Michael Licona and the problem of forced harmonisations of the Gospels

Many who believe the biblical authors were divinely inspired also assume those authors must have written with the degree of accuracy and almost forensic precision we desire and expect today. However, this would require those authors to have stepped out of their culture and to have thought in terms of literary conventions that were in existence—as we see in the work of Asconius—but not valued as highly as other conventions. Fortunately, historical nearsightedness can be corrected with the proper glasses. We crat the proper lenses by reading a significant amount of literature from the period, which improves our understanding of the genre to which the Gospels belong. Like anyone who begins to wear glasses, the Gospels as holy write requires us to accept and respect them as God has given them to us rather than to force them into a frame shaped by how we think we should have. (Michael R. Licona, Why are there differences in the Gospels? What we can learn from Ancient Biography [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016], 201)