What Twitter can teach us about synoptic harmonization

Sometimes I read an uber-skeptic challenging the credibility of the gospels because of differences in wording from one gospel to another. This is especially true in the gospels where one writer will have Jesus saying one thing and another gospel writer will have Jesus saying something similar yet different in some (usually minor) way. Does this mean that the gospels are untrustworthy? Does this mean that the Bible is in error and therefore uninspired? Is the sky really falling on any sort of conservative evangelical understanding of the nature of scripture? Such skepticism is neither healthy nor fair. Most of the time these small differences will be explained in one of two ways. First of all it is highly likely that Jesus repeated himself numerous times over the course of a three-year ministry. Just think about a politician on the campaign trail. Even in our highly electronic age, he will typically repeat the same talking points over and over with slight variations each time. Why would we expect anything different from Jesus in an oral culture with no communication technology? Secondly, it is reasonable to expect some stylistic and even content differences among the gospel writers even if they were reporting on the exact same event. Recent studies on the nature of oral transmission have essentially proven this point over and over again. But before you call into question the reliability of ancient sources for such discrepancies, I think that you will find that even in modern reporting we find these variations. I submit to you the following example from Twitter sent to me by a student following a recent Notre Dame dump truck job on the University of Michigan. (!!!!) All of these sources were quoting the exact same interview but with slight variations. The one thing that no one would ever question however was that ND did in fact kick Michigan's butt.

The NIV is the Antichrist!!

Preaching and Hermeneutics

An effective expositor is first an effective exegete. Exegesis precedes exposition, just as baking a cake comes before serving it. The exegetical process takes place in the workshop, the warehouse. It is a process in private, a perspiring task in which the Bible student examines the backgrounds, meanings, and forms of words; studies the structure and parts of sentences; seeks to ascertain the original textual reading (textual criticism); etc. But not all those details are shared when he preaches or teaches the Bible. An artist, in the process of creating his work, agonizes over the minutia of his painting, but in the end he wants others to see not the fine details but the whole and how the parts are related.

Roy B. Zuck, Rightly Divided (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1996), 24-25.