Contradictions and Improbabilities in the Descriptions?

July 15, 2018Science & Faith

Each of the four Gospels contains a large number of descriptions of events that may be unique to one single Gospel or common to several if not all of them. When they are unique to one Gospel, they sometimes raise serious problems. Thus, in the case of an event of considerable importance, it is surprising to find the event mentioned by only one evangelist; Jesus’s Ascension into heaven on the day of Resurrection, for example. Elsewhere, numerous events are differently described-sometimes very differently indeed-by two or more evangelists. Christians are very often astonished at the existence of such contradictions between the Gospels-if they ever discover them. This is because they have been repeatedly told in tones of the greatest assurance that the New Testament authors were the eyewitnesses of the events they describe!

Some of these disturbing improbabilities and contradictions have been shown in previous chapters. It is however the later events of Jesus’s life in particular, along with the events following the Passion, that form the subject of varying or contradictory descriptions.

DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PASSION

Father Roguet himself notes that Passover is placed at different times in relation to Jesus’s Last Supper with His disciples in the Synoptic Gospels and John’s Gospel. John places the Last Supper ‘before the Passover celebrations’ and the other three evangelists place it during the celebrations themselves. Obvious improbabilities emerge from this divergence: a certain episode becomes impossible because of the position of Passover in relation to it. When one knows the importance it had in the Jewish liturgy and the importance of the meal where Jesus bids farewell to his disciples, how is it possible to believe that the memory of one event in relation to the other could have faded to such an extent in the tradition recorded later by the evangelists?

On a more general level, the descriptions of the Passion differ from one evangelist to another, and more particularly between John and the first three Gospels. The Last Supper and the Passion in John’s Gospel are both very long, twice as long as in Mark and Luke, and roughly one and a half times as long as Matthew’s text. John records a very long speech of Jesus to His disciples which takes up four chapters (14 to 17) of his Gospel. During this crowning speech, Jesus announces that He will leave His last instructions and gives them His last spiritual testament. There is no trace of this in the other Gospels. The same process can work the other way however; Matthew, Luke and Mark all relate Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, but John does not mention it.