Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  DISCREPANCIES INVOLVING THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF PAUL

  So far in this chapter I have considered just the four canonical Gospels, emphasizing the need to read these horizontally if we want to gain new insights into them, insights unavailable to us if we read them only vertically, in sequence. I do not claim that a horizontal reading is the best or only way to approach these books. Obviously the Gospels were meant to be read like other books, from beginning to end, and historical critics have long recognized the value of doing so and have devised a number of interesting methods that can assist readers who choose to read them in this way.13

  I am also not claiming that the Gospels are the only books in the New Testament that contain discrepancies. As we have already seen, the book of Acts appears to be at odds with what the Gospels say with respect to the death of Judas (in contrast with Matthew), for example, or with respect to whether the disciples journeyed north to Galilee soon after Jesus’ death and resurrection (again, in contrast to Matthew).

  The book of Acts as a whole is a narrative of what happened to and among his followers after Jesus’ ascension to heaven. Briefly, the apostles spread the Christian faith, first among the Jews who lived in Jerusalem and then elsewhere, taking their message to Jews in other parts of the empire and then, most significantly, to non-Jews, gentiles, living in urban centers dotted around the Mediterranean. Of the many converts to this new religion none was more significant than Saul of Tarsus, who came to be known as the apostle Paul. About two thirds of the narrative of Acts is concerned with Paul, his conversion to Christianity after being a violent opponent of the new faith, his missionary journeys converting others to faith in Christ, his arrest, trials, and eventual imprisonment in the city of Rome.

  Paul was not only the hero of Acts but also an author in his own right. Of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, thirteen claim to be written by Paul. One other book, the letter to the Hebrews, was admitted into the canon because early church fathers believed it was written by Paul, even though it doesn’t claim to be. Scholars today are reasonably certain that Paul did not in fact write it. And among the thirteen letters that bear Paul’s name, there are reasons for doubting that he actually wrote six of them. This will be the subject of a later chapter, when we discuss the big question “Who Wrote the Bible?” For now it is enough to know that Paul is the subject of Acts and the author of at least some of the writings of the New Testament. The seven letters that virtually all scholars agree Paul wrote—the so-called undisputed Pauline epistles—are Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.

  It is thus possible to do a kind of horizontal reading of Acts, comparing it with the letters of Paul. Sometimes Acts discusses an event in Paul’s life that Paul himself mentions in his letters. This allows us to see how the two square up. Historical critics have long disagreed among themselves concerning just how reliable the book of Acts is for understanding the life and writings of Paul. My personal view is that Acts is about as accurate for Paul as Luke’s first volume, the Gospel of Luke, is for Jesus: much of the basic information is probably reliable, but a lot of the details managed to get changed.

  Most critical scholars think Acts was written sometime after the Gospel of Luke, possibly around 85 or 90 CE—about twenty or twenty-five years after Paul died. If so, it would be no surprise to see that information about him in Acts may not be historically accurate. But the only way to know for sure is to compare what Acts says about Paul with what Paul says about himself, to see if they are basically in agreement or whether there are discrepancies. Here are five examples that strike me as interesting. Some of these are important for understanding the life and teachings of Paul; others of them, frankly, are rather unimportant discrepancies. But together they show that Acts cannot be completely reliable when it comes to reporting on Paul’s life.

  1. After his conversion, did Paul go directly to Jerusalem in order to confer with those who were apostles before him? As noted, Paul was a persecutor of the Christians prior to becoming a Christian himself, so he was not a follower of Jesus during his ministry and he probably never even knew him. Paul lived outside Palestine, and his native language was Greek, not Aramaic. But at some point, for some reason, he “saw the light” (literally, according to Acts 9:3) and converted from an enemy of the Christian faith to one of its greatest proponents. And what did he do then? Paul himself recounts, in Galatians 1:16–20, what happened after his conversion:

  I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away off to Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and I stayed with him fifteen days; but I did not see any of the other apostles, except James the Lord’s brother. In what I am writing to you, before God, I am not lying!

  This emphatic statement that Paul is not lying should give us pause. He is completely clear. He did not consult with others after his conversion, did not see any of the apostles for three years, and even then he did not see any except Cephas (Peter) and Jesus’ brother James.

  This makes the account found in the book of Acts very interesting indeed. For according to Acts 9, immediately after Paul converted he spent some time in Damascus “with the disciples,” and when he left the city, he headed directly to Jerusalem, where he met with the apostles of Jesus (Acts 9:19–30). On all counts Acts seems to be at odds with Paul. Did he spend time with other Christians immediately (Acts) or not (Paul)? Did he go straight to Jerusalem (Acts) or not (Paul)? Did he meet with the group of apostles (Acts) or just with Peter and James (Paul)?

  For those familiar with Paul’s own writings and the book of Acts, it is not difficult to understand why this discrepancy exists. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians he wants to insist that his Gospel message came directly from God himself, through Jesus. He didn’t get it from anyone else—not even the other apostles—so anyone who disagrees with him about the Gospel is really disagreeing not with him but with God.

  The writer of the book of Acts, on the other hand, wants to insist that there was complete continuity in every way among all the genuine apostles of Jesus, both the original disciples and Paul. They met, they talked, they agreed—time and again this is stated in Acts. For Paul himself, however, the issue is his authority, given straight from God. He did not confer with others or meet with the apostles. The two authors have different agendas and so have recounted the events differently—creating an interesting but important discrepancy. Whom are we to believe? In this case my vote would go with Paul, who not only should know what he was doing but also swears an oath before God that he’s not lying. It’s a bit hard to believe that he would be lying.

  2. Did the churches in Judea know Paul? Here again Paul is quite clear. Sometime after he converted he went around to various churches in the regions of Syria and Cilicia, but he “was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea” (Galatians 1:21–22). This has struck some scholars as odd. According to the book of Acts, when Paul was earlier persecuting the churches in Christ, it was specifically the Christian churches in “Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1–3; 9:1–2). Why is it that Christians in the churches he had formerly persecuted didn’t know what he looked like? Wasn’t he physically present among them as their enemy earlier? According to Acts, yes; according to Paul, no.

  3. Did Paul go to Athens alone? When he was making his missionary journeys, and went to Athens to evangelize the pagans there, did Paul go alone? Here again there appears to be a discrepancy. It may not be one that matters all that much, except that Luke again appears to have gotten some details wrong. When Paul writes his very first letter to the Thessalonians, he indicates that after he had brought them to faith and started a church among them, he traveled to Athens. But he felt concerned about the fledgling new church and so sent his companion Timothy back to see how the Thessalonians were doing. In other words, Timothy accompanied Paul to Athens and then returned to Thessalonica to h
elp build them up in the faith (1 Thessalonians 3:1–2). The book of Acts, however, is equally clear. There we are told that after Paul established the church in Thessalonica, he and Silas and Timothy founded a church in the city of Boroea; the Christians there then “sent Paul away to the coast, but Silas and Timothy remained behind” (17:14–15). Paul proceeded to send instructions that Silas and Timothy should meet up with him when they could. He traveled to Athens alone and met up with his two companions only after leaving the city for Corinth (17:16–8:5). This is another discrepancy hard to resolve: either Timothy went to Athens with Paul (1 Thessalonians), or not (Acts).

  4. How many trips did Paul make to Jerusalem? In Galatians Paul is intent to show that he did not confer with the apostles in Jerusalem in order to “learn” the Gospel. He already knew what the Gospel was: he had heard it directly from Christ in a divine revelation. He especially wants the Galatians to understand that when there was some dispute about his message, there was a special meeting in Jerusalem to discuss it. The question was this: if a non-Jew converted to become a follower of Jesus, did he or she first have to become a Jew? Paul said, emphatically, no. In particular, gentile men were not to be circumcised, the sign of the covenant for Jews, if they became followers of Christ. Other Christian missionaries took the opposite point of view, and there was a meeting in Jerusalem to consider the issue. According to Paul’s account, this was only the second time he had been to Jerusalem (Galatians 1:18; 2:1). According to Acts, it was his third, prolonged, trip there (Acts 9, 11, 15). Once again, it appears that the author of Acts has confused some of Paul’s itinerary—possibly intentionally, for his own purposes.

  5. Were the congregations that Paul established made up of both Jews and gentiles? According to the book of Acts, the answer is a clear yes. When Paul preaches in Thessalonica, Jews in the synagogue come to faith in Christ, as do non-Jewish Greeks (Acts 17:4). Paul indicates just the opposite. When he writes to this church in Thessalonica, he recalls how he converted them to faith in Christ and speaks of how they “turned to God from idols” (1 Thessalonians 1:9). Only pagans worshiped idols. Paul’s converts in both Thessalonica and Corinth (1 Corinthians 12:2) were former pagans. That is why he calls himself the “apostle to the gentiles.” There were other missionaries, in particular Peter, who were in charge of taking the message to Jews (Galatians 2:8). The Thessalonian and Corinthian churches were made up of gentiles (Paul), not Jews and gentiles (Acts).

  These are just a few of the discrepancies that one can find when one reads Acts horizontally against Paul’s letters. Many more can be discovered. What they show is that Acts cannot be relied upon for completely accurate detail when it describes the mission of early apostles such as Paul.

  One reason it matters whether Acts is reliable in its historical details is that a lot of the information that people “know” about Paul comes from Acts and only from Acts, since these are pieces of information that Paul doesn’t mention in his letters. Some historical critics have raised doubts about these items, including the following: that Paul came from Tarsus (Acts 21:39), that he had studied with the Jewish rabbi Gamaliel in Jerusalem (22:3), that he was a Roman citizen (22:27), that he was a “tent-maker” (18:3), that when he entered a city to evangelize it, he first went into a synagogue to try to convert Jews (for example, 14:1), that he was arrested in Jerusalem and spent years in prison (chapters 21–28), that he appealed to Caesar for his trial, and that’s why he ended up in Rome (25:11).

  CONCLUSION

  We have seen lots of discrepancies in the New Testament in this chapter, some small and relatively inconsequential, others important for understanding what the different authors wanted to say. Some of the discrepancies could probably be reconciled if sufficient interpretive ingenuity were brought to bear; others appear to be flat-out contradictions. This is not an exhaustive treatment of the discrepancies, just a representative example. I picked some that I find to be the most interesting.

  What conclusions can we draw from these discrepancies? Three points strike me as the most significant.

  1. On one level the discrepancies are significant because they show that the view of the Bible as completely inerrant appears not to be true. There are errors, if the Bible is looked at historically. If two descriptions of an event (for example, Jesus’ death) are contradictory in their details, both accounts cannot be historically correct. One of them is historically wrong, or both of them are wrong, but both cannot be right, at least with regard to what actually happened. Does this mean that the Bible should be tossed aside, jettisoned as just another piece of old and basically worthless literature? Not in the least. I argue in my final chapter that we should continue to read, study, and cherish the Bible—but not as an inerrant historical account.

  Does this mean that it is impossible any longer for a person to be a Christian? Only Christians of a certain persuasion—such as many of those among whom I live, in the American South—would ever think to ask such a question. But the answer, again, is decidedly no. A Christianity dependent on the inerrancy of the Bible probably cannot survive the reality of the discrepancies. But there are lots of other forms of the Christian faith, many of them unscathed by the fact that the Bible is not a completely perfect book. I will deal with this at greater length in my final chapter

  2. Since there are discrepancies between what different authors want to say—sometimes small, insignificant contradictions and sometimes significant—it is important to let each author speak for himself and not pretend that he is saying the same thing as another. The discrepancies should teach us that Mark’s view is not John’s, John’s is not Matthew’s, Matthew’s is not Paul’s, and so on. Each author has to be read for his own message, so that when you read Mark, you do not import the teachings of Matthew. Read Mark for Mark and Matthew for Matthew. This is an issue we will take up at greater length in the next chapter.

  3. The discrepancies that involve historical narratives—what did Jesus or Paul actually say, do, and experience?—make it difficult to establish what really happened in the life of Jesus or the history of the early church. You can’t read these books as disinterested historical accounts. None of them is that. What would you do as a judge in a court trial in which you have conflicting testimony from eye witnesses? One thing you would certainly not do is assume that each witness is 100 percent correct. Someone—or everyone—is getting some information wrong. The trick would be to figure out who is wrong and who is right—if anyone is right. The same applies to ancient documents like those in the New Testament. If there is conflicting testimony about historical events, all the witnesses cannot be (historically) right, and we have to figure out ways to decide what most probably really happened. We take up this task in chapter 5.

  THREE

  A Mass of Variant Views

  In the mid-nineties I was asked by Oxford University Press to write a college-level textbook on the New Testament. I wasn’t sure this would be the best career move for me: I didn’t have tenure yet, and sometimes university tenure committees look askance on textbooks as not involving real research. And I wondered what the pitfalls would be in trying to communicate historical-critical scholarship to nineteen-year-olds for whom all this would be news. I decided to call a number of my friends in the field to see what they thought about it. Should I do it? And if so, what kinds of problems would I have in trying to digest hard-core biblical scholarship basically for kids just out of high school?

  I received lots of good tips and advice, but I think the wisest comment came from my friend Charlie Cosgrove, who years earlier had helped get me through graduate school (he was a couple of years ahead of me at Princeton Seminary and taught me the ropes). About the textbook Charlie said, “The hardest thing will be deciding what to leave out.”

  I ended up writing the book, and Charlie was absolutely right. It is very easy to decide what to include in a book on the New Testament because there is so much to include. But to keep the book manageable and affordable, a number of important a
nd beloved topics simply have to be left out. And leaving out topics that are near and dear to your heart is painful.

  I had the same experience with this book. When talking about discrepancies in the Bible, I want to go on and on—there are so many of them that are both interesting and important. But I’ve managed to restrain myself and have kept my discussion to one chapter—the previous one. Yet I have the same problem with the present chapter. I—or any other historical critic—could easily devote an entire book to its topic, but I’ve restricted myself to a single chapter.

  As we saw in the previous chapter, the discrepancies in the Bible are important in part because they force us to take each author seriously. What Mark is saying may not be at all what Luke is saying; Matthew may stand at odds with John, and they both may conflict with what is said in Paul. But when we look at the contrasting messages of the different biblical authors, there is more involved than the kinds of detail and minutiae that we dealt with in chapter 2. There are much larger differences among these authors and books—differences not simply in a detail here or there, a date, a travel itinerary, or who did what with whom. Many of the differences among the biblical authors have to do with the very heart of their message. Sometimes one author’s understanding of a major issue is at odds with another author’s, on such vital matters as who Christ is, how salvation is attained, and how the followers of Jesus are to live.