Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Differences of this magnitude do not involve a simple contradiction here or there, but alternative portrayals of major importance. It is impossible to see these alternative portrayals if we do not allow each author to speak for himself. Most people do not read the Bible this way. They assume that since all the books in the Bible are found between the same hard covers, every author is basically saying the same thing. They think that Matthew can be used to help understand John, John provides insights into Paul, Paul can help interpret the book of James, and so on. This harmonizing approach to the Bible, which is foundational to much devotional reading, has the advantage of helping readers see the unifying themes of the Bible, but it also has very serious drawbacks, often creating unity of thought and belief where originally there was none. The biblical authors did not agree on everything they discussed; sometimes they had deeply rooted and significant disagreements.

  The historical-critical approach to the Bible does not assume that each author has the same message. It allows for the possibility that each author has his own perspective, his own views, his own understandings of what the Christian faith is and should be. The discrepancies we have already considered are crucial for showing us that there are differences among the biblical writers. The major differences we are about to discuss should force us to recognize that the discrepancies are not merely a matter of minutiae but are issues of great importance.

  I am not insisting that the historical-critical approach is the only way to read the Bible. Sophisticated theologians who are fully aware of historical-critical problems with the Bible have devised ways of treating the Bible as Scripture even though it is full of discrepancies. I will have more to say about this later, in chapter 8. For now, though, it is important to come to grips with what the historical-critical approach is and how it can affect the way the Bible is understood.

  The approach is predicated, to some extent, on the idea that the “canon” of Scripture—that is the collection of the books into one book considered in some sense to be authoritative for believers—was not the original form in which the biblical books appeared. When Paul wrote his letters to the churches he founded, he did not think that he was writing the Bible. He thought he was writing letters, addressing individual needs as they came up, based on what he thought, believed, and preached at the time. Only later did someone put these letters together and consider them inspired. So, too, with the Gospels. Mark, whatever his real name was, had no idea that his book would be put into a collection with three other books and called Scripture; and he certainly did not think that his book should be interpreted in light of what some other Christian would write some thirty years later in a different country and a different context. Mark no doubt wanted his book to be read and understood on its own, as did Matthew, Luke, John, and all the other writers of the New Testament.

  The historical-critical method maintains that we are in danger of misreading a book if we fail to let its author speak for himself, if we force his message to be exactly the same as another author’s message, if we insist on reading all the books of the New Testament as one book instead of as twenty-seven books. These books were written in different times and places, under different circumstances, to address different issues; they were written by different authors with different perspectives, beliefs, assumptions, traditions, and sources. And they sometimes present different points of view on major issues.1

  AN OPENING ILLUSTRATION: THE DEATH OF JESUS IN MARK AND LUKE

  I can begin my comparison of texts by discussing an example that strikes me as particularly clear and gripping. As with the detailed discrepancies we discussed in chapter 2, this kind of difference can be seen only by doing a careful horizontal reading of passages; this time, rather than looking for minute disagreements here or there, we are looking for broader themes, major differences in the way a story is told. One story told very differently in the Gospels is the key story in them all: the crucifixion of Jesus. You might think that all the Gospels have exactly the same message about the crucifixion, and that their differences might simply reflect minor changes of perspective, with one author emphasizing one thing and another something else. But in fact the differences are much larger and more fundamental than that. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the accounts of Jesus’ death in Mark and Luke.

  Since the nineteenth century, scholars have recognized that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, around 65–70 CE. Both Matthew and Luke, writing fifteen or twenty years later, used Mark as one of their sources for much of their own accounts. That is why almost all of Mark’s stories can be found in Matthew or Luke, and it is also why sometimes all three of these Gospels agree word for word in the way they tell the stories. Sometimes just two agree and the third doesn’t, because occasionally only one of the later Gospels changed Mark. This means that if we have the same story in Mark and Luke, say, and there are differences, these differences exist precisely because Luke has actually modified the words of his source, sometimes deleting words and phrases, sometimes adding material, even entire episodes, and sometimes altering the way a sentence is worded. It is probably safe to assume that if Luke modified what Mark had to say, it was because he wanted to say it differently. Sometimes these differences are just minor changes in wording, but sometimes they affect in highly significant ways the way the entire story is told. This appears to be true for the portrayal of Jesus going to his death.

  Jesus’ Death in Mark

  In Mark’s version of the story (Mark 15:16–39), Jesus is condemned to death by Pontius Pilate, mocked and beaten by the Roman soldiers, and taken off to be crucified. Simon of Cyrene carries his cross. Jesus says nothing the entire time. The soldiers crucify Jesus, and he still says nothing. Both of the robbers being crucified with him mock him. Those passing by mock him. The Jewish leaders mock him. Jesus is silent until the very end, when he utters the wretched cry, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani,” which Mark translates from the Aramaic for his readers as, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Someone gives Jesus a sponge with sour wine to drink. He breathes his last and dies. Immediately two things happen: the curtain in the Temple is ripped in half, and the centurion looking on acknowledges, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

  This is a powerful and moving scene, filled with emotion and pathos. Jesus is silent the entire time, as if in shock, until his cry at the end, echoing Psalm 22. I take his question to God to be a genuine one. He genuinely wants to know why God has left him like this. A very popular interpretation of the passage is that since Jesus quotes Psalm 22:1, he is actually thinking of the ending of the Psalm, where God intervenes and vindicates the suffering psalmist. I think this is reading way too much into the passage and robs the “cry of dereliction,” as it is called, of all its power. The point is that Jesus has been rejected by everyone: betrayed by one of his own, denied three times by his closest follower, abandoned by all his disciples, rejected by the Jewish leaders, condemned by the Roman authorities, mocked by the priests, the passersby, and even by the two others being crucified with him. At the end he even feels forsaken by God Himself. Jesus is absolutely in the depths of despair and heart-wrenching anguish, and that’s how he dies. Mark is trying to say something by this portrayal. He doesn’t want his readers to take solace in the fact that God was really there providing Jesus with physical comfort. He dies in agony, unsure of the reason he must die.

  But the reader knows the reason. Right after Jesus dies the curtain rips in half and the centurion makes his confession. The curtain ripping in half shows that with the death of Jesus, God is made available to his people directly and not through the Jewish priests’ sacrifices in the Temple. Jesus’ death has brought an atonement (see Mark 10:45). And someone realizes it right off the bat: not Jesus’ closest followers or the Jewish onlookers but the pagan soldier who has just crucified him. Jesus’ death brings salvation, and it is gentiles who are going to recognize it. This is not a disinterested account of what “really” happened when Jesus died. It i
s theology put in the form of a narrative.

  Historical scholars have long thought that Mark is not only explaining the significance of Jesus’ death in this account but also quite possibly writing with a particular audience in mind, an audience of later followers of Jesus who also have experienced persecution and suffering at the hands of authorities who are opposed to God. Like Jesus, his followers may not know why they are experiencing such pain and misery. But Mark tells these Christians they can rest assured: even though they may not see why they are suffering, God knows, and God is working behind the scenes to make suffering redemptive. God’s purposes are worked precisely through suffering, not by avoiding it, even when those purposes are not obvious at the moment. Mark’s version of the death of Jesus thus provides a model for understanding the persecution of the Christians.

  Jesus’ Death in Luke

  Luke’s account is also very interesting, thoughtful, and moving, but it is very different indeed (Luke 23:26–49). It is not just that there are discrepancies in some of their details; the differences are bigger than that. They affect the very way the story is told and, as a result, the way the story is to be interpreted.

  In Luke as in Mark, Jesus is betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, rejected by the Jewish leaders, and condemned by Pontius Pilate, but he is not mocked and beaten by Pilate’s soldiers. Only Luke tells the story of Pilate trying to get King Herod of Galilee—the son of the King Herod from the birth stories—to deal with Jesus, and it is Herod’s soldiers who mock Jesus before Pilate finds him guilty. This is a discrepancy, but it doesn’t affect the overall reading of the difference between the two accounts that I’m highlighting here.

  In Luke, Jesus is taken off to be executed, and Simon of Cyrene is compelled to carry his cross. But Jesus is not silent on the way to his crucifixion. En route he sees a number of women wailing over what is happening to him, and he turns to them and says, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children” (Luke 23:28). He goes on to prophesy the coming destruction that they will face. Jesus does not appear to be in shock over what is happening to him. He is more concerned with others around him than with his own fate.

  Moreover, Jesus is not silent while being nailed to the cross, as in Mark. Instead he prays, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).2 Jesus appears to have close communion with God and is concerned more for those who are doing this to him than for himself. Jesus is mocked by the Jewish leaders and the Roman soldiers, but explicitly not by both men being crucified with him, unlike in Mark. Instead, one of them mocks Jesus but the other rebukes the first for doing so, insisting that whereas they deserve what they are getting, Jesus has done nothing wrong (remember that Luke stresses Jesus’ complete innocence). He then asks of Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus gives the compelling reply, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (23:42–43). In this account Jesus is not at all confused about what is happening to him or why. He is completely calm and in control of the situation; he knows what is about to occur, and he knows what will happen afterward: he will wake up in God’s paradise, and this criminal will be there with him. This is a far cry from the Jesus of Mark, who felt forsaken to the end.

  Darkness comes over the land and the Temple curtain is ripped while Jesus is still alive, in contrast to Mark. Here the torn curtain must not indicate that Jesus’ death brings atonement—since he has not died yet. Instead it shows that his death is “the hour of darkness,” as he says earlier in the Gospel (23:53), and it marks the judgment of God against the Jewish people. The ripped curtain here appears to indicate that God is rejecting the Jewish system of worship, symbolized by the Temple.

  Most significant of all, rather than uttering a cry expressing his sense of total abandonment at the end (“Why have you forsaken me?”), in Luke, Jesus prays to God in a loud voice, saying, “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.” He then breathes his last and dies (23:46). This is not a Jesus who feels forsaken by God and wonders why he is going through this pain of desertion and death. It is a Jesus who feels God’s presence with him and is comforted by the fact that God is on his side. He is fully cognizant of what is happening to him and why, and he commits himself to the loving care of his heavenly Father, confident of what is to happen next. The centurion then confirms what Jesus himself knew full well, “Surely this man was innocent.”

  It is hard to stress strongly enough the differences between these two portrayals of Jesus’ death. Earlier I pointed out that scholars have sometimes suggested that Mark’s account was written in part to provide hope for those suffering persecution, to let them know that, appearances notwithstanding, God was at work behind suffering to achieve his redemptive purposes. What might Luke’s purpose have been in modifying Mark’s account, so that Jesus no longer dies in agony and despair?

  Some critical interpreters have suggested that Luke may also be writing for Christians experiencing persecution, but his message to those suffering for the faith is different from Mark’s. Rather than stressing that God is at work behind the scenes, even though it doesn’t seem like it, Luke may be showing Christians a model of how they, too, can suffer—like Jesus, the perfect martyr, who goes to his death confident of his own innocence, assured of God’s palpable presence in his life, calm and in control of the situation, knowing that suffering is necessary for the rewards of Paradise and that it will soon be over, leading to a blessed existence in the life to come. The two authors may be addressing similar situations, but they are conveying very different messages, both about how Jesus died and about how his followers can face persecution.

  The Payoff

  The problem comes when readers take these two accounts and combine them into one overarching account, in which Jesus says, does, and experiences everything narrated in both Gospels. When that is done, the messages of both Mark and Luke get completely lost and glossed over. Jesus is no longer in deep agony, as in Mark (since he is confident as in Luke), and he is no longer calm and in control as in Luke (since he is in despair as in Mark). He is somehow all things at once. Also, his words mean something different now, since he utters the sayings of both. When readers then throw both Matthew and John into the mix, they get an even more confused and conflated portrayal of Jesus, imagining wrongly that they have constructed the events as they really happened. To approach the stories in this way is to rob each author of his own integrity as an author and to deprive him of the meaning that he conveys in his story.

  This is how readers over the years have come up with the famous “seven last words of the dying Jesus”—by taking what he says at his death in all four Gospels, mixing them together, and imagining that in their combination they now have the full story. This interpretive move does not give the full story. It gives a fifth story, a story that is completely unlike any of the canonical four, a fifth story that in effect rewrites the Gospels, producing a fifth Gospel. This is perfectly fine to do if that’s what you want—it’s a free country, and no one can stop you. But for historical critics, this is not the best way to approach the Gospels.

  My overarching point is that the Gospels, and all the books of the Bible, are distinct and should not be read as if they are all saying the same thing. They are decidedly not saying the same thing—even when talking about the same subject (say, Jesus’ death). Mark is different from Luke, and Matthew is different from John, as you can see by doing your own horizontal reading of their respective stories of the crucifixion. The historical approach to the Gospels allows each author’s voice to be heard and refuses to conflate them into some kind of mega-Gospel that flattens the emphases of each one.

  SOME KEY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN JOHN AND THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

  Clearly the Synoptic Gospels don’t tell the same version of all their stories. But there are strong similarities among them that set them apart from John. It has long been known that the reason they agree on so much is that they all shar
ed the same sources. Both Matthew and Luke, for example, used Mark, reproducing it verbatim in places and changing it—sometimes changing it a lot—when they wanted to tell the stories in different ways.

  Although many casual readers of the New Testament have not noticed it, the Gospel of John is a different kettle of fish altogether. With the exception of the Passion Narratives, most of the stories found in John are not found in the Synoptics, and most of the stories in the Synoptic Gospels are not found in John. And when they do cover similar territory, John’s stories are strikingly different from the others. This can be seen by doing a kind of global comparison of John and the Synoptics.

  Differences in Content

  If you were to go through the Synoptic Gospels and make an outline of their key passages—the stories that make up the skeleton of their narratives, so to say—what would it be like? Luke and Mark begin with Jesus being born in Bethlehem to a virgin. The first major event mentioned in all three is Jesus’ baptism by John, after which he goes out into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil. He comes back from the wilderness and begins preaching his message that the “kingdom of God” is soon to appear. The characteristic form of his teaching is through parables. In fact, in Mark’s Gospel Jesus is said to have taught the crowds only in parables (Mark 4:11). Jesus also performs miracles. One of his distinctive miracles—the first one in Mark—is casting demons out of those who are possessed. And so he goes through his ministry in Galilee, preaching parables and performing exorcisms, until half way through the accounts, when he takes three of his followers, Peter, James, and John, up onto a mountain, and in their presence experiences his transfiguration, in which he is gloriously transformed in appearance and begins to speak with Moses and Elijah, who have appeared from heaven. After the Transfiguration, Jesus continues his ministry until he goes to Jerusalem in the last week of his life. He cleanses the Temple, has the Last Supper, in which he institutes the Lord’s supper by talking about the bread as his body and the cup as his blood. He is put on trial before the Jewish authorities and condemned for blasphemy. Then comes the familiar end, told in different ways, of his death and resurrection.