Contradictions and Improbabilities in the Descriptions?

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.