.¹⁶I might well add here that to some extent this is true of all historical inquiry, increasingly so the farther back in time one attempts to go. In short, all history involves guesswork. There is a danger, then, of over-explaining things; coming up with an explanation for every difference we can, no matter how labored those explanations become; or of interpreting an entire account according to a possibly false understanding of the author’s agenda or motive. It may well be that many of the differences in the Gospels are the result of simple errors or differences in perspective or source information. Thus, sometimes the best approach could be to admit we simply don’t know why a difference exists. Licona for his part seems aware of these concerns and advocates considering any ideas about authors’ motives as “tentative and provisional.” ¹⁷24-25. Of course, he doesn’t let this stop him from making those tentative and provisional guesses in the first place, nor do I think he should. I only mean to say that perhaps what is most responsible is to be aware of the tentative nature of any judgements and to always balance these by considering alternate theories where available.

Another set of issues worth raising has to do with method. We have seen that, to test his hypothesis, Licona selects 19 pericopes from the Gospels. He mentions there were many more he could have examined, but he chose these 19 because he regarded them “as having the best chance of containing differences resulting from the same type of compositional devices described in the compositional textbooks and inferred from the pericopes we examined in Plutarch’s Lives.”¹⁸117-18. This leaves me wondering a couple things: First, on what criteria does he judge these pericopes as the most likely to have the types of differences he’s looking for? Second, doesn’t this skew the results a bit, since (as I understand it) he is admitting to basically cherry picking examples he knows have the best chance of backing up the theory he intends to test? We might wonder what results we would see if more pericopes that appear in multiple Gospels were examined. If other pericopes present fewer differences, or if the differences don’t lend themselves to being explained by Greco-Roman literary devices, would that change the picture significantly? Would we have to rethink the literary relationship of the Gospels to Greco-Roman biography?

After pondering these issues a bit myself, my guess is that studying additional pericopes in the same manner Licona does in his book wouldn’t change the picture all that much. Even if we found fewer differences overall in other pericopes, or fewer differences that appear to be readily explainable by the use of literary conventions, this wouldn’t discount all the positive evidence Licona has already put forward. It would give us a more comprehensive and balanced view of Gospel differences overall, which might tell us that there were certain stories with more variance than others. This might prompt further inquiry into this disparity, and it might change our understanding of the extent to which Gospel authors employ Greco-Roman literary conventions, but it wouldn’t change the basic fact that the Gospel authors do seem to employ these conventions to some extent. Furthermore, there are numerous differences between Gospel accounts that are of a wholly different type than those under consideration in this rather narrow study, many of which, I suspect, can be shown to be consistent with the literary convention hypothesis.¹⁹I’m thinking here of the differences over which pericopes are included in or omitted from an individual Gospel account, differences of the writing style and word choice between Gospel accounts, and differences of interpretive editorializing between Gospel accounts. One other set of differences worthy of note, to which Licona does devote a chapter of his book, is differences in the chronology of particular pericopes within the overall narrative of each Gospel account. See Chapter 5: “Synthetic Chronological Placement in the Gospels,” 185-96. I am far from an expert in this area, but it is my understanding that, for all the aforementioned types of differences, New Testament scholars have proposed explanations that rest on some type of creative editing on the part of the Gospel authors, whether specifically utilizing the literary devices cited by Licona or not. Considering these together with everything mentioned above, it seems to me we can maintain reasonable confidence in Licona’s thesis overall, even if his judgements on some particular aspects or sections of narrative are worth drawing into question.

But, what difference does it make? Whether Licona is right or wrong, what’s at stake? And, if he’s right, what should it mean for us reading and understanding the Gospels?

Licona actually spends very little time in his book addressing these questions directly. As I read him, I believe his own answer would begin with the idea that understanding more how the Gospels were written – that is, the literary rules and conventions followed by their original authors – provides us greater clarity and insight into what the Gospels originally were (and were not) meant to communicate. This then has implications for all sorts of questions we could ask about Jesus, his life and ministry, and the early Christian community and tradition. It seems obvious to me, however, that there’s one question about the Gospels that stands out as most important and relevant to all of us – are they to be trusted? Are they true?²⁰The centrality of this question to Licona’s project is put well by Craig A. Evans in his forward to the book. Writing of the differences present between the Gospels, he asks, “How is this to be explained? Should these discrepancies be regarded as errors? Were the Gospel writers poor historians? Have they told the truth about Jesus?,” ix. For Evans at least, these are some of the key issues at stake that Licona helps to illuminate.

The ideas in this book, if we take them to be correct, force us to answer, “It’s complicated.”

Are the Gospels true in every detail of the events they describe? No. Are they to be trusted as historical accounts to the same extent that we might trust modern historical writing? No. On the other hand, are they to be trusted as historical accounts to the same extent that we might trust other historical writings contemporary with them (e.g. Plutarch)? Yes, or at least we have a lot of evidence that they are more consistent with each other in their description of events than are other ancient authors even with themselves.

But, just how reliable does this make them? More precisely, which parts or aspects of the Gospels should we trust? Which claims about Jesus should we take to be true, and which may have been altered, or creatively constructed in part or in whole by the authors? Once we acknowledge the Gospel authors had creative license to make these sorts of alterations to their source material, we open the door to a great deal of ambiguity regarding their veracity. If it’s true, as Licona says, that with this insight, skeptical readers cannot reasonably dismiss the “general historical accuracy of what [the Gospels] report,”²¹201 it’s also true that they cannot reasonably accept, without serious question, many of the particular historical and theological claims the Gospels make.²²The category distinction between history and theology, like many category distinctions, tends to be oversimplified. I don’t believe in reality there should be a sharp line drawn between history and theology, and the two influence and depend on eachother in important ways. My point here is that, whatever insight or knowledge one hopes to get out of the Gospels, we have reason to doubt the accuracy and truth of that insight or knowledge based on Licona’s findings. Each section of text really needs to be analyzed individually to see if it was likely altered, and in what way(s). Furthermore, to truly test how well a section matches the facts, this analysis needs to go well beyond the questions posed in this study to include questions about source material and authorship as well, and we need to accept that we may never have much certainty about the veracity of some passages.²³For example, here are some of the questions floating around my head as I write this: Were the Gospels written by eyewitnesses or derived from oral traditions? Or, were they somehow a mix of both? To what extent might they have been edited from their original versions (whatever those may have looked like) and by whom? To what purpose? And, how much creative license may have been taken by the editors? How many of Jesus’s words may have been altered, loosely paraphrased, or even imagined by authors? How many of his actions? Could a passage be historically accurate, but theologically inaccurate? Or vice versa? Given all these considerations, what does it mean to call the Gospels “scripture” or the “Word of God?” I raise these questions not to simply cast doubt on the veracity of the Gospels’ claims, and certainly not to suggest that there is no way to begin answering these questions. Rather, these are honest and, I think, legitimate questions I am struggling with, and I think they also stress the many considerations involved in understanding and evaluating the Gospels. I am well aware that scholars have been pursuing and arguing over questions like these for a long time.

In the end, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? offers a compelling answer to a longstanding question about the New Testament, but it is an answer that leads to more questions. In this case greater clarity leads not to greater certainty, but to less. As frustrating or disconcerting as this may be to many readers, I believe it’s a good and necessary step toward an historically accurate understanding of the Bible – one piece of a very large, very complex puzzle. For me, at least, this is something of a starting point, and there is much more work ahead.²⁴All of this is of course assuming the literary conventions hypothesis is in fact correct. There are those who argue strongly against significant aspects of this line of thinking, and it is to one such scholar I plan to turn soon. The next book on my list regarding these issues is Lydia McGrew’s The Mirror or the Mask: Liberating the Gospels from Literary Devices (Tampa: DeWard Publishing Company, Ltd., 2019).

The Bottom Line

For Christians, non-Christians, and anyone in-between, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? is a valuable resource for better understanding the Gospels in the literary context in which they were written. While it falls far short of explaining every difference in the Gospels, it does starkly reveal the true complexity of issues surrounding their composition and forces readers to abandon overly simplistic or extreme views of them as either wholly unreliable or wholly factual. The book’s level of detail, however, is not for the faint of heart, and for this reason, I wouldn’t recommend it to everybody. It’s best use is as a reference for more in-depth study of problematic passages or for those who, like me, prefer to see the evidence laid out in all it’s detail before buying into a new theory or idea.