Eva Hart was just seven years old when she and her parents boarded Titanic.
When the “unsinkable” passenger liner collided with an iceberg on April 14, 1912, Eva and her mother were escorted to a lifeboat by her father. That was the last time they ever saw him.
Hart was one of the 710 survivors of history’s most famous maritime disaster. Leonardo DiCaprio would have been #711 if he had just figured out how to balance himself on that floating door next to Kate Winslet.
In the months that followed, the British Wreck Commissioner held an inquest in London, seeking to nail down as many relevant details as possible concerning the catastrophe in the hopes of establishing safety precautions for future voyages. What exactly had the survivors seen, heard, and experienced?
Eva Hart was one of the dozens of those who always insisted that Titanic had been torn into two gigantic pieces just before it sank beneath the surface. “We rode away [on the lifeboat],” she later reflected, “and I didn’t close my eyes at all. I saw that ship sink, and I saw that ship break in half.”
But a small group of others disagreed.
The commission assigned great weight to the testimony of Charles Lightoller, the ship’s second officer and the most senior member of the crew to survive. Did Titanic split in half? “It is utterly untrue,” he said. “The ship did not and could not have broken in two.” When pressed, he insisted he was “perfectly certain” about that. The other eyewitnesses must have been mistaken or overwhelmed by shock.
The maritime authorities chose to believe Lightoller. Surely a gigantic steel ship could not have been snapped in half like a pretzel – a view that prevailed for 73 years.
Eva Hart was still alive in 1985 when Robert Ballard and colleagues discovered Titanic’s remains two miles down in the Atlantic. Videos confirmed the shipwreck consisted of two widely separated pieces, both with jagged edges where the ship had been torn asunder. Before her death in 1996 at age 91 she acknowledged she was glad to be “proved correct.”
The intriguing mystery concerning Titanic’s structural integrity also seems to prove that eyewitness testimony cannot always be trusted. Even people who happen to be at the same place at the same time tend to see things differently.
This is where skeptics of the Christian story often pounce.
Followers of Jesus have always insisted that the first Easter morning changed human history. Yet the four biblical biographies of Jesus – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – report significantly different details concerning this crucial moment.
Bart Ehrman, the believer-turned-agnostic New Testament scholar, has built his reputation on exposing contradictions and inconsistencies in the gospel accounts.
How many angels were at the empty tomb? Well, says Ehrman, that depends. It’s either one or two, depending on which gospel you read. How many women were present? Perhaps it was a group or perhaps it was just one, depending on your biblical source. Did Jesus rise before dawn, at dawn, or after dawn? Was there an earthquake? Was there a Roman guard? Take your pick.
Ehrman thus concludes it’s impossible to say with any precision exactly what happened on that spring morning sometime around A.D. 30.
But before you start thinking about resigning your church membership, let’s step back a moment. Every Titanic survivor agreed on one important detail: The ship sank. No one said otherwise.
And all of the apostolic witnesses to the first Easter agreed on one essential Fact: Jesus rose from the dead. The tomb was empty. And that very day Jesus began to appear in a “resurrection body” to his disciples.
What about all the conflicting details?
Most historians admit that it took a lot of chutzpah for the early church to leave those four gospel accounts exactly as we currently have them. Plenty of writers over the centuries have attempted to tie up the loose ends. But Christianity’s earliest leaders apparently made no such efforts.
That’s because all the eyewitnesses agree on the one thing that really matters: Jesus rose from the dead. If that in fact is true, then the apparent contradictions are of secondary importance. They must in fact fit together somehow, even if we don’t know exactly how.
That’s one of the issues that New Testament scholar Mark Licona explores in depth in his new book Jesus, Contradicted: Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently.
When we begin to zero in on the numerous variations in how Jesus’ four biographies report his parables, miracles, and basic teachings, we might be led to conclude that the Bible is in trouble.
But Licona is quick to point out that the real trouble is not with the Bible, but with our expectations concerning the way it was written.
It’s high time that Christians abandon the view that God must have dictated every sentence of the New Testament, word-for-word, as if Peter, Luke, Paul, James and the other human authors were nothing more than human tape recorders.
My favorite “prooftext” for human freedom in the composition of scripture is I Corinthians 1:14-16, where Paul says, “I thank God that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized in my name. (Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.)” It’s hard to imagine God dictating, word-for-word, Paul’s momentary memory lapse.
The Bible is a collaborative composition, involving both human and divine authorship. 2 Peter 1:21 tells us, “For prophecy [in this context, that means any proclamation from God] never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
The human authors were carried along by the Spirit. That means God did not overrule their personalities or special interests, but incorporated them into their writings in such a way that God’s intentions were also entirely fulfilled.
Licona notes that the biblical authors’ works were consistent with the literary conventions of their time. In an oral culture like the ancient Middle East, it was widely accepted that stories, when told and retold, could vary by as much as 30-40% with regard to details. But there was a core of essential facts that simply had to be reported for an account to be considered true. If the storyteller somehow overlooked the important stuff, the community of listeners would provide a corrective: “You also need to include this.”
My wife and I frequently tell the same story in different ways.
If one of our grandchildren says or does something that is particularly memorable (which happens about every 20 minutes), and we later have the opportunity to talk about it, I tend to be the drama queen. I will exaggerate a word here and an inflection there, making a special point in a colorful way. Mary Sue’s reports, on the other hand, tend to be closer to what a camcorder might reveal.
Even if our descriptions at first seem hard to reconcile, our listeners are never in any doubt that we are both describing the same event. They simply take our personalities into account.
It’s quite true that no one had a smart phone to record specific quotes or images from the Sermon on the Mount or Jesus’ confrontations with the Pharisees. Licona admits that because of variations in the gospel accounts, we cannot always know with precision exactly what Jesus might have said on a given occasion.
But we have good reasons to trust that the Spirit has allowed us to know the exact gist of what Jesus intended to communicate.
The traditional doctrine of inerrancy says that the Bible cannot err in any way, all the way down to the smallest details. Entire books have been written trying to reconcile variations in names, numbers, and sequences in parallel biblical texts. Sometimes those books are persuasive. But often they fall short of the mark.
Licona believes that Bible students should be free to embrace what he calls “flexible inerrancy.” According to this perspective, “the Bible is true, trustworthy, authoritative and without error in all that it teaches.” Note those last five words: in all that it teaches.
God’s essential message has been faithfully preserved by the Holy Spirit – that’s the crucial part – even though the human authors were free to “be themselves” regarding their use of vocabulary and their decisions concerning which details were worth reporting.
Since this subject touches on the very heart of our faith, feelings are bound to run deep.
What can we affirm with some degree of assurance?
It seems best to agree that the classic Dictation Theory, at the conservative end of the spectrum, does not reflect what we actually find in the Bible. And Bart Ehrman’s radical skepticism, at the other end of things, is needlessly extreme.
We can say with confidence that the Bible’s authors proclaim that Jesus lived, died, and was raised from the dead, all for our sake – even if they tell that story in different ways.
Our call is to immerse ourselves in this one-of-a-kind book, trusting that the Spirit has guaranteed we have everything we will need to navigate through the next 24 hours.
Especially if there are icebergs dead ahead.
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