Why Are There Multiple Accounts of Jesus’s Resurrection in the Bible?

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@ManiacalVesalius

How would literary spotlighting explain that?

@ManiacalVesalius

I think you are making my point for me. “Literary spotlighting”, while valid, is hardly the answer to some of the bigger questions:

Matthew locates the family of Jesus in Bethlehem while Luke locates them in Nazareth, during overlapping periods.

Sometimes, differences are not intentional (because the writer has never heard any other version)

… and

sometimes they are intentional (because the writer has heard other versions and thinks they are in error).

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@ManiacalVesalius

Well, I’m not making your point for you, since literary spotlighting is not used to explain anything about Bethlehem/Nazareth, the scene at the temple, etc. I used it rather precisely. The gospel authors did not randomly apply their literary techniques.

@ManiacalVesalius

So… what’s the point of proposing “literary spotlighting” to answer the question of inconsistency … if it only applies to one specific case - - and based on speculation alone?

There’s plenty of inconsistencies that still go unanswered… without any speculation at all.

[ManiacalVesalius]

It’s not speculation, it’s actually quite demonstrable in a few cases.

The point of “proposing” literary spotlighting is because it actually takes place and any discussion without all the variables is incomplete. Nowhere have I suggested that all inconsistencies have answers – some simply don’t. You seem to be responding to some mystical strawman in my points. If you simply focus on the points I’ve actually made, you’ll find every single thing I’ve said here has been perfectly accurate.

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@ManiacalVesalius

If you simply focus on the points I’ve actually made, you’ll find every single thing I’ve said here has been perfectly accurate.

@ManiacalVesalius,

So what do you consider to be the best example of Literary Spotlighting? How good does a good explanation get?

[ManiacalVesalius]

I’ve been off biologos for a bit now so I wasn’t able to respond. The best example of literary spotlighting in the Gospels is definitely to do with the number of angels.

[James_MC]

Why harmonise at all ? The details in the texts are in fact present in the first place - their existence is one of the reasons that prompts people to attempt to construct harmonies of them.
As those details are all there in the texts, maybe they are meant to be present. Maybe, if they were not ironed out into an unintended uniformity, they could be read in ways that reflect the intentions and interests of the authors, ways that would deepen appreciation of the Gospels as the masterpieces they are. Harmonisation is like nothing so much as the well-intended vandalism of the 19th century, which Victorianised many older buildings because the Victorian style was then in vogue; to the loss of the pre-Victorian character of the buildings thus “improved”.

The whole operation is misguided even in principle. No other authors of Antiquity are subjected to this bed of Procrustes. Livy, Dio Cassius and Polybius are not compelled to tell the very same story about the beginnings of Rome; they are safe from such tortures, because no-one regards them as authors of books that are deemed to be sacred, canonical, infallible, inerrant, God-breathed, and Divine. So their differences are allowed to stand.

Books that have those more than human qualities are the very last books that need to be propped up by all too human harmonisation, a human undertaking which treats the books as though they were so riddled with flaws, and so woefully lacking in Divine authority or wisdom, that they cannot be allowed to say what they do. How can a treatment of Biblical books be justifiable, that requires them to be treated with less respect than is paid to Greek or Roman historians ?

Harmonisation not only shows disrespect to the words of which the Bible is composed - it rests on the unquestioned supposition that the parts of the Bible need to be harmonised, which itself depends on the supposition that the Bible needs to be totally free of all error. But what Biblical foundation for the Bible’s supposed need to be totally error-free & contradiction-free is there ?

Maybe the differences in the Bible have a positive theological function, that reveals something about God. There are different views about ths value of the Temple, for example: the Bible would be much the more if these were ironed away, or if the differences between the Synoptic Gospels and the Fourth were obliterated. By reverently obliterating these differences, we lose the use of an aspect of the Bible that may seem inconvenient, but is part of the Bible as it in fact is.