Have you ever noticed, as you have read the Gospels, that the order of events and some of the details often varies? This is especially noticeable in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) so named because they “see together” — whereas John’s approach is quite different. But even the fourth Gospel does not entirely escape the difficulty. We might think of the cleansing of the temple. Were there two such events — at two separate Passovers — or only one? So it is that many “Harmony of the Gospels” have been written over the history of the church, to address these very issues.

Two Approaches, Both Legitimate

I remember reading James White’s book Scripture Alone over a decade ago now. In it he handles one of these difficult passages. It covers all three Synoptics in how they account for Jesus’ commission of the twelve disciples. What exactly were they told to bring on their journey? The skeptic naturally sees contradictions everywhere. Ever the technical apologist, White undoes his opponent with a combination of Greek and logic. It is always exhilarating to be so thorough in decimating an objection to the faith. Now what Vern Poythress does in his book Inerrancy and the Gospels represents a very different approach and two-fold.

In challenging what he calls the mental picture theory of truth — namely, “that a true account will produce in readers a mental picture in direct correspondence to the actual events” — he is exposing the modernist demand for a text built to satisfy his doubt as unreasonable, but he is also making way for the positive value of the different perspectives. You see, while we are so busy following the skeptic around in the exegetical sands, we are not bothering to ask why the authors, as individual authors, may have written exactly what they did. On their terms. Not on the critic's terms.

And after all, that is the meaning that the apologist is defending, isn't it? To defend the Bible is to defend the author's intent. To attack the Bible (if the skeptic would be serious) is to attack that same author's intent.

In our defense of biblical inerrancy our hasty answers produce one of two results, according to Poythress: The first is what he calls “wooden harmonization” which settles for forced and artificial reconciliation of difficulties. The second is to deny that any difficulties exist and to look down at those who see them as unspiritual.

Now I will not say that White’s approach is wrong and that Poythress’ approach is right. The whole point of Poythress is that the apologist’s technical approach can never be an exhaustive resolution. It seems to me that we need both. That is, we need to answer whatever objections we can to the level of responsible scholarship. But both apologist and exegete need to, sooner or later, get some positive exegesis done. Nor can we pretend to have every difficulty neatly resolved. That is to sweep genuine blindspots under the rug. Thoughtful skeptics will see right through that. New skeptics will be made by it.

Appealing to multi-perspectives rather than naming the whole elephant, so to speak, is not an anti-intellectual cop out. The simple fact that skeptical books keep coming out is enough to prove that. There is no end to new angles on biblical criticism. And whether we have thought about it or not, that demonstrates that the skeptic has two strikes by his own standard. He has gotten most things wrong up to this point, and he always seems to lack more data about his subject matter than he possesses. By the modern definition of reason, this should make us lose all faith in the skeptic’s critical task. But we can hardly get around to exposing this irony if we do not first take seriously such criticism.

A Case Study — The Cursing of the Fig Tree

For our purposes, let us take the account of Jesus cursing the fig tree in Matthew 21:17-22 and Mark 11:11-15 and verse 19-25. This example interests me because the alleged discrepancy is one of chronological order. On the surface it may more readily jump out to the skeptical eye than other more minor details. The most obvious feature of Mark’s account is that there is an interruption. Mark places the cleansing of the temple right in the middle of the two interactions with the fig tree. Matthew has the fig tree withering “at once” (v. 19), whereas in Mark it was after they came back out of the city that they saw it withered and “remembered” (v. 21). So which is it! the skeptic demands.

For starters, what we have here is an example of a literary device that Mark employs throughout his Gospel. We must grant that it is a rather unique device. Because of this, scholars have opted for the name ‘sandwiching’ for it. What he does is to take the beginning and end of a story — like two slices of bread — and he divides them with another story — like jelly on the inside. Lest anyone get the idea that this is a “convenient” escape hatch for biblicists, we will notice that Mark uses it quite a bit. There is a pattern. In fact this device begins to reveal two purposes. It heightens the tension of the narrative, and it also contrasts or compares the figures in the two stories. The crucial verses are these,

In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once (Matt 21:18-19)

On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it … As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” (Mk. 11:12-14, 20-21).

What makes the difficulty harder is that in Matthew the temple cleansing occurs prior to the stay in Bethany that is mentioned. That difficulty goes away if this is where they stayed when they were in Jerusalem period. In other words, they would have been in Bethany both nights just as you or I would return to a hotel every night of a conference. The real issue is the relation of the fig tree to the temple cleansing.

One solution is that Matthew is summarizing the whole withering generically — not that he is trying to deny a two-day process of withering — as well as the whole conversation about it. Augustine took this position. So too did Calvin by default, adding “Only Marks states what Matthew had omitted … So then, though Mark has stated more distinctly the order of time, he makes no contradiction.”

Now I have mentioned Mark’s sandwiches, but I have not yet mentioned Matthew’s ‘compressions.’ In the first Gospel there is a literary device with omits detail, but preserves narrative in a life of Jesus that is vast in its teaching. So which happened here? Did Matthew compress or did Mark sandwich? Or is it both? Poythress helps us by reminding that words never have “infinitely precise meanings” and that trees take many days and weeks to wither. Granting that the whole point is that this is a miracle, still those two facts alone should sober the critic a bit.

Moreover, we must bear in mind that Matthew’s claim is that Jesus caused the withering all at once, so that when Mark has the disciples realizing it the next day, these are not even the same actions anyway. The withering may have happened all “at once,” as in a matter of minutes, and the disciples were already on their way into the city having missed it. Mark brings us back to the "second slice of the bread" for the disciples to see the result.

What I do not have time to get into here is all the details that are really far more interesting than this red herring that the skeptic has thrown down the path for us. There is the real meaning that Jesus had in mind, and then (to Poythress’ point) the specific perspectives within Jesus’ meaning that Matthew and Mark alternatively wanted their readers to notice. The skeptic at this point is like a class clown who is drowning out the profound team lecture that the two Evangelists would give us if we could hear them on their terms. We ought to hear the authors we are criticizing before deciding what to criticize.

Why Four Different Gospels in General?

There are four different Gospels to display the multiperspectival glory of Jesus. And the Gospel authors have different theological selectivity and different literary artistry, to borrow from two more of Poythress’ phrases. We have mentioned one of the most obvious differences: that of order. But the placement of pericopes (definite textual units) is part of the context for interpretation; and those differ in each gospel. That is no embarrassment. That is part of the point.

Speaking of a story teller and his literary elements, like suspense, think of the so-called Messianic Secret emphasized in Mark’s narrative. I am referring to those places where either demons or people were silenced (or fled) by Jesus in order to keep His identity hushed until a better time. The old, critical view of such passages was that Jesus didn’t think of Himself as divine, and so these “secrets” are insertions by the church to bridge this gap between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. But this is very unsophisticated. In reality Mark makes you work for the answer to “Who is Jesus?” Why? What is the literary, theological, “sermonic” value of Mark doing this?

As creatures placed in a space-time continuum, it is our nature to learn progressively. Mark is the lone Evangelist who tells us that the grass was green where the Lord fed them in that desolate place. Why? There are reasons. But my only point here is to say that if it is reason that you are after in history, then you cannot complain that the reason is personal — an author who is not you, the reader — and therefore need not answer to what you think the writing should be about.

The modernist wants history without story. But what did we think history was? And what about stories? The only difference between the two presumably is that one happened and the other did not. However the literary form is largely the same. The form of the narrative is inseparable from the narrator — his aims and his angles. We have a defective view of harmonization because we have a defective view of history. We have an impersonal view of history.

A non-story filled with those “brute” or “bare” facts that the presuppositionalists would remind us cannot exist. While I cannot agree with how presuppositionalists tend to bring this up in order to dismiss objective truth in the medium of nature (facts “outside of” Scripture), nevertheless, their point about facts always being interpreted by some mind (author in the case of texts) is not a point at which classicalists and presuppositionalists ought to disagree. We classicalists may prefer that when the matter of facts come up in critical scholarship, that we recognize that the problem is really not a “brute fact” (apart from interpretation), but that the critic is demanding a very full perspective: namely the perspective of the modernist.

The modernist really expects the fig tree episode to play out as either a still picture in his botany text book or else a motion picture of the same plant in the university greenhouse. This is what interests him and so it must be the only thing that Matthew and Mark could be talking about. When Matthew and Mark "fail" that test, we have a "contradiction." Really we are no longer talking about logic, but about chronological snobbery applied to acceptable forms of literature.

But let us leave that quibble with the presuppositionalist aside. Let us assume that by "bare fact" we mean a thing that is a true apart from the meaning of any person. In that sense, we can agree that there is no such thing as a bare fact (or event) because all events are scripted from eternity, moved and moving toward, within an omnipresent Mind. So divine meaning fills each event prior to human interpretation, which must always come afterward. And since the Gospel authors were commissioned by Christ and inspired by the Spirit for this re-interpretation, their meaning will inerrantly reflect God’s meaning.

A Better Approach to Harmonization

The Gospel writers did not communicate primarily to satisfy the very narrow demands of modern Western elites. Presuppositionalists charge that our apologetics has largely bought into the modern assumptions in order to refute the modern critic. I think we can agree that there are certainly cases of this. The way this plays out in the question of harmonizing differing Gospel accounts is that we shoot at the differences like we are playing Space Invaders (sorry, the last time I played video games was the 80s). But this comes at a cost. By minimizing differences in the accounts, we are actually reducing the truth. The reason this is the case is because God is speaking into a context which He controls and which we can never get to the bottom of — i. e. exhausting its every detail.

One way to summarize Poythress’ point here is that the differences are doctrine. The whole truth contains multi-perspectival truths that cannot be explained away without contradicting the actual truth. In the name of refuting the skeptic we become skeptics ourselves.

Take the case of the centurion’s servant being healed. Matthew makes the centurion relate to Jesus directly, whereas Luke has him sending elders and then servants. However, what if we knew that Matthew’s sought to reduce the insider’s pride and Luke to lift up the outsider’s humility? Two different emphases are united on the big picture. The two Gospels viewed the same details from two different application perspectives.

Multiple perspectives deepen knowledge because each (true) perspective is a portion of the truth and therefore true. Consequently we cannot reduce personal perspective to something less than a deeper “impersonal truth” that is underneath all perspectives. Remember that we are not only talking about multiple human perspectives. God Himself speaks in multiple perspectives, being the ultimate Author of each Gospel. Each has a distinct divine perspective through the human.

Supposing the skeptic in us all asks “How do you really know that’s the meaning?” Take Mark’s depiction of Jesus touching the blind man’s eyes a second time. We see an object lesson of the disciples’ only getting it gradually. But isn’t such an application a little too convenient? How come the Gospel author doesn’t just come out and say that this is the meaning? But if one will take the trouble to study this Gospel as I am suggesting, then the patterns of Mark’s literary artistry would begin to emerge. The constant use of the “sandwich” to draw parallels and drive home applications against a much clearer backdrop than if he did not take this profound angle. When such an appreciation emerges, we will see the two feedings of the crowds, and how the disciples still disbelieved, though the Syrophoenician woman got it. How they got on the boat still oblivious to the meaning of bread. It was though they were as blind as bats. And when their blindness could no longer reach a deeper depth, very helpfully they run into a blind man for Jesus to heal by stages.

It is logically possible that no such meaning exists. But mere logical possibilities and necessities are not the only hurdle a truth claim must clear. If we stop short of deeper meaning only on the ground that “it’s possible” none could be found, well then the lesson would be on us. We would have to have a stubborn kind of blindness not to see it. The better approach to harmonization is to simply jump on the train of God’s progressive revelation, to gain from the perspectives of those who have theologized on the Gospels before and continue the never-ending art of putting it together.

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Vern Poythress. Inerrancy and the Gospels (Wheaton, IL: Crossway 2012)

James White, Scripture Alone (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2004)