Why do different Gospels disagree on whether Jesus carried the cross?

Answer 1

A:Even if we believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote the gospels attributed to them, none of them was likely to have been present at the time. In fact, the four gospels were all anonymous until the Church Fathers sought to establish who, in their view, probably wrote each of the gospels. Modern New Testament scholars say that none of the gospels could have been eyewitnesses to the events portrayed in the gospels, so details such as this would not really have been known.

We now know that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were substantially based on Mark's Gospel, so when the author of Mark reported that Simon of Cyrene was ordered to carry the cross, the other two synoptic gospels reported the same.

A theme throughout John's Gospel is that Jesus did not suffer. For example, rather than have Jesus pray alone and in agony in the Garden of Gethsemene, it says that he offered a triumphant prayer before entering the Garden and was arrested as soon as he entered. In this gospel, he was not placed on the cross until the sixth hour (12 noon), and died in just three hours. When he died, he did not say, "My God. My God. Why hast thou forsaken me?" as in Mark and Matthew, but a dignified, "It is finished." The need for Simon to carry the cross is evidence of Jesus' suffering, which is foreign to John's account. For this reason, Jesus carried the cross to Golgotha.