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The differences between the four gospels is actually further supporting evidence that they are largely the records of eyewitnesses or those who wrote down what eyewitnesses said. If all four of the gospels were virtually exactly the same without any difficulties between the accounts, it would raise some significant and legitimate suspicion as to the claim that they are four different accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus by four different eyewitness contemporaries.

Consider this. There is a car accident witnessed by four people on both sides of the street at different positions along the street. How likely is it that each of them is going to give a report of what happened, that without any difficulties, harmonizes with the reports of the other eyewitnesses? Not likely, is it. Even though all of them will have seen and perceived certain things in common, there will be other things that only two of them saw or only one of them saw.

Now the car accident is just a simple, short span of time, single location event. Jesus’ ministry was diverse, covered three years, and dozens of places. The opportunity for differences and discrepancies between the reports of eyewitnesses is far greater.

But what about the inspiration of the Holy Spirit?

Just because the authors of the gospels were inspired by the Holy Spirit does not mean that the Holy Spirit dictated to them what to write down. Inspiration does not mean dictation. Rather, the Holy Spirit protected them from writing error on matters of faith and morals and guided (or inspired) each of them concerning what to write down that that particular eyewitness (or group of eyewitnesses) had himself witnessed. The Holy Spirit left the human authors as human authors and worked with and through their human faculties of mind and memory.

Maybe one eyewitness was only aware of seeing one angel, but another remembered seeing two. Their two reports may pose a difficulty, but it is not insurmountable. If one of the gospels said “ONLY one woman went to Jesus’ grave, NOT two women”; and another gospel said, “exactly two woman went to Jesus’ grave, neither more nor less”, then that would pose an irreconcilable difference. As it is, though the differences between the gospels do pose some apparent difficulties, they are not insurmountable differences.