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.

…

‘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. …

Mk 6:8f; Mt 10:10; Lk 9:3 – Staff, or no staff?

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Mk 6:8 He instructed them to take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts—6:9 and to put on sandals but not to wear two tunics.

Mt 10:9f ‘”Do not take gold, silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for the journey, or an extra tunic, or sandals or staff, for the worker deserves his provisions.”‘

Lk 9:3 ‘He said to them, “Take nothing for your journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, and do not take an extra tunic.”‘…

Acts 9:7/22:9 – What did Paul’s companions see and hear?

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Acts 9:7 (Now the men who were traveling with him stood there speechless, because they heard the voice but saw no one.)

22:9 “Those who were with me saw the light, but did not understand the voice of the one who was speaking to me.”

Acts 9:7 appears to be saying that Paul’s companions heard but did not see, whereas according to Acts 22:9 they saw but did not hear.

This apparent discrepancy is discussed as a ‘test case’ in Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy (Zondervan).…

All things new

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I was delighted by Jim Gordon’s New Year reflections, reproduced here in slightly abridged form.

New Creation

2 Corinthians 5.17 ‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; what is old has passed away—look, what is new has come!’

‘To be in Christ and know Christ in us, is the core experience of Christian faith. Paul calls it new creation; Jesus calls it being born again. It’s what God does.’

New Teaching

Acts 17:19 ‘They took Paul and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are proclaiming?”‘…

Exodus 6:2 – When was the name ‘Yahweh’ first made known?

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Exodus 6:2 “I am the LORD. 3 I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the LORD I did not make myself known to them.”

The Issue

Source critics point out that this (attributed to ‘P’) appears to contradict Gen 4:26 (attributed to ‘J’), which says that men called upon the name of the LORD as early as the days of Enosh (see also Gen 12:8; 28:13).

Steven DiMattei asks:

‘When was the name Yahweh first invoked: in the earliest generations of man OR not till Moses at Sinai?

…

1 Sam 34:1-4; 2 Sam 1:1-10 – How did King Saul die?

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According to 1 Samuel 34:1-14, Saul asked his armor-bearer to kill him, but the armor-bearer refused, and so Saul fell on his own sword and committed suicide.

However in 2 Samuel 1:1-10 an Amalekite claims to have killed Saul, at his (Saul’s) request.

What should we make of this discrepancy?

Some, such as Ackroyd, think that the two accounts represent two incompatible ‘traditions’ concerning Saul’s death.

Others, such as Brueggemann, are unwilling to adjudicate on the relative historicity of the two accounts.…