DAY 89
CHALLENGE
“The Gospels sometimes record the events of Jesus’ ministry in different order and thus contradict one another.”
DEFENSE
These are not contradictions. Ancient authors had the liberty to record events chronologically or non-chronologically.
Even in our modern, time-obsessed world, biographers have liberty to arrange material in non-chronological ways. A biography of Abraham Lincoln might devote a chapter to his thoughts on slavery and race relations rather than breaking this material up and covering it repeatedly throughout a chronological account of his career. Similarly, Jesus’ ethical or prophetic teachings might be put together in single sections of a Gospel, as with the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7) and the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24–25).
In the ancient world, people usually did not have day-by-day re- cords of a person’s life. The memory of what a great man did per- sisted, but not precisely when he did things. Recording material in a non-chronological order was thus expected. This was true even of the most famous men in the world. See Suetonius’s The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, which records the words and deeds of the Caesars without a detailed chronology.
Ultimately, what a great man said and did was considered important, not precisely when the events happened. That’s why the former were remembered and the latter was not.
Jesus gave his teachings on many occasions, but without having a detailed chronology available, the evangelists sequenced them according to topical and literary considerations. The same was true of many individual deeds Jesus performed (e.g., healings).
This is not to say that the evangelists give us no chronological information. Some events obviously occurred before or after others. Thus his baptism (with which he inaugurated his ministry) is toward the beginning of the Gospels and the Crucifixion is at the end.
Sometimes chronological details were remembered, such as the fact that Jesus performed a particular healing on the Sabbath (Mark 3:1–6), that John the Baptist’s ministry began in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar (Luke 3:1–3), or that certain events in Jesus’ life took place on major Jewish feasts (John 2:13, 6:4, 7:2, 10:22, 11:5). It is thus possible to glean chronological information from the Gospels.