Category Archives: Gospels

Jesus as the new Moses in Matthew’s Gospel

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Readers of Matthew’s Gospel have long pondered and puzzled over his references and allusions to the Old Testament Scriptures.

Bart Ehrman invites us to consider the story that Matthew tells in his first five chapters:

  • a male child is miraculously born to Jewish parents,
  • but a fierce tyrant in the land is set to destroy him.
  • The child is supernaturally protected from harm in Egypt.
  • Then he leaves Egypt and is said to pass through the waters (of baptism).
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Why Are There Differences In The Gospels? – 3

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Summarising chapter 3 of:

Licona, Michael R. Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Parallel Pericopes in Plutarch’s Lives

In this chapter, Michael Licona examines differences within thirty pericopes that appear two or more times within nine Lives written by Plutarch.

Here, I shall simply reproduce Licona’s own chapter summary:

In the fifty Lives written by Plutarch that have survived, we have focused our attention on nine, since they feature main characters who, for the most part, knew the main characters in the other Lives: Sertorius, Lucullus, Cicero, Crassus, Pompey, Cato Minor, Caesar, Brutus, and Antony.

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‘Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?’ – 2

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Summarising chapter 2 of:

Licona, Michael R. Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Who Was Plutarch?

Plutarch (cAD 45 – cAD 120)  was a Greek philosopher, historian and biographer.  He wrote more than 60 ‘lives’ (biographies), of which about 50 survive.

There are important differences between ancient history and biography and their modern counterparts.  Ancient biography had its own literary conventions.  The biographer’s main aim was to illuminate the character of his subject. …

‘Why Are There Differences In The Gospels?’ – 1

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Summarising chapter 1 of:

Licona, Michael R. Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Compositional Textbooks

Students of rhetoric were taught preliminary exercises or progymnasmata.  The earliest known textbook of these was by Theon, and dates to the 1st century CE.

A chreia is a brief account of what a person said or did.  Relating of a chreia could be varied in any of a number of ways: by varying the number of people involved, for example.…

‘Why Are There Differences In The Gospels?’ – Intro

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Licona, Michael R. Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Summarising the Introduction:

Any careful reader of the Gospels will notice that, despite many similarities, there are also differences between them.

Differences in parallel accounts can also be found in the secular biographies of the day: works by Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, etc.

Various explanations of these differences have been offered: memory lapse, use of different sources, elasticity of oral tradition, flexibile nature of the biography genre, redaction, selectivity between different sources or authors, use of idioms that are unfamiliar to us, altering of sources to make a story seem more plausible.…

What makes a story ‘true’?

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The recent screening on ITV of the four-part miniseries ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’ has brought the plight of hundreds of sub postmasters and postmistresses who, over a period of some 20 years, have been subjected to a massive miscarriage of justice.

What I would like to mention here is not the story itself, gripping and alarming as it is.  Rather, I would like to focus on how the story has been told.  At the beginning of each episode comes the following statement:

‘This is a true story. …

Compositional devices in ancient biographies

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How do we account for difference between the Gospels?

Michael Licona, in his book, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography (2017) argued that the Evangelists would have been acquainted with, and would have utilised, compositional devises that were ‘practically universal in ancient historiography’.

These include:

  • transferal (attributing words spoken by one person to another),
  • displacement (placing something spoken in one context to another),
  • conflation (combining elements of two different events or people as one),
  • compression (describing events as taking place in a shorter period of time than actual),
  • spotlighting (focusing attention upon a particular person),
  • simplification (omitting details in order to focus attention),
  • expansion of narrative details (the creative reconstruction and free composition of plausible circumstances),
  • paraphrasing (creative retelling of an event to emphasize a point),
  • the law of biographical relevance (the addition or omission of biographical information according to the purpose of the author)

Robert Stein (from whose review the above list has been taken), comments that a number of these are not only uncontroversial, but by no means limited to ancient Greco-Roman historiography (we find just such spotlighting in the Old Testament stories of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Solomon and others. …