Walking With Giants

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. …

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.…