Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  A careful comparison of the two accounts also shows internal discrepancies. One way to get to the problem is to ask this: According to Matthew, what was Joseph and Mary’s hometown? Your natural reaction is to say “Nazareth.” But only Luke says this. Matthew says nothing of the sort. He first mentions Joseph and Mary not in connection with Nazareth but in connection with Bethlehem. The wise men, who are following a star (presumably it took some time), come to worship Jesus in his house in Bethlehem. Joseph and Mary evidently live there. There is nothing about an inn and a manger in Matthew. Moreover, when Herod slaughters the children, he instructs his soldiers to kill every male two years and under. This must indicate that Jesus had been born some time before the wise men show up. Otherwise the instruction does not make much sense: surely even Roman soldiers could recognize that a toddler walking around the playground was not an infant born some time last week. So Joseph and Mary are still living in Bethlehem months or even a year or more after the birth of Jesus. So how can Luke be right when he says that they are from Nazareth and returned there just a month or so after Jesus’ birth? Moreover, according to Matthew, after the family flees to Egypt and then returns upon the death of Herod, they initially plan to return to Judea, where Bethlehem is located. They cannot do so, however, because now Archelaus is the ruler, and so they relocate to Nazareth. In Matthew’s account they are not originally from Nazareth but from Bethlehem.

  Even more obvious, though, is the discrepancy involved with the events after Jesus’ birth. If Matthew is right that the family escaped to Egypt, how can Luke be right that they returned directly to Nazareth?

  In short, there are enormous problems with the birth narratives when viewed from a historical perspective. There are historical implausibilities and discrepancies that can scarcely be reconciled. Why such differences? The answer might seem obvious to some readers. What historical critics have long said about these Gospel accounts is that they both are trying to emphasize the same two points: that Jesus’ mother was a virgin and that he was born in Bethlehem. And why did he have to be born in Bethlehem? Matthew hits the nail on the head: there is a prophecy in the Old Testament book of Micah that a savior would come from Bethlehem. What were these Gospel writers to do with the fact that it was widely known that Jesus came from Nazareth? They had to come up with a narrative that explained how he came from Nazareth, in Galilee, a little one-horse town that no one had ever heard of, but was born in Bethlehem, the home of King David, royal ancestor of the Messiah. To get Jesus born in Bethlehem but raised in Nazareth, Matthew and Luke independently came up with solutions that no doubt struck each of them as plausible. But the historian can detect the problems with each narrative, and the careful reader can see that when the stories are placed side by side (read horizontally) they are at odds with each other at several key points.

  The Genealogy of Jesus

  Genealogies are not usually among the favorite passages of readers of the Bible. Sometimes my students complain when I have them read the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. If they think this is bad, I tell them they should take a class on the Hebrew Bible and read the genealogy of 1 Chronicles. It covers nine full chapters, name after name. By comparison, the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke are short and sweet. The problem is that the genealogies are different.

  Once again, Matthew and Luke are our only Gospels that give Jesus’ family line. Both of them trace his lineage through Joseph to the Jewish ancestors. This in itself creates a puzzling situation. As we have seen, both Matthew and Luke want to insist that Jesus’ mother was a virgin: she conceived not by having sex with Joseph but by the Holy Spirit. Joseph is not Jesus’ father. But that creates an obvious problem. If Jesus is not a blood-relation to Joseph, why is it that Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’ bloodline precisely through Joseph? This is a question that neither author answers: both accounts give a genealogy that can’t be the genealogy of Jesus, since his only bloodline goes through Mary, yet neither author provides her genealogy.

  Apart from this general problem, there are several obvious differences between the genealogies of Matthew 1 and Luke 3. Some of them are not discrepancies per se; they are just differences. For example, Matthew gives the genealogy at the very outset of his Gospel, in the opening verses; Luke gives his after the baptism of Jesus in chapter 3 (an odd place for a genealogy, since genealogies have to do with your birth, not your baptism as a thirty-year-old. But Luke may have had his reasons for locating it where he does). Matthew’s genealogy traces Joseph’s lineage back through King David, the ancestor of the Messiah, all the way to Abraham, the father of the Jews. Luke’s genealogy goes back well beyond that, tracing the line to Adam, father of the human race.

  I have an aunt who is a genealogist, who is proud to have traced our family back to a passenger on the Mayflower. But here is a genealogy that goes back to Adam. As in Adam and Eve—the first humans. It’s an amazing genealogy.

  One might wonder why the two authors have different end points for their genealogies. Usually it is thought that Matthew, a Gospel concerned to show the Jewishness of Jesus, wants to emphasize Jesus’ relation to the greatest king of the Jews, David, and to the father of the Jews, Abraham. Luke, on the other hand, is concerned to show that Jesus is the savior of all people, Jew and gentile, as seen in Luke’s second volume, the book of Acts, where the gentiles are brought into the church. And so Luke shows that Jesus is related to all of us through Adam.

  One other difference between the two genealogies is that Matthew starts at the beginning, with Abraham, and moves down generation by generation to Joseph; Luke goes the other direction, starting with Joseph and moving generation by generation back to Adam.

  These then are simply some of the differences between the two accounts. The real problem they pose, however, is that the two genealogies are actually different. The easiest way to see the difference is to ask the simple question, Who, in each genealogy, is Joseph’s father, patrilineal grandfather, and great-grandfather? In Matthew the family line goes from Joseph to Jacob to Matthan to Eleazar to Eliud and on into the past. In Luke it goes from Joseph to Heli to Mathat to Levi to Melchi. The lines become similar once we get all the way back to King David (although there are other problems, as we’ll see), but from David to Joseph, the lines are at odds.

  How does one solve this problem? One typical suggestion is to say that Matthew’s genealogy is of Joseph, since Matthew focuses on Joseph more in the birth narrative, and that Luke’s is of Mary, since she is the focus of his birth narrative. It is an attractive solution, but it has a fatal flaw. Luke explicitly indicates that the family line is that of Joseph, not Mary (Luke 1:23; also Matthew 1:16).7

  There are other problems. In some ways Matthew’s genealogy is the more remarkable because he stresses the numerological significance of Jesus’ ancestry. From Abraham to David, Israel’s greatest king, there were fourteen generations; from David to the destruction of Judah by the Babylonians, Israel’s greatest disaster, there were fourteen generations; and from the Babylonian disaster to the birth of Jesus, fourteen generations (1:17). Fourteen, fourteen, and fourteen—it is almost as if God had planned it this way. In fact, for Matthew, he had. After every fourteen generations there occurs an enormously significant event. This must mean that Jesus—the fourteenth generation—is someone of very great importance to God.

  The problem is that the fourteen-fourteen-fourteen schema doesn’t actually work. If you read through the names carefully, you’ll see that in the third set of fourteen there are in fact only thirteen generations. Moreover, it is relatively easy to check Matthew’s genealogy against his source, the Hebrew Bible itself, which provides him with the names for his genealogy. It turns out that Matthew left out some names in the fourteen generations from David to the Babylonian disaster. In 1:8 he indicates that Joram is the father of Uzziah. But we know from 1 Chronicles 3:10–12 that Joram was not Uzziah’s father, but his great-great-grandfather.8 In other words, Matthew has dropped three generations
from the genealogy. Why? The answer should be obvious. If he included all the generations, he would not be able to claim that something significant happened at every fourteenth generation.

  But why does he stress the number fourteen in particular? Why not seventeen, or eleven? Scholars have given several explanations over the years. Some have pointed out that in the Bible seven is the perfect number. If so, then what is fourteen? Twice seven. This could be a “doubly perfect” genealogy. Another, possibly more convincing, theory is that the genealogy is designed to stress Jesus’ status as the Messiah. The Messiah is to be the “son of David,” a descendant of Israel’s greatest king. It is important to know that in ancient languages, the letters of the alphabet functioned also as numerals, so that the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, was also the numeral 1, the second, beth, was 2, the third, gimel, was 3, and so on. Also, in ancient Hebrew no vowels were used. So the name David was spelled D-V-D. In Hebrew, the letter D (daleth) is the number 4 and the V (waw) is 6. If you add up the letters of David’s name, it equals 14. That may be why Matthew wanted there to be three groups of precisely fourteen generations in the genealogy of the son of David, the Messiah, Jesus.

  Unfortunately, to make the numbers work he had to leave out some names. I might also point out that if Matthew was right in his fourteen-fourteen-fourteen schema, there would be forty-two names between Abraham and Jesus. Luke’s genealogy, however, gives fifty-seven names. These are different genealogies.

  And the reason for the discrepancies? Each author had a purpose for including a genealogy—or, more likely, several purposes: to show Jesus’ connection to the father of the Jews, Abraham (especially Matthew), and the great king of the Jews, David (Matthew), and to the human race as a whole (Luke). Probably the two authors inherited, or possibly they made up, different genealogies. Of course neither could know that his account would be placed in a “New Testament” and be carefully compared with the other by historical critics living two thousand years later. And they certainly didn’t consult with each other to get their facts straight. Each gave his account as well as he could, but their accounts ended up different.

  Other Discrepancies from the Life of Jesus

  Now that we have looked in some detail at a few of the interesting discrepancies among the Gospel accounts, I can touch on some others more quickly. For the most part you can examine these on your own if you choose. And you can find plenty more, simply by reading the Gospels horizontally, story by story.

  We can approach some of the discrepancies by asking some simple questions. I’ll limit myself here to five.

  What Did the Voice at Jesus’ Baptism Say?

  It depends on which account you read. The baptism is not narrated in John, but we do have accounts in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all very similar. This is what one would expect: scholars have long known that Matthew and Luke got a number of their stories from Mark, one of their key sources; that’s why there are so many cases of verbatim agreement. But there are differences because Matthew and Luke changed the wording of their sources in certain places. In any event, in all three accounts of Jesus’ baptism, when he emerges from the water the heavens open up, the Spirit descends in the form of a dove, and a voice comes from heaven. But what does the voice say? In Matthew it says, “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased.” The voice appears to be speaking to the people around Jesus, or possibly to John the Baptist, informing them who Jesus is. In Mark, however, the voice says, “You are my son, in whom I am well pleased.” In this case the voice appears to be speaking directly to Jesus, telling him, or confirming to him, who he really is. In Luke we have something different (this is a bit complicated, because different manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel give the voice different words. I am taking here the original wording of the verse as found in some older manuscripts of the Bible, even though it is not found in most English translations).9 Here the voice says, “You are my son, today I have begotten you” (3:22), quoting the words of Psalm 2:7.

  Each account is trying to do something different with the voice. That is to say, the different words mean different things and have different functions: in Matthew, the words identify Jesus to John the Baptist and the crowd; in Mark, to confirm Jesus’ identity to him directly; in Luke, they declare that the baptism has made (or ratified?) him as God’s special son. But there remains the question, What did the voice actually say? Early Christians were confused by this problem, so much so that a later Gospel, called the Gospel of the Ebionites, resolved it by indicating that the voice came from heaven on three occasions. First it said the words as related by Mark, which were addressed to Jesus; then it said the words as related by Matthew, addressed to John the Baptist and the crowd; and finally the words as related by Luke. But unless someone is willing to rewrite all three Gospels, the fact is they indicate that the voice said different things.

  Where Was Jesus the Day After He Was Baptized?

  In Matthew, Mark, and Luke—the so-called Synoptic Gospels—Jesus, after his baptism, goes off into the wilderness where he will be tempted by the Devil.10 Mark especially is quite clear about the matter, for he states, after telling of the baptism, that Jesus left “immediately” for the wilderness. What about John? In John there is no account of Jesus being tempted by the Devil in the wilderness. The day after John the Baptist has borne witness to the Spirit descending on Jesus as a dove at baptism (John 1:29–34), he sees Jesus again and declares him to be the Lamb of God (John is explicit, stating that this occurred “the next day”). Jesus then starts gathering his disciples around him (1:35–52) and launches into his public ministry by performing his miracle of turning water into wine (2:1–11). So where was Jesus the next day? It depends on which Gospel you read.

  Was Jairus’s Daughter Already Dead?

  To illustrate my point that minor, irreconcilable differences can be found throughout the Gospels, I have chosen just one simple example from Jesus’ healing ministry. In Mark, our earliest account, a leader of the synagogue named Jairus comes up to Jesus and begs him to hasten home with him, because his daughter is very sick and he wants Jesus to heal her. Before they can start on their way, though, Jesus is interrupted by a woman with a hemorrhage, whom he heals. Then servants from Jairus’s house arrive to tell him that it is too late—the girl has died. Jesus tells them not to fret; he goes to the house and raises the girl from the dead (Mark 5:21–43). Matthew has the same story (9:18–26), but with a key difference. In Mark’s version Jairus comes to Jesus because his daughter has already died. He wants Jesus to come not to heal her but to raise her from the dead. And Jesus does so. It may seem like a minor difference, but it can be seen as highly significant—a matter of life and death.

  Who Is for Jesus and Who Is Against Him?

  Some sayings of Jesus are rendered in similar but nevertheless diverging ways. One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is the pair of sayings related in Matthew 12:30 and Mark 9:40. In Matthew, Jesus declares, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” In Mark, he says, “Whoever is not against us is for us.” Did he say both things? Could he mean both things? How can both be true at once? Or is it possible that one of the Gospel writers got things switched around?

  How Long Did Jesus’ Ministry Last?

  Our earliest Gospel, Mark, does not give an explicit indication of the length of Jesus’ public ministry, but does give some suggestive comments. At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, in chapter 2, his disciples are going through the wheat fields and eating the grain, to the consternation of the Pharisees, who believe they are violating the Sabbath. This must be taking place, then, in the fall, at the time of the harvest. After this point the action moves very quickly: one of Mark’s favorite words is euthus, “immediately”—“immediately” Jesus did this, “immediately” he did that. By chapter 11, after lots of “immediately’s” we come to the last week of Jesus’ life, at the Passover feast in Jerusalem. Passover is in the spring, and the distinct impression is that the ministry has lasted a few months, fro
m harvest time to spring.

  A few months? Doesn’t everyone know that Jesus’ ministry lasted three years? Actually, the idea that it lasted three years comes not from the Synoptic Gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—but from the last Gospel, John. On three separate occasions John refers to different Passover celebrations, which since they were a year apart would seem to indicate that the ministry must have lasted at least over two years, rounded up to three. But which is it? I would say this is not technically a discrepancy, but it is hard to know what to make of all of Mark’s “immediately’s” if he didn’t really mean them.

  One can find many other discrepancies in the accounts of Jesus’ ministry if one were inclined to track them all down. Rather than continue on the same track, though, at this point I’d like to move on and talk about discrepancies found in the Passion Narratives—the accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Some of these discrepancies, too, are highly significant.

  Discrepancies in the Passion Narratives

  We have already talked about a couple of the discrepancies between the Gospels of Mark and John with regard to the Passion Narratives: the date of the Temple cleansing (Mark 11; John 2) and the day and time of his death (Mark 14–15; John 18–19). These are not the only differences in our Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Here I will talk about three important differences at some length, and then give a short rundown of a few others.

  The Trial Before Pilate

  We start with a comparison of Mark, our earliest canonical Gospel, and John, our latest. In both accounts Jesus is put on trial before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and condemned to death for calling himself the King of the Jews. But there are some very interesting differences between Mark’s and John’s narratives of the trial.