actually, scrolls of papyrus-were relatively rare. Therefore education, learning, worship, teaching in religious communities- all this was done by word of mouth. Rabbis became famous for having the entire Old Testament committed to memory. So it would have been well within the capability of Jesus' disciples to have committed much more to memory than appears in all four gospels put together-and to have passed it along accurately." "Wait a second," I interjected. "Frankly, that kind of memorization seems incredible. How is that possible?" "Yes, it is difficult for us to imagine today," he conceded, "but this was an oral culture, in which there was great emphasis placed on memorization. And remember that eighty to ninety percent of Jesus' words were originally in poetic form. This doesn't mean stuff that rhymes, but it has a meter, balanced lines, parallelism, and so forth-and this would have created a great memory help. The other thing that needs to be said is that the definition of memorization was more flexible back then. In studies of cultures with oral traditions, there was freedom to vary how much of the story was told on any given occasion-what was included, what was left out, what was paraphrased, what was explained, and so forth. One study suggested that in the ancient Middle East, anywhere from ten to forty percent of any given retelling of sacred tradition could vary from one occasion to the next. However, there were always fixed points that were unalterable, and the community had the right to intervene and correct the storyteller if he erred on those important aspects of the story. It's an interesting" -he paused, searching his mind for the right word- "coincidence that ten to forty percent is pretty consistently the amount of variation among the synoptics on any given passage." Blomberg was hinting at something; I wanted him to be more explicit. "Spell it out for me," I said. "What precisely are you saying?" "I'm saying that it's likely that a lot of the similarities and differences among the synoptics can be explained by assuming that the disciples and other early Christians had committed to memory a lot of what Jesus said and did, but they felt free to recount this information in various forms, always preserving the significance of Jesus' original teachings and deeds." Still, I had some question about the ability of these early Christians to accurately preserve this oral tradition. I had too many memories of childhood party games in which words got garbled within a matter of minutes. Playing Telephone You've probably played the game of telephone yourself. one child whispers something into another child's ear-for instance, "You're my best friend"-and this gets whispered to others around a big circle until at the end it comes out grossly distorted-perhaps, "You're a brutish fiend." "Let's be candid," I said to Blomberg. "Isn't this a good analogy for what probably happened to the oral tradition about Jesus?" Blomberg wasn't buying that explanation. "No, not really," he said. "Here's why: When you're carefully memorizing something and taking care not to pass it along until you're sure you've got it right, you're doing something very different from playing the game of telephone. "In telephone half the fun is that the person may not have got it right or even heard it right the first time, and they cannot ask the person to repeat it. Then you immediately pass it along, also in whispered tones that make it more likely the next person will goof something up even more. So yes, by the time it has circulated through a room of thirty people, the results can be hilarious." "Then why," I asked, "isn't that a good analogy for passing along ancient oral tradition?" Blomberg sipped his coffee before answering. "If you really wanted to develop that analogy in light of the checks and balances of the first-century community, you'd have to say that every third person, out loud in a very clear voice, would have to ask the first person, 'Do I still have it right?' and change it if he didn't. "The community would constantly be monitoring what was said and intervening to make corrections along the way. That would preserve the integrity of the message," he said. "And the result would be very different from that of a childish game of telephone."
This test looks at whether it was in the character of these writers to be truthful. Was there any evidence of dishonesty or immorality that might taint their ability or willingness to transmit history accurately? Blomberg shook his head. "We simply do not have any reasonable evidence to suggest they were anything but people of great integrity," he said. "We see them reporting the words and actions of a man who called them to as exacting a level of integrity as any religion has ever known. They were willing to live out their beliefs even to the point of ten of the eleven remaining disciples being put to grisly deaths, which shows great character. "In terms of honesty, in terms of truthfulness, in terms of virtue and morality, these people had a track record that should be envied."
Here's a test that skeptics often charge the gospels with failing. After all, aren't they hopelessly contradictory with each other? Aren't there irreconcilable discrepancies among the various gospel accounts? And if there are, how can anyone trust anything they say? Blomberg acknowledged that there are numerous points at which the gospels appear to disagree. "These range all the way from very minor variations in wording to the most famous apparent contradictions," he said. "My own conviction is, once you allow for the elements I've talked about earlier-of paraphrase, of abridgment, of explanatory additions, of selection, of omission-the gospels are extremely consistent with each other by ancient standards, which are the only standards by which it's fair to judge them." "Ironically," I pointed out, "if the gospels had been identical to each other, word for word, this would have raised charges that the authors had conspired among themselves to coordinate their stories in advance, and that would have cast doubt on them." "That's right," Blomberg agreed. "If the gospels were too consistent, that in itself would invalidate them as independent witnesses. People would then say we really only have one testimony that everybody else is just parroting." My mind flashed to the words of Simon Greenleaf of Harvard Law School, one of history's most important legal figures and the author of an influential treatise on evidence. After studying the consistency among the four gospel writers, he offered this evaluation: "There is enough of a discrepancy to show that there could have been no previous concert among them; and at the same time such substantial agreement as to show that they all were independent narrators of the same great transaction ." From the perspective of a classical historian, German scholar Hans Stier has concurred that agreement over basic data and divergence of details suggest credibility, because fabricated accounts tend to be fully consistent and harmonized. "Every historian," he wrote, "is especially skeptical at that moment when an extraordinary happening is only reported in accounts which are completely free of contradictions."
While that's true, I didn't want to ignore the difficulties that are raised by the ostensible discrepancies among the gospels. I decided to probe the issue further by pressing Blomberg on some apparent clear-cut contradictions that skeptics frequently seize upon as examples of why the gospels are unreliable.
Coping with Contradictions I began with a well-known story of a healing. "In Matthew it says a centurion himself came to ask Jesus to heal his servant," I pointed out. "However, Luke says the centurion sent the elders to do this. Now, that's an obvious contradiction, isn't it?" "No, I don't think so," Blomberg replied. "Think about it this way: in our world today, we may hear a news report that says, 'The president today announced that . . .' when in fact the speech was written by a speechwriter and delivered by the press secretary-and with a little luck, the president might have glanced at it somewhere in between. Yet nobody accuses that broadcast of being in error. "In a similar way, in the ancient world it was perfectly understood and accepted that actions were often attributed to people when in fact they occurred through their subordinates or emissaries-in this case through the elders of the Jewish people." "So you're saying that Matthew and Luke can both be right at the same time?" "That's exactly what I'm saying," he replied. That seemed plausible, so I posed a second example. "What about Mark and Luke saying that Jesus sent the demons into the swine at Gerasa, while Matthew says it was in Gadara. People look at that and say this is an obvious contradiction that cannot be reconciled-it's two different places. Case closed." "Well, don't shut the case yet," Blomberg chuckled. "Here's one possible solution: one was a town; the other was a province." That seemed a little too glib for me. He appeared to be skimming over the real difficulties that are raised by this issue. "It gets more complicated than that," I said. "Gerasa, the town, wasn't anywhere near the Sea of Galilee, yet that's where the demons, after going into the swine, supposedly took the herd over the cliff to their deaths." "OK, good point," he said. "But there have been ruins of a town that have been excavated at exactly the right point on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The English form of the town's name often gets pronounced 'Khersa,' but as a Hebrew word translated or transliterated into Greek, it could have come out sounding something very much like 'Gerasa.' So it may very well have been in Khersa-whose spelling in Greek was rendered as Gerasa-in the province of Gadara." "Well done," I conceded with a smile. "I'll surrender on that one. But here's a problem that's not so easy: what about the discrepancies between the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke? Skeptics often point to them as being hopelessly in conflict." "This is another case of multiple options," he said. "Such as?" "The two most common have been that Matthew reflects Joseph's lineage, because most of his opening chapter is told from Joseph's perspective and Joseph, as the adoptive father, would have been the legal ancestor through whom Jesus' royal lineage would have been traced. These are themes that are important for Matthew. "Luke, then, would have traced the genealogy through Mary's lineage. And since both are from the ancestry of David, once you get that far back the lines converge. "A second option is that both genealogies reflect Joseph's lineage in order to create the necessary legalities. But one is Joseph's human lineage-the gospel of Luke-and the other is Joseph's legal lineage, with the two diverging at the points where somebody in the line did not have a direct offspring. They