Why were there so many different interpretations of the story of Jesus?

Answer 1

A:The story of Jesus is told in the gospels, of which there are four in the New Testament. These gospels were originally anonymous, although they were eventually attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John later in the second century. Because of these attributions, it was always assumed that Matthew and John were eyewitnesses to the events in the life and mission of Jesus and that they wrote what they remembered. Because John differs so dramatically from the synoptic gospels, a tradition arose that the apostle John finally wrote his gospel to correct the errors in the other gospels. Since it is traditionally assumed that the gospels were all written independently of each other, this raises the question of why three other authors would write accounts that are in moderate agreement and all three be wrong in their accounts.

New Testament scholars say that none of the gospels could have been written by eyewitnesses to the events portrayed, which rules out Matthew and John as possible authors, and therefore rules out the hypothesis that John wanted to correct the record. They have established that Mark was the first gospel to be written, and that Matthew and Luke were based on that original gospel, with Matthew containing some 90 per cent of the verses in Mark, often in exactly the same words in the original Greek language. They have also established that John was loosely based on Luke, although it contains some material taken direct from Mark. Clearly, each subsequent author wished to improve on Mark, correcting errors as they saw them and adding new material that they felt would help the propagation of Christianity.

We have two nativity stories, in Matthew and Luke, because neither author was aware of what the other wrote, and because Mark provided nothing that could be used as a guide in a fuller story of the birth of Jesus. We have quite different stories of the appearances of the risen Jesus because Markoriginally ended at verse 16:8, with the young man telling the women that Jesus was risen and they fled, telling no one, and therefore with no resurrection appearance of Jesus. Mark 16:9-20 form what is now known as the "Long Ending" and were added to the Gospel at a later stage, to provide resurrection appearances.

The discrepancies in the story of the empty tomb prompted Archbishop Peter Carnley to write: "The presence of discrepancies might be a sign of historicity if we had four clearly independent but slightly different versions of the story, if only for the reason that four witnesses are better than one. But, of course, it is now impossible to argue that what we have in the four gospel accounts of the empty tomb are four contemporaneous but independent accounts of the one event. Modern redactional studies of the traditions account for the discrepancies as literary developments at the hand of later redactors of what was originally one report of the empty tomb...There is no suggestion that the tomb was discovered by different witnesses on four different occasions, so it is in fact impossible to argue that the discrepancies were introduced by different witnesses of the one event; rather, they can be explained as four different redactions for apologetic and kerygmatic reasons of a single story originating from one source."