In her book, The Mirror and the Mask, a response to the work of Michael Licona (Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography), Michael Burridge (What Are the Gospels?: A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography) and others, Protestant Lydia McGrew, while defending the historical reliability of the Gospels, unlike many of her co-religionists are willing to admit that there are genuine discrepancies and (albeit, very minor) mistakes in the Gospels, as opposed to engage in the mental masturbation inerrantists like Rob Bowman, Ron Rhodes, and others are wont to do (I will note, using standards and arguments they would never allow Latter-day Saints to use for purported contradictions and other issues in uniquely LDS texts). Consider some of the following examples:
Did the centurion personally come to Jesus?
And when he heard of Jesus, he sent unto him the elders of the Jews, beseeching him that he would come and heal his servant. And when they came to Jesus, they besought him instantly, saying, That he was worthy for whom he should do this: For he loveth our nation, and he hath built us a synagogue. Then Jesus went with them. And when he was now not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to him, saying unto him, Lord, trouble not thyself: for I am not worthy that thou shouldest enter under my roof: Wherefore neither thought I myself worthy to come unto thee: but say in a word, and my servant shall be healed. For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers, and I say unto one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. When Jesus heard these things, he marvelled at him, and turned him about, and said unto the people that followed him, I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. (Luke 7:3-9)
And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented. And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him. The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. And Jesus said unto the centurion, Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee. And his servant was healed in the selfsame hour. (Matt 8:6-13)
Commenting on this issue, McGrew writes:
There are, however, puzzles for the traditional harmonization of Matthew and Luke. Matthew’s narrative is quite unified in its appearance that the centurion personally present. The final statement that Jesus said, "Go, it shall be done for you as you have believed” to the centurion, where the command is in the singular, is particularly had to square with the Augustinian solution. If the centurion were back at his house sending the messengers to Jesus, he would not need to go anywhere. And if Jesus were speaking to the messengers, he would not have used the singular.
A slightly better harmonization is the theory that the centurion sent messengers at first but later came to join the crowd as they neared the house and that Jesus, knowing who he was, spoke just the very last words recorded in Matthew directly to him. As an interpretation of Matthew, however, this breaks up Matthew’s account in a way that seems quite artificial. The statement that Jesus said something to the centurion early in the passage would then mean something different from the final statement that Jesus said something to him.
This is therefore one of the places where . . . I am inclined to think that the best explanation is simple memory variation among witnesses . . . The differences between the accounts in Luke and in Matthew are evidence of some degree of testimonial independence between them—in other words, that they are ultimately relying on different human sources for the story. (Lydia McGrew, The Mirror and the Mask: Liberating the Gospels from Literary Devices [Tampa, Fla: DeWard Publishing Company Limited, 2019], 379-80)
On what day in Passion Week were Jesus’ feet anointed?
Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him. Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment. Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray him, Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor? This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein. Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always. Much people of the Jews therefore knew that he was there: and they came not for Jesus' sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom he had raised from the dead. But the chief priests consulted that they might put Lazarus also to death; Because that by reason of him many of the Jews went away, and believed on Jesus. On the next day much people that were come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, (John 12:1-12)
After two days was the feast of the passover, and of unleavened bread: and the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by craft, and put him to death. But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people. And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head. (Mark 14:1-3)
McGrew comments:
Ultimately, though, I am not fully convinced by the achronological suggestion. If Mark were narrating achronologically in verse 3, I would have expected him to put more content concerning Wednesday prior to that, in verses 1-2, after stating that the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were two days away. Mark narrates almost nothing immediately after that careful time designation and before the dinner at Bethany and the anointing. Mark says that the chief priests were trying to figure out how to destroy Jesus but feared the people. But he already told us that much in 12.12, with the apparent reference to Monday. The only additional information here, apparently on Wednesday, is that they explicitly decided that they would put off trying to seize Jesus during the feast, lest there be a riot. This resolution seems to have changed abruptly when Judas came to them in 14.10 with the offer to betray Jesus. Since Mark introduces the day in 14.1, he presumably intends to narrate some substantial events that happened on that day. Why would he make such an explicit time reference in 14.1, narrate only the decision of the Jewish leaders on that day, break off abruptly when Judas came to them in 14.10 with the offer to betray Jesus. Since Mark introduces the day in 14.1, he presumably intends to narrate some substantial events that happened on that day. Why would he make such an explicit time reference in 14.1, narrate only the decision of the Jewish leaders on that day, break off abruptly to tell about something that happened several days earlier, and then return in verse 10 to the narrative of events on Wednesday? This would be an extremely choppy composition process indeed, almost as if he did not even read what he had last written when he began narrating the dinner at Bethany. And even if that were the case, why would he not make some better time indicator when returning to Wednesday in verse 10? Mark has been indicating the days in his narrative of Passion Week from Sunday to Wednesday fairly clearly (Mark 11.11-12, 19-20, 13.1-3, 14.1). It would be surprising if he suddenly began narrating achronologically in 14.3, even as an artifact of breaking off and d resuming writing. It is far simpler to take it that Mark intends all of the events at the beginning of Chapter 14 to occur on Wednesday.
For this reason, though I have presented the achronological options as worthy consideration, I am inclined to think that this is an instance in which either Mark or John has simply made a minor, good-faith chronological error, and one that should be quite easy to make. (p. 391; on the “achronological” reading, see, for example, Steve Hays, “Projecting Contradictions”)
How many male disciples were present at Jesus’ first appearance?
Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord. Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained. But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. (John 20:19-25)
And they rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them, Saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon. And they told what things were done in the way, and how he was known of them in breaking of bread. And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. (Luke 24:33-36)
Instead of engage in all sorts of gymnastics and special-pleading, McGrew admits that the best explanation is that Luke was simply unaware of Thomas’ absence on the first occasion:
Here I must bring up an option that Licona should certainly consider far more probable than John's inventing doubting Thomas—namely, that Luke just didn't know that Thomas was absent on the first occasion. I have often refrained from mentioning, as I've gone through these alleged discrepancies, that honest, minor error, is always an option or consideration by historians and usually a much simpler theory than wholesale invention. Certainly it is simpler in the case of the Gospel authors, when we have plenty of independent evidence of their historical intention and when the trivial differences in question would be quite easy for an honest witness to misremember or for an honest historian not to get precisely correct. In most cases, the literary device theorists ought to consider good-faith error more probably than the more complex idea that the author deliberately wrote falsely. The falsehood is there either way, even though they do not wish to admit that it is a falsehood when they call it a “device.” Adding deliberateness to a false statement makes it no less false and merely contradicts much other evidence concerning the literal honesty of these authors.
In this case it would be a serious omission if I did not mention the obvious. Perhaps nobody told Luke about Thomas’s absence from Jesus’ first appearance or about the subsequent scene recorded in John. Luke was a very careful historian, but he was not told everything. Perhaps he honestly thought that all eleven main disciples were present when Jesus first appeared to them. If this theory makes Luke’s reference to “the eleven” count as an error, that does not change the face that such an error is a far simpler explanation of his using “the eleven” than his knowing that Thomas was absent on this first occasion and writing in a deliberately misleading way to make it look like he was present. And it is orders of magnitude simpler than the idea that John made up the entire doubting Thomas sequence.
Saying that Luke is (deliberately) “conflating” two meetings does not explain what we have in any useful way, since Luke does not tell anything else that sounds much like John’s description of the second meeting. There is, for example, no confrontation with a specific skeptic, nor any invitation to anyone to thrust a hand into Jesus’ side. Luke 24 records an invitation to touch Jesus and verify that he is not a spirit, but this is similar to Jesus’ showing the disciples his wounds in the first meeting in John (Luke 24.39, John 20.20). Conversely, John does not happen to mention in either meeting that Jesus ate at this time. So what does it even mean to say that Luke has conflated two meetings other than to say in a less explicit way that he wrote deliberately misleadingly about how many people were present, knowing that Thomas was absent? (pp. 446-47)
