Should We Harmonize the Gospels?

One of the most interesting, and potentially problematic, aspects of the New Testament is that it provides four separate accounts of Jesus' ministry. By the mid-second century, the churches agreed that there exactly four accepted gospels, and opponents of Christianity were studying them intently to find inconsistencies. Justin Martyr, an early defender of Christianity, responded by harmonizing the gospels, especially the first three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Essentially, this meant smoothing over and explaining away the inconsistencies to produce one, consistent account. His disciple, Tatian, took this one step further by creating the Diatessaron, which means "Through Four", which blends the texts of the four gospels into one account. This churches in Syria used this "harmony" for around 200 years, until a broad crackdown aimed at unifying all the churches banned it. While Tatian's solution is a bit extreme, Christian defenders have continued to rely on unifying the gospel accounts or otherwise explaining away inconsistencies in the face of criticism. I see two problems with this approach. First, some of the explanations create more problems than the inconsistencies that they address. Here are three examples.

• Jesus cleared the temple. However John places this event at the beginning of Jesus ministry, creating an inconsistency. Solution, Jesus cleared the temple twice.
• While Jesus was eating at the house of a man named Simon, a woman came and poured out expensive perfume on Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. However, Luke places this event in the middle of Jesus' ministry, rather than at the end. Solution, two different women poured out perfume on Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair.
• Matthew and Luke each record Jesus preaching a sermon, both sermons start with stylized statements, "Blessed are the poor..." and cover similar topics. However, the wording in each sermon is different, resulting in different messages. Solution, Jesus preached two separate sermons.

While each explanation is possible by itself, taken together, the "two of everything" approach sounds phony while doing nothing to address the inconsistencies. Second, what if the original authors were aware of the inconsistencies and didn't care about them, or even created them intentionally? By smoothing everything over, we would then miss the intentions of the original authors while misrepresenting their works. In other words, we in danger of missing the message while making false statements about the Bible. However, is this possible? Would Luke intentionally take Matthew's Sermon On The Mount and rewrite it, changing the focus from righteousness to social justice? Personally, I think that is quite possible. There were thirteen apostles (the original twelve, minus Judas Iscariot, plus Matthias, plus Paul) preaching their own versions of the gospel, based on their own personal experiences of Jesus. Assuming Matthew wrote first and that Luke used Matthew as a source, there is no reason that Luke would feel compelled to treat it as set in stone, as we would today. Luke was not recording Matthew's view of the gospel, he was recording Paul's. The fact he chose to use Matthew as a source at all shows that he, and everyone else, already held it in high regard. IMHO, we should stop viewing the inconsistencies in the four gospels as flaws that need to be explained away. The combined leadership of the early Church had to be aware of them, and yet they insisted that there were indeed four different gospel accounts of equal authority, in spite of the attacks their position caused. If these inconsistencies were really a problem, they could easily have declared Matthew, which was the most widely used gospel of the early Church, as THE gospel and relegated the others to secondary status. According to Luke, this happened to many other written gospels. As far as the inconsistencies, here are a few suggestions.

• Ignore them. Most of the inconsistencies are either contrived or trivial. Most attempts to explain them make them sound worse than they are.
• Look at each gospel individually. The authors were providing a unique perspectives, and we should honor them rather than trying to eliminate them.
• For really advanced study, look at how each author was influenced by his peers. Unfortunately, this requires agreeing on when and why each author wrote, and that subject is disputed. On the other hand, this level of study isn't essential.