Why do the Gospels tell it differently?

Matthew, Mark and Luke overlap so closely that they are usually printed in parallel columns, which is where the name synoptic comes from. Nearly everything in Mark turns up in Matthew, and most of it in Luke, frequently in the same sequence and the same phrasing.

Coincidence does not produce that. Two writers describing the same event independently agree about the event, not about the participles. That some form of copying happened, from each other or from shared written material, is the starting point of the problem the book cited here is a way through.

John has no birth narrative, no parables of the kind the other three are full of, no exorcisms, and at the last supper no words over the bread and the cup. It has long discourses the others do not, a ministry that runs through three Passovers where the others narrate one, and it places the cleansing of the temple at the beginning rather than at the end.

It is not a fourth version of the same shared material. It is a separate work with separate priorities.

Matthew and Luke both give Jesus a genealogy, and between David and Joseph the two lists are largely different names. All four describe the discovery of the empty tomb, and they differ on who went, how many figures were there, and what was said.

These are not differences hidden in the Greek. They are visible in any translation, on facing pages.

The standard solution is that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke each used it, along with a collection of sayings that has not survived and is referred to only as Q. It accounts for the shared wording, and for the way Matthew and Luke so often read as tidier versions of Mark rather than the reverse.

It is a reconstruction, not a discovery. No copy of Q exists; it is rebuilt from what Matthew and Luke share and Mark lacks. The author cited here argues one of the alternatives: that Luke used Matthew as well as Mark, and no lost document is needed. The argument is about which account explains the pattern with the fewest inventions.

Some divergence looks like ordinary transmission: details drifting, names dropping out, an episode remembered in a different order. Papias already reports an elder saying that Mark wrote accurately but "not in order", which suggests sequence was understood as flexible early.

Other divergence looks deliberate. Each writer has a shape they are working toward, and moving an episode or changing an emphasis is one of the ways they get there. Distinguishing the two is where much of the scholarship lives.

Where the accounts diverge, there is usually no third source to check them against. Choosing between two versions of the morning at the tomb means preferring one text to another, and the criteria for doing that are themselves under attack from inside the field. In a 2012 collection, its co-editor Chris Keith argued that the criteria of authenticity depend on form criticism and should be abandoned rather than repaired, while other contributors argued for using them with more caution.

Reconciling the four is an old project, and an old defence. Augustine devoted a four-book work to it around 400, answering pagan and Manichaean critics who said the evangelists contradicted each other, going through the apparent discrepancies in order and arguing that the Gospels are complementary rather than competing, including on the genealogies.

Whether a given harmonisation works is a question you can actually examine. That the effort is ancient is simply a fact about the history.

Christianity did not, in the end, resolve the differences with a single edited Gospel, and it had the opportunity. Tatian made one in the second century, a “combination and collection of the Gospels” called the Diatessaron, and Eusebius reports that it was “still in the hands of some” a century and a half later. In Syriac-speaking churches it was for a time the gospel text in use, until fifth-century bishops replaced it with the four. Irenaeus, writing against groups that used a single Gospel or rejected one of the four, says flatly that “it is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are”, and reaches for the four winds and the four faces of the cherubim to say why. Four accounts, not harmonised, is what the churches chose to keep.

For Irenaeus the four are “the Gospel under four aspects, but bound together by one Spirit”. Augustine gives each evangelist his own emphasis and still defends their agreement.