Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Mark’s account is short and straightforward. Early in the morning the Jewish leaders bring Jesus to Pilate, who asks him if he is, in fact, the King of the Jews. Jesus replies in just two words, in Greek: “su legeis.” “You say so.” The Jewish priests accuse him of many things, and Pilate expresses surprise that Jesus puts up no defense. We are then told that Pilate had a custom of releasing a prisoner to the Jewish people during Passover, and he asks the gathered crowds whether they want him to release the “King of the Jews.” The chief priests intervene to stir up the crowd to ask for a murderer named Barabbas to be released to them instead of Jesus. Pilate asks the crowd what they want done with Jesus. They reply that he should crucify him. And “to satisfy the crowd” he does what they ask: he releases Barabbas, has Jesus flogged, and hands him over to be crucified.

  If Mark’s were our only account of the event, we would have the impression that the trial was very quick; that Jesus said almost nothing (just two words); and that Pilate, the Jewish leaders accusing Jesus, the crowds, and Jesus himself were all in one place exchanging their views.

  But John (18:28–19:14) has a very different account. In John the Jewish leaders take Jesus to Pilate early in the morning, but they refuse to enter Pilate’s headquarters because they want to “avoid ritual defilement” so that they can “eat the Passover” that evening (18:28; remember, though, that in Mark’s Gospel they had already eaten the Passover meal the night before). We’re not told why they would be defiled by entering the headquarters. Because it was a pagan place? Built on a cemetery? Something else? But the result is that the trial proceeds in a rather peculiar way. Jesus is inside the headquarters with Pilate, the Jewish authorities who accuse him are outside the headquarters, along with the Jewish crowd, and Pilate runs back and forth between accuser and accused, talking first to one, then to the other. Pilate enters and leaves the headquarters six times over the course of the trial and has discussions both with Jesus and with the accusers—reasoning with them, pleading with them, trying to get them to listen to sense.

  You can find numerous other differences between the accounts if you read them horizontally. Here I mention just three and point out their potential significance. First, Jesus has a lot more to say in John’s account than in Mark. In fact, he has sustained conversations with Pilate, speaking of his “kingdom that is not of this world” (18:36), indicating that he has come into the world to speak the truth (18:37), declaring that Pilate has no ultimate power over him, except what has been given him by God (19:11). These extended dialogues conform well with what you find throughout all of John’s Gospel, where Jesus engages in long protracted speeches, quite unlike the series of aphorisms and one-liners that you frequently find in the Synoptic Gospels.

  Second, rather than having Jesus flogged after his trial is over and the sentence has been pronounced—which, one might think, would be the sensible time to carry out the sentence—in John, Pilate has Jesus flogged in the middle of the proceedings (19:1). A variety of explanations have been given for John’s change of this detail; it may be because of what happens next: Pilate brings Jesus out of the headquarters to present him, beaten, bloodied, and in a purple robe, to the Jewish people, and says to them, “Behold the man.” For the author of John, Jesus is much more than a man, but Pilate and the Jewish crowds don’t recognize it. Pilate and his soldiers are mocking Jesus by dressing him up in a crown of thorns and giving him a purple robe and declaring, “Hail, King of the Jews.” In fact, unbeknownst to them their declaration is true. For John, Jesus really is the King, appearances notwithstanding.

  Finally, it is significant that in John’s Gospel, on three occasions Pilate expressly declares that Jesus is innocent, does not deserve to be punished, and ought to be released (18:38; 19:6; and by implication in 19:12). In Mark, Pilate never declares Jesus innocent. Why this heightened emphasis in John? Scholars have long noted that John is in many ways the most virulently anti-Jewish of our Gospels (see John 8:42–44, where Jesus declares that the Jews are not children of God but “children of the Devil”). In that context, why narrate the trial in such a way that the Roman governor repeatedly insists that Jesus is innocent? Ask yourself: If the Romans are not responsible for Jesus’ death, who is? The Jews. And so they are, for John. In 19:16 we are told that Pilate handed Jesus over to the Jewish chief priests so that they could have him crucified.

  The Death of Judas

  In all four Gospels Judas Iscariot is said to be the one who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his arrest. The four accounts differ on why Judas did the foul deed. There is no reason stated in Mark, although we are told that he received money for the act, so maybe it was out of greed (14:10–11). Matthew (26:14) states explicitly that Judas did it for the money. Luke, on the other hand, indicates that Judas did it because “Satan entered into him” (22:3). In other words, the devil made him do it. In John, Judas is himself called “a devil” (6:70–71), and so presumably he betrayed his master because he had an evil streak.

  More interesting yet is the question of what happened to Judas after he performed the act of betrayal. Mark and John say nothing about the matter: Judas simply disappears from the scene. So, too, in the Gospel of Luke, but Luke wrote a second volume to accompany his Gospel, the book of Acts.11 Acts gives an account of what happened to Judas after the betrayal, as does the Gospel of Matthew, but it is striking that the two accounts stand directly at odds with each other on a number of points.

  The commonly held view that Judas went out and “hanged himself” comes from Matthew (27:3–10). After Judas sees that his betrayal has led to Jesus’ conviction, he feels remorse and tries to return his pay of thirty pieces of silver to the Jewish chief priests, telling them that he has “sinned by betraying innocent blood.” They refuse to accept the money, however, so he throws it down in the Temple and goes out and hangs himself. The chief priests then collect the money, but decide that they cannot put it back into the Temple treasure because it is “blood money”—money that has been tainted with innocent blood. So they decide to put it to good use and purchase a “potter’s field,” presumably a field from which potters took clay, as a place to bury foreigners who died in Jerusalem. It is because it was purchased with Judas’s blood money, we are told, that the place “has been called the Field of Blood to this day.”

  Luke’s account in the book of Acts has some similarities: the death of Judas is connected with the purchase of a field that is called “the Field of Blood.” But the details are in stark contrast to—even contradict—the story as told by Matthew. In Acts (1:18–19) we are told that Judas himself, not the Jewish priests, purchased the field with “the reward of his wickedness,” the money he earned for his betrayal. And it is not said that he hanged himself. Instead we learn that he fell “headlong” and “burst open in the middle” so that “his bowels gushed out.” For Luke the reason the field was called the Field of Blood was because Judas bled all over it.

  Over the years readers have tried to reconcile these two accounts of the death of Judas. How could he both hang himself and “fall headlong” so that his stomach split open and his intestines spilled all over the ground? Ingenious interpreters, wanting to splice the two accounts together into one true account, have had a field day here. Maybe Judas hanged himself, the rope broke, and he fell to the ground, head first, bursting in the middle. Or maybe he hanged himself, and that didn’t work, so he climbed onto a high rock and did a swan dive onto the field below. Or maybe…well, maybe something else.

  The point is, though, that the two reports give different accounts of how Judas died. However mysterious it may be to say he fell headlong and burst open, at the least that is not “hanging” oneself. And they are flat out contradictory on two other points: who purchased the field (the priests, as per Matthew, or Judas, as per Acts?) and why the field was called the field of blood (because it was purchased with blood money, as Matthew says, or because Judas bled all over it, as Acts says?).

  The Resurrection
Narratives

  Nowhere are the differences among the Gospels more clear than in the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. I often have my first-year students do a simple comparison exercise in which they list everything said in each of the four Gospels about the events between the time Jesus was buried and the end of the Gospels. There can be no better introduction to the idea of horizontal reading. There are scads of differences among the four accounts, and some of these differences are discrepancies that cannot be readily (or ever) reconciled. Students find this a valuable exercise because I’m not simply telling them there are differences between the accounts: they discover the differences themselves and try to make sense of them.

  Here let me stress the point that I made in my book Misquoting Jesus: we don’t have the originals of any of these Gospels, only copies made later, in most instances many centuries later. These copies all differ from one another, very often in the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. Scholars have to determine what the originals said on the basis of these later manuscripts. In some places the decisions are quite straightforward; in others there is a lot of debate.

  In one aspect of the resurrection narratives there is little debate: it appears that the final twelve verses of Mark’s Gospel are not original to Mark’s Gospel but were added by a scribe in a later generation. Mark ended his Gospel at what is now 16:8, with the women fleeing the tomb and not telling anyone what they had seen. In my discussion I accept the scholarly consensus that verses 16:9–21 were a later addition to the Gospel.12

  With that detail out of the way, what can we say about the resurrection narratives in the four canonical accounts? All four Gospels agree that on the third day after Jesus’ crucifixion and burial, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and found it empty. But on virtually every detail they disagree.

  Who actually went to the tomb? Was it Mary alone (John 20:1)? Mary and another Mary (Matthew 28:1)? Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome (Mark 16:1)? Or women who had accompanied Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem—possibly Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and “other women” (Luke 24:1; see 23:55)? Had the stone already been rolled away from the tomb (as in Mark 16:4) or was it rolled away by an angel while the women were there (Matthew 28:2)? Whom or what did they see there? An angel (Matthew 28:5)? A young man (Mark 16:5)? Two men (Luke 24:4)? Or nothing and no one (John)? And what were they told? To tell the disciples to “go to Galilee,” where Jesus will meet them (Mark 16:7)? Or to remember what Jesus had told them “while he was in Galilee,” that he had to die and rise again (Luke 24:7)? Then, do the women tell the disciples what they saw and heard (Matthew 28:8), or do they not tell anyone (Mark 16:8)? If they tell someone, whom do they tell? The eleven disciples (Matthew 28:8)? The eleven disciples and other people (Luke 24:8)? Simon Peter and another unnamed disciple (John 20:2)? What do the disciples do in response? Do they have no response because Jesus himself immediately appears to them (Matthew 20:9)? Do they not believe the women because it seems to be “an idle tale” (Luke 24:11)? Or do they go to the tomb to see for themselves (John 20:3)?

  The questions multiply. You can read horizontally to do a cross-Gospel comparison yourself of what happens next: to whom Jesus appears (if anyone) and when, what he says to them, and what they say in response. On virtually every issue at least one Gospel is out of step.

  One point in particular seems to be irreconcilable. In Mark’s account the women are instructed to tell the disciples to go meet Jesus in Galilee, but out of fear they don’t say a word to anyone about it. In Matthew’s version the disciples are told to go to Galilee to meet Jesus, and they immediately do so. He appears to them there and gives them their final instruction. But in Luke the disciples are not told to go to Galilee. They are told that Jesus had foretold his resurrection while he was in Galilee (during his public ministry). And they never leave Jerusalem—in the southern part of the Israel, a different region from Galilee, in the north. On the day of the resurrection Jesus appears to two disciples on the “road to Emmaus” (24:13–35); later that day these disciples tell the others what they have seen, and Jesus appears to all of them (24:36–49); and then Jesus takes them to Bethany on the outskirts of Jerusalem and gives them their instructions and ascends to heaven. In Luke’s next volume, Acts, we’re told that the disciples are in fact explicitly told by Jesus after his resurrection not to leave Jerusalem (Acts 1:4), but to stay there until they receive the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, fifty days after Passover. After giving his instructions, Jesus then ascends to heaven. The disciples do stay in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes (Acts 2). And so the discrepancy: If Matthew is right, that the disciples immediately go to Galilee and see Jesus ascend from there, how can Luke be right that the disciples stay in Jerusalem the whole time, see Jesus ascend from there, and stay on until the day of Pentecost?

  Other Differences in the Passion Narratives

  These then are just some of the key discrepancies in the accounts of Jesus’ last week of life, his death, and his resurrection. They are by no means the only differences, but instead of listing them all I point out here a few of the more interesting ones that you would find if you were to do a complete analysis. I can give these in rapid-fire succession by asking just five simple questions.

  1. When Jesus entered Jerusalem during the Triumphal Entry, how many animals did he ride? It seems like there should be an obvious answer: he rode one animal, a donkey or a colt. And that in fact is what is said in three of the Gospels, including Mark 11:7. In Matthew’s Gospel, however, this triumphal act is said to fulfill prophecy; as we have seen, Matthew sets great store on the fulfillment of Scripture, and in 21:5 he states, quoting Zechariah 9:9:

  Behold, your king is coming to you,

  humble, and mounted on a donkey,

  and on a colt, the foal of a donkey

  Scholars of the Hebrew Bible recognize this kind of poetic prophecy: the third line of the text restates what is said in the second line. This is called “synonymous parallelism”—where two lines of poetry say basically the same thing in different words. But Matthew evidently did not understand this poetic convention in this place, leading to some rather bizarre results. In Matthew, Jesus’ disciples procure two animals for him, a donkey and a colt; they spread their garments over the two of them, and Jesus rode into town straddling them both (Matthew 21:7). It’s an odd image, but Matthew made Jesus fulfill the prophecy of Scripture quite literally.

  2. What did Jesus tell the high priest when questioned at his trial? My sense is that historically, this is something we could never know. Jesus was there, and the Jewish leaders were there, but there were no followers of Jesus there, taking notes for posterity. Nevertheless, Mark gives us a clear account. The high priest asks Jesus if he is the “Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One” (14:61), and Jesus gives a straightforward reply, “I am. And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62). In other words, in the near future God would be sending a cosmic judge of the earth, in fulfillment of the predictions of the Old Testament (Daniel 7:13–14). In fact, it was so near that the high priest himself would see it happen.

  What if it doesn’t happen? What if the high priest were to die before the Son of Man arrived? Wouldn’t that invalidate Jesus’ claim? Maybe. And that may be why Luke, writing some fifteen or twenty years after Mark—presumably after the high priest has died—changes Jesus’ answer. Now when he replies he says nothing about the high priest being alive when the Son of Man arrives in judgment: “I am, and from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God” (Luke 22:69).

  3. Why does Matthew quote the wrong prophet? When Matthew indicates that Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, he notes (as by now we expect of him) that this was in fulfillment of Scripture: “Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, ‘And they took the thirty pieces of silver…and they gave them for the potter’s field’” (Mathew 27:9�
��10). The problem is that this prophecy is not found in Jeremiah. It appears to be a loose quotation of Zechariah 11:3.

  4. When was the curtain in the Temple ripped? The curtain in the Temple separated the holiest place, called the “holy of holies,” from the rest of the Temple precincts. It was in the holy of holies that God was thought to dwell here on earth (he obviously is reigning in heaven as well). No one could enter that room behind the curtain except once a year, on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), when the high priest could go in to offer a sacrifice, first for his own sins and then for the sins of the people. According to Mark’s Gospel, after Jesus breathes his last, the curtain of the Temple is torn in half (15:38). This has long been recognized as a symbolic statement, for there is no historical evidence to suggest the curtain was ever destroyed before the Temple itself was burned to the ground forty years later in the war with the Romans. For Mark, Jesus’ death means the end of the need for Temple sacrifices. In his son’s death God is now available to all people; he is no longer separated from them by a thick curtain. Jesus’ death makes people one with God: it is an atonement (at-one-ment) for sin.

  Luke’s Gospel also indicates that the curtain in the Temple was ripped in half. Oddly enough, it does not rip after Jesus dies but is explicitly said to rip while Jesus is still alive and hanging on the cross (23:45–46). I will speak about the significance of this discrepancy in the next chapter, as this change is directly tied to Luke’s understanding of Jesus’ death.

  5. What did the centurion say when Jesus died? Again the answer may seem obvious, especially to those who remember the great biblical epic on the silver screen, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and the immortal words of the centurion played by John Wayne: “Truly this man was the Son of God.” And that is, in fact, what the centurion says in the Gospel of Mark (15:39). But it is worth noting that Luke has changed the words. In his account the centurion says, “Truly this man was innocent” (23:47). There have always been interpreters who have wanted to insist that this comes to the same thing: of course if he’s the Son of God he’s innocent. But the words are different and have different meanings. If a potential criminal is declared “not guilty” by the court, that is certainly not the same thing as being declared the Son of God. Did the centurion say both things? One could say yes if one’s goal were to reconcile the Gospels, and thereby create yet a third version of the scene, unlike either Mark or Luke. But it is probably better to consider why the later Luke might have changed the words. For Luke it was important to stress that Jesus was completely innocent of the charges against him. In John, for example, as in Luke, three times Pilate tries to release Jesus by declaring him innocent (unlike in Mark). And at the end, so, too, does the centurion. The Romans all agree on Jesus’ innocence. Who then is guilty for his death? Not the Romans, but the Jewish authorities, or the Jewish people themselves.