In response let me first point out that—as his more attentive students have likely discovered—Professor Ehrman is engaged in a cocky game of slight-of-mind. The truth is that Matthew does not tell us how many times the rooster crowed, he simply tells us that the rooster crowed (Mt. 26:34). As such Ehrman is only knocking down a straw man.

Furthermore, only an extreme literalist bent on undermining Scripture would attempt to make this particular passage walk on all fours. In recounting past events or stories, we obviously don’t all highlight the same details. In the case at hand, Mark simply provides a bit more detail than does Matthew (Mt.26:34; Mk 14:30).

Finally, Ehrman has set up a rigged game in which it’s impossible for him to lose. Since Matthew and Mark do not provide identical testimonies he cries contradiction. Conversely, if they had provided identical testimony he would charge them with collusion.

In sharp contrast to Ehrman’s methodology, credible scholarship looks for a reliable core set of facts in order to validate a historical account. In this case, Matthew and Mark merely provided complementary perspectives.

So there’s no problem and we don’t have to make a big deal out of Bart Ehrman’s all too convenient cock crowing conundrum. It’s easily explained, it’s not a problem and certainly isn’t a reason for us to say that the Bible can’t be trusted. In fact, the reasons the Bible can be trusted are overwhelming including the evidence for the manuscripts themselves, archaeological evidence, predictive prophecy and scriptural synergy. All this is available in various sources, especially in my new resource Memorable Keys to Essential Christian D-O-C-T-R-I-N-E. It’s available at our Website at www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-700-0274.

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[1] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York, Harper One, 2009), 7.

Bart Ehrman says that one of his favorite discrepancies is that Jesus evidently had a painfully short attention span. This discrepancy would be easy to resolve had not Bart Ehrman been hopelessly lost in a wooden literal labyrinth of his own making. Here how’s he cites the problem, “In John 13:36, Peter says to Jesus, ‘Lord where are you going?’ A few verses later Thomas says, ‘Lord we do not know where you are going’ (John 14:5).  And then a few minutes later at the same meal Jesus upbraids his disciples saying, ‘Now I am going to the one who sent me, yet none of you ask me where are you going?’”That leaves only two possibilities according to Ehrman, “either Jesus had a very short attention span or there is something strange going on for the sources for these chapters…”[2]

How does one respond to that? The first thing I would say to Professor Ehrman, and those who he is proud of causing to waver in their faith, that it’s instructive to note is that, if I were to take Professor Bart in a woodenly literal sense, in that same sense he takes the Bible, I’d be doing him a grave injustice. It would hardly be fair to suppose that he really thinks it possible that Jesus really had a short attention span. Anyone who reads his book in context knows full well that Ehrman is convinced that John, who by the way he characterizes as a lower class illiterate and an Aramaic speaking peasant, did not write the Gospel attributed to him, and that the sources that cobbled together the text were decidedly unreliable.

Furthermore, we must be careful not to fall for historical revisionists who, like Bart Ehrman, would have us believe on the basis of Acts 4 that John was illiterate, and therefore could not have written the fourth gospel. John may have been unlettered—in the sense that he was not educated beyond the primary schooling available to boys at that time—but he was clearly not illiterate. Not only is it an uncharitable stretch to demean John as illiterate from the standpoint of his formal education, but this characterization neglects the immediate and overall context of the book of Acts where the supposed unlearned apostles continually astonish the Jewish teachers of the law with their knowledge and wisdom, in much the same way that Jesus himself had; though he too was without the prerequisite rabbinic training demanded by Ehrman.

Moreover, following the resurrection of our Lord, there is every indication that the apostles devoted themselves to the study and ministry of the Word of God. An entire adult lifetime of that kind of study can easily account for John’s ability to produce an astonishingly sophisticated and nuanced literary masterpiece.

Finally, allow me to underscore what is painfully obvious to anyone who engages Bart’s so called problems with the Bible. Professor Ehrman, it seems, is wholly incapable of comprehending the subtlety of sophisticated literacy nuances. Instead he’s bent on forcing the text through a fundamentalist filter. Peter and Thomas obviously utter the words, “Where are you going?’ with a decidedly different drift. As has been well said, Peter’s question was only a selfish exclamation, which would not hear of Jesus’ going away alone. The assertion of Thomas was nothing but an expression of discouragement and dullness of mind. So here Jesus is leaving, He’s going to his sender, means so much to His disciples and yet none of them request one word of this precious information. Put another way, while the disciple focused on mean earthly vanities, Christ intended to elevate their gaze to eternal verities.

Well, was Jesus a dummy with a painfully short attention span as per Professor Ehrman or it is Professor Ehrman who is hopelessly lost in a wooden literal labyrinth of his own making? I ask you to be the judge, but remember while I responded to this discrepancy, Professor Ehrman has thrown so many up against the wall that his students are wavering in their faith and many of these evangelical Christians, who went to Sunday School, church, and made professions of faith, and now don’t know what to think. This is why the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Christian Research Institute continually tackle these issues head on because make no mistake about it the Bible is under siege. For further information on supposed Bible contradictions please see my Complete Bible Answer Book. 

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[1] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York, Harper One, 2009), 6.

[2] Ibid., 9.

Now I don’t have a personal ax to grind with Professor Ehrman, I don’t even know him, but I have a completely different mission. He talks about how “the more conservative students–– resist for a long time, secure in their knowledge that God would not allow any falsehoods into a sacred book, but before long, as students see more and more of the evidence, many of them find that their faith in the inerrant and absolute historical truthfulness of the Bible begins to waver.”[2] My goal is not to cause students to lose their faith; my goal is to cause students to find their faith. To trust the Bible—and I am particularly focused on this goal right now in that we are reading and recognizing on the basis of research that the vast majority of kids that come from conservative evangelical homes are walking away from the faith. Some say 75% of them[3]; Josh McDowell said it could be upwards of 94% of them[4], which is to say that only 6% of them survive the onslaught against the Bible and the historic Christian faith.

So I’ve been devoting some time to demonstrating that the supposed discrepancies are just that, supposed.

According to Professor Ehrman, the first of the key discrepancies with respect to the resurrection involves the female or females who allegedly discovered the empty tomb. Ehrman writes, “Who actually went to the tomb? Was it Mary alone (John 20:1)? Mary and another Mary (Matthew 28:1)? Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome (Mark 16:1)? Or the women who had accompanied Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem––possibly Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the Mother of James, and ‘other women’ (Luke 24:1, see 23:55)?”[5]

Well, it all depends on what Gospel you read, and in responding to a dogmatist, who has made a virtual art form out of exploiting the discrepancies in the secondary details of these Gospels, a number of thoughts spring immediately to mind. Let me share them with you.

First, it’s helpful to recognize that the gospels are complementary rather than contradictory. If John had stipulated that Mary Magdalene was the only female to discover the empty tomb, and the other Gospels had claimed more than one woman was involved in the process, we’d be faced with a genuine contradiction. Instead the complementary details provided by the four gospel writers simply, as Paul Harvey used to say, flesh out the “rest of the story.”

Furthermore, credible scholars are always looking for a reliable core set of facts in order to validate historical accounts. In this case, liberal and conservative historians agree that the body of Jesus was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. As credible scholars have noted a member of the Jewish court that condemned Christ to death is an unlikely candidate for Christian fiction.[6]

Additionally, when we consider the role of women in 1st century Jewish society, what’s remarkable is that the empty tomb accounts feature females as heroes of the story in the first place. This, of course, demonstrates that the gospel writers factually recorded what happened even if it was culturally embarrassing.

One final point; if each of the gospel writers presented secondary details in exactly the same way, Professor Ehrman would no doubt dismiss their accounts on the basis of collusion. Instead of course the gospels provide unique yet mutually consistent perspectives on the events surrounding the empty tomb.

These principles not only revolve and resolve the conundrum I’m discussing now, but include all the supposed resurrection contradictions that are highlighted by Ehrman in his latest book. Indeed, we can safely conclude that far from being contradictory that the gospel accounts are clearly complementary, that a consensus of credible scholarship consider the core set of facts presented by the gospel writers to be authentic and reliable, and that the unique perspectives provided by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John preclude the possibly of collusion. For further information on supposed Bible contradictions please see my Complete Bible Answer Book. 

Recommended Resource: 

The Complete Bible Answer Book

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[1]  Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 244.

[2]  Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York, Harper One, 2009), 6.

[3]   Southern Baptists of Texas Convention,  “Youth ministry summit to explore mass exodus of young from churches” This news release cites LifeWay Christian Resources’ Glenn Schultz in his book Kingdom Education on the 75% number. (http://www.sbtexas.com/default.asp?action=article&aid=3313&issue=11/7/2006).

[4] North American Mission Board, “Studies Show that Once Students Graduate from High School They Struggle With Their Faith”, this News Article cites McDowell’s 94% statistic. (http://www.namb.net/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=9qKILUOzEpH&b=1594365&ct=3237289)

[5]  Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted, 48.

[6] Raymond Brown as quoted in Wilkens, Michael J. and J.P. Moreland, eds., Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 148.

One of the alleged inconsistencies that he cites in his book is that the gospel of Mark indicates that it was in the last week of Jesus’ life when he cleansed the temple by overturning the tables of the money changers, saying; “This is to be a house of prayer…but you have made it a den of thieves.” Whereas, according to Ehrman, the gospel of John says that this happened at the very beginning of John. Then Ehrman says, “some readers have thought that Jesus must have cleansed the temple twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and once at the end. But that would mean that neither Mark nor John tells the “true” story, since in both accounts he cleanses the temple only once.” He further asks, “Moreover, is this reconciliation of the two accounts historically plausible? If Jesus made a disruption of the temple in the beginning of his ministry, why wasn’t he arrested by the authorities then?” He concludes with the following dogmatic assertion: “Historically speaking, then, the accounts are not reconcilable.”

Well is Professor Ehrman right? Is this just one more in a litany of errors made by a pseudonymous gospel writer, or is this just indicative of a professor gone wild? I would first say, in answer to that question, it is not only uncharitable but unquestionably wrong headed to suggest that neither Mark nor John—who by the way Ehrman demeans as illiterate—would be telling the true story had the temple been cleansed twice. As is no doubt obvious to even the most unlettered of Ehrman’s students, neither Gospel writer provides an exhaustive account of everything Jesus said or did. As the apostle John indicates in hyperbolic parlance, no doubt lost on a wooden literalist like Bart Ehrman, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25).

Furthermore, the gospel of John itself provides a more than historically plausible insight as to why Jesus might not have been arrested during His initial temple cleansing. The proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back leading to the arrest and trial of Jesus quite logically would have resulted from a late, not an early temple cleansing. Not only so, but as the gospel of John makes clear, the Jewish leaders did not arrest Jesus in the early stages of his ministries for fear of the multitudes who were in awe of Christ’s teaching and miracles.

One final point, as even a cursory reading reveals, John kairologically orders his gospel by theme. I think that is an important point. John as such says, the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, which fulfills the Old Testament promise that God’s glory would again return to His temple. Moreover, John reinterprets the meaning of Passover by revealing Jesus as the quintessential Passover. As such it would be logically, and I would say charitable, to surmise that John might introduce his account of Christ’s temple cleansing early in his Gospel narrative and within a context in which Jesus is reveled as the substance that fulfills the types and shadows of temple priests and sacrifice.

While such a notion does not sit well with a fundamentalist reading of scripture, it accords well with the nuanced and highly sophisticated reckoning of time particular to the ancients. A kairological interpretation, which reckons time not in terms of our familiar chronological ordering, but in terms of a quality of purpose in which an event is said to occur at just the right time. In other words, even if there was just one temple cleansing, one might logically assume that John communicates it kairologically, as opposed to chronologically.

Of the course the very fact a number of plausible resolutions have been forwarded precludes the charge that the gospel accounts are in fact contradictory.

So, Bart Ehrman set this up as a way of dissuading his students, particularly the ones he calls his conservative students, from believing that the Bible is the infallible repository of redemptive revelation. He writes, “some students accept these new views from day one. Others––especially those among the more conservative students––resist for a long time secure in their knowledge that God would not allow any falsehoods into a sacred book, but before long as students see more and more of the evidence many of them find that their faith in the inerrant and absolute historical truthfulness of the Bible begins to waver.”[3] This is of course his goal, he’s shaking the faith of his students, because he wants them to know what he thinks is true, and that is that the Bible is riddled with errors.

In the face of this onslaught on the Bible, we always need to be ready to give an answer. For further information on supposed Bible contradictions please see my Complete Bible Answer Book.    

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[1] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York, Harper One, 2009) 5-6.

[2] Ibid., 7

[3] Ibid. 6