Matthew (Mt 8:5-12) and Luke (Lk 7:1-10) both have an account of a Roman centurion whose servant Jesus healed.

Matthew 8:5 When he entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him asking for help.

Luke 7:3 ‘When the centurion heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave.’

So, did the centurion personally ask Jesus for help, or did he send others to do this on his behalf?

Writing on Peter Enns’ ‘Rethinking Biblical Christianity’ blog, Megan Defranza recounts (not quite an ‘Aha! moment’ but) the process by which she came to the conclusion that the Bible is not quite the ‘perfect’ book she had previously thought it to be.  She says that now sees the Bible as ‘imperfect, but wholly adequate’.  DeFranza cites the present account, in its Matthean and Lukan forms, as her first piece of ‘evidence’, because, although there is no problem with the main point, ‘the details… Well, let’s just say they didn’t match up as perfectly as I had expected.’

Kostenberger suggests that the problem in this instance is with DeFranza’s expectations, rather than with the biblical text.  In ancient Jewish culture, there was a close connection between the sender of a message and those who carry that message, such that it would be no surprise to learn that Elijah (1 Kings 18:40), Pilate (Mark 15:15/Mt 27:26, and also Jn 19:19,22), Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus (John 19:39, 40) did not personally carry out the actions attributed to them.

So, from the case cited, there is no undermining either of the Bible’s complete adequacy or of its complete accuracy, ‘when the writers’ own genre, purposes, and intentions are taken into account, as they should be’.

Mounce agrees that ‘It may be that Matthew in his shorter version passes over the original contact and that Luke does not bother to say that the centurion went with his friends to meet Jesus just outside Capernaum.’

Jonathan McClatchie, while espousing a high view of the historical reliability of the New Testament, nevertheless thinks that the issue here is not easily resolved:

‘Traditional harmonizers often try to draw a parallel between this and passages such as Matthew 27:26/Mark 15:15/John 19:1 where we are told that Pilate scourged Jesus (whereas in fact we know that it wasn’t Pilate himself who did the scourging but rather the soldiers under his command). [8] However, in the latter case we know that nobody would have thought that Pilate personally scourged Jesus, whereas this is quite different from what we have in the case of the centurion. In Matthew there are pretty clear indications (to my mind) that Matthew thought the centurion came in person.’

McClatchie quotes Lydia McGrew:

‘Matthew’s narrative is quite unified in its appearance that the centurion is personally present. The final statement that Jesus said, ‘Go, it shall be done for you as you have believed’ to the centurion, where the command is in the singular, is particularly hard to square with the Augustinian solution. If the centurion were back at his house sending messengers to Jesus, he would not need to go anywhere. And if Jesus were speaking to the messengers, he would not have used the singular.’

McClatchie agrees with McGrew’s conclusion, ‘that the simplest explanation of this discrepancy is “a simple memory variation between witnesses.”‘

(Ryle, while accepting the possibility of the above explanation, thinks it more likely that both accounts are literally true: ‘In all probability the Centurion first sent messengers to our Lord, and afterwards went to speak to Him in person. St. Matthew relates the personal interview, and St. Luke the message.’  This seems to be unduly speculative.)

There are, indeed, some serious questions to be faced about the Bible’s ‘perfections’ (and Enns himself has raised some of these).  But the present story, as told by Matthew and Luke, may not be the best case in point.