Mark 2:25f – “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry—2:26 how he entered the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the sacred bread…?”

According to 1 Sam 21:1-6, Ahimelech was high priest at this time.  His son, Abiathar, became high priest shortly afterwards.

The problem is discussed from a sceptical perspective by this blogger.

The ESV Study Bible summarises two of the main approaches to harminisation:

‘The incident with David actually occurred when Ahimelech, not his son Abiathar, was high priest (1 Sam. 21:1). “In the time of Abiathar” could mean: (1) “In the time of Abiathar who later became high priest” (naming Abiathar because he was a more prominent person in the OT narrative, remaining high priest for many years of David’s reign); “In [the Scripture section] of Abiathar, the high priest” (taking Gk. epi plus the genitive to indicate a location in Scripture, as in Mark 12:26). Abiathar, the only son of Ahimelech to survive the slaughter by Doeg (1 Samuel 22), is the best-known high priest in this larger section of 1 Samuel.’

To consider in a little more detail various attempt to account for this apparent discrepancy:-

(a) Some think that Mark is plainly mistaken.  For Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar who moved from conservative evangelicalism to agnosticism, this text was instrumental in undermining his belief in the truthfulness of Scripture.  As a student, he had written an extensive essay defending the accuracy of the text.  His tutor, however, raised the question, “Perhaps Mark simply made a mistake.”  It is remarkable that this had such an effect on Ehrman, given that there are many Christians who would allow for the presence of minor inexactitudes in the Bible while still accepting its overall trustworthiness in matters of faith and practice.  For John Byron, this same text raised similar questions about the Bible’s historical value, although with less devastating effects on his personal faith.

(b) Others think that Mark originally wrote ‘Ahimelech’, but this was changed by early copyists to ‘Abiathar’.

(c) William Hendriksen proposes the rather desperate expedient of suggesting that both father and son gave the bread to David(!)

(d) According to Cranfield, ‘in the days of Abiathar the High Priest’ need not imply that he was actually High Priest at the time.  He suggests that there may be some confusion between Ahimelech and Abiathar in the OT itself – citing 1 Sam 22:20 with 2 Sam 8:17; 1 Chron 18:16; 24:6.

(e) Blomberg (Historical Reliability) notes that ‘in the days of’ translates the Gk. word ‘epi‘.  Following John Wenham, he suggests that Mark means, ‘In the passage about Abiathar‘ (Abiathar, mentioned in 1 Sam 22, was the better-known of the two, and note the similar construction in Mk 12:26).  Blomberg has also posted on this question here.

In Hermeneutics, Authority and Canon (p148), Blomberg writes:

Ahimelech is certainly the more dominant of the two high priests in the larger context of the latter portion of 1 Samuel, making Wenham’s application to Mark 2:26 extremely plausible. Moreover, in eighteen of the twenty-one Markan uses of the preposition, ἐπί has a local or spatial rather than a temporal sense, rendering the traditional translation (“when Abiathar was high priest”) less likely.

The last of these explanations seems the most likely.  The problem is, of course, fairly trivial, except for those who feel the need to defend the inerrancy of the Bible in every detail, and those whose faith is too flimsy to withstand any uncertainty.  There is some indication that Matthew and Luke recognised that there was a problem here, because both Matthew 12:4 and Luke 6:4 drop the offending name.

See also this, by Ian Paul.