The Case For Christ

author of an influential treatise on evidence. After studying the
consistency among the four gospel writers, he offered this
evaluation: "There is enough of a discrepancy to show that there
could have been no previous concert among them; and at the same
time such substantial
agreement as to show that they all were independent narrators of
the same great transaction ."
From the perspective of a classical historian, German scholar
Hans Stier has concurred that agreement over basic data and
divergence of details suggest credibility, because fabricated
accounts tend to be fully consistent and harmonized. "Every
historian," he wrote, "is especially skeptical at that moment
when an extraordinary happening is only reported in accounts
which are completely free of contradictions."
While that's true, I didn't want to ignore the difficulties that
are raised by the ostensible discrepancies among the gospels. I
decided to probe the issue further by pressing Blomberg on some
apparent clear-cut contradictions that skeptics frequently seize
upon as examples of why the gospels are unreliable.
Coping with Contradictions
I began with a well-known story of a healing. "In Matthew it says
a centurion himself came to ask Jesus to heal his servant," I
pointed out. "However, Luke says the centurion sent the elders to
do this. Now, that's an obvious contradiction, isn't it?"
"No, I don't think so," Blomberg replied. "Think about it this
way: in our world today, we may hear a news report that says,
'The president today announced that . . .' when in fact the
speech was written by a speechwriter and delivered by the press
secretary-and with a little luck, the president might have
glanced at it somewhere in between. Yet nobody accuses that
broadcast of being in error. "In a similar way, in the ancient
world it was perfectly understood and accepted that actions were
often attributed to people when in fact they occurred through
their subordinates or emissaries-in this case through the elders
of the Jewish people."
"So you're saying that Matthew and Luke can both be right at the
same time?"
"That's exactly what I'm saying," he replied.
That seemed plausible, so I posed a second example. "What