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?

This is not a hill to die on, but here’s a review of the main options offered by scholars.

(a) Creation harmonisation?

Ryle, while accepting the possibility of other explanations, thinks it more likely that both Matthew’s and Luke’s 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 approach was taken by Chrystostom.  Gleason Archer (Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties) offers a similar reconstruction.  But it seems unduly speculative.

(b) Metonymy?

Responding to DeFranza (see below), 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.’

(c) A simple, if unimportant, contradiction?

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.’

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).  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.”‘

(d) Transferral

Licona (Why Are There Differences In The Gospels?) thinks that the principle of ‘transferral’, which he says is prevalent in ancient biography, is at work here.

Various clues within the account itself suggest that Matthew is not using metonymy.  For example, in Mt 8:5 and Mt 8:13, Jesus speaks directly to the centurian.  This is following by the instruction to ‘Go’, which is in the singular, and then the encouragement, ‘It is done for you as you believed’, which is also in the singular.

He agrees that Matthew’s version of this story is consistent with his tendency to abbreviate:

‘Matthew has simplified the story by airbrushing out the Jewish elders and friends the centurion had sent and instead has the centurion go to Jesus directly to make his request in person. Matthew has transferred the actions of the emissaries to the centurion.’

Licona concludes:

‘I see no good reason to think Matthew erred here when a simple explanation is readily available and is in accord with what other biographers of the same era were doing: Matthew simplified the story by eliminating the Jewish emissaries and friends and has the centurion make the request in person to Jesus (transferal).’

Conclusion

I see Licona’s proposal of ‘transferral’ as just one step beyond ‘metonymy’.  It is, as he says, consistent with ancient standards of biography.  I think that this explanation can be accepted without casting any doubt on the truthfulness of Matthew’s (or Luke’s) account.