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‘Jesus Contradicted’ With Mike Licona

Mike Licona
Well, the objective of modern biography is how the person came to develop the character, the inward character that they have. Was it their social background, cultural backgrounds, their education. What led them to that? The ancients did not look at it that way. They assumed that the person was born with a type of character, and it just manifested itself over the years. In the most famous passage in all of Plutarch’s writings, his Life of Alexander, chapter 1, he’s saying that what the person said and did, illuminates the kind of person they are, their moral character, ethics, who they actually are.

So, David, it’s really interesting. When you come to the Gospels and you read them through this lens, it is so eye opening. When I saw it the first time, I just leapt out of my seat. You start off the beginning of Mark’s Gospel. And what does he say? As Isaiah, the prophet said, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight. You would think that it’s Jesus preparing the way for God, but no, it’s John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus. What does that say about who Jesus is? It’s saying he’s God. Then you come to chapter 2. Jesus heals a paralytic and forgives him his sins. And the Jewish leaders say, that’s blasphemy. Only God can forgive sins. Chapter 3, you’ve got Jesus who calms the wind and the storm. The Old Testament says that’s something God does. He calms the wind. Chapter 4, you’ve got Jesus casting out demons. And they say, only it’s Satan casting out Satan. And Jesus gives that word picture where he says, If you want to go and rob a strong man, you’ve got to bind him first, and then you can go in his house and plunder his goods. What he’s saying by those exorcisms is he is binding the strong man who is Satan and now is plundering souls from his kingdom. Well, what human can bind Satan? And then he walks on water in chapter 6, which the Old Testament says God does that. Then he raises the dead, something the Old Testament says only God does.

And then you see what Jesus was saying throughout the Gospel of Mark. It’s like almost every chapter has something that Jesus says or does that Mark uses to illustrate he is deity. And this is something you see when you read the gospels through the lens of ancient biography. That’s not so clear when you read it through a 21st century lens.

David Capes
Okay, so we’ve got the Gospels as examples of ancient biography. What other kind of examples have you looked into in all of your studies?

One of my favorite ones is the cursing of the fig tree and the cleansing of the temple. We find a couple of these compositional devices occurring here. These stories, both of them, are found in Mark and in Matthew. In Mark’s account, you have Jesus entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He enters the temple. It’s late in the day. He looks around. He leaves the temple, goes to Bethany and spends the night. Monday, he’s returning to Jerusalem. He’s hungry. They come to a fig tree, find nothing on it, so he curses it. It’s still Monday and he goes into the temple, doesn’t like what he sees, and cleanses the temple. Then he goes back and spends Monday night in Bethany, Tuesday morning, he gets up and returning to Jerusalem, sees the fig tree. It’s already withered and died.

But Matthew compresses things. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, goes into the temple, doesn’t like what he sees. So, what Matthew does now is he conflates. He combines the Sunday visit with the Monday visit. And he cleanses the temple on Sunday. Then they leave the temple, and go to Bethany to spend the night, just as they did in Mark. Monday morning, he gets up. He’s returning to Jerusalem. He’s hungry. He sees the fig tree. He curses it, and Matthew says, immediately, it withers and dies. He takes the two steps of cursing it on one day and seeing it dead the next day in Mark. He conflates them, compresses them together to occur on a single occasion, so that it withers before their very eyes. I’d like to reckon this is something like today.

I call it the difference between the guy version and the girl version of a story. And just about all of us who are married can understand this. It’s stereotyping, of course, and there are many exceptions, but it is largely true, and most of us can understand that women like to tell details. They want to tell precisely what happened, where it happened, when it happened, why it happened, how it happened, who was there, what they were doing, what they were thinking, what they were saying, what they were wearing, and how they were feeling. But as guys, we’ll bend the details a little, just get to the bottom line. The game’s coming on in five minutes. Well, Matthew gives us the guy version of the story. Mark gives us the girl version of the story.

David Capes
You’ve got that telescoping. That’s what I’ve always referred to as, telescoping. You take that which is a long thing, and you pull it down and you condense it in a way. If somebody wanted to look at ancient biographies, would Plutarch be a good place to start?

Mike Licona
That would be excellent place. Plutarch is such a great writer. He wrote more than 60 biographies, of which 48 have survived. Most of those you can read in about three hours, and they are so good. He is such a good writer. He’s known as the greatest ancient biographer. And we know a lot about the ancient world from Plutarch, you get into some other biographers, probably Suetonius, who wrote almost contemporaneous within just a few years of Plutarch and a lot of overlap between them. He’s considered to be the greatest Roman biographer, and he writes more like we do today, but he’s quite dry in comparison to Plutarch. Plutarch is a very good read.

David Capes
Were these authors trying to entertain? Were they trying to inspire? What were they hoping to do with their biographies?

Mike Licona
They were to be educational, to be inspiring, and yes, to be entertaining as well. Ancient biographers and historians were expected to write good literature. Now, there’s one ancient writer named Asconius who writes just like historians do today, and most people will have never heard of him. That’s because the ancients didn’t preserve everything he wrote, because it just didn’t interest them as much.

David Capes
It was a bit of flat and uninteresting. Part of your book is very conversational. You do a wonderful job writing that part, and you tell the story about the naivete with which you, at one point came to Scripture. I know that it is actually the reading of Scripture, the engaging of Scripture, that leads you to these questions and leads you try to give an account for what you find there.

Mike Licona
You know, it’s like when I was learning Greek. I learned how to pronounce it, and then I’m reading the Greek New Testament and the words of Jesus. I’m thinking, wow, this is just how he sounded. I didn’t think at the time he was probably speaking in Aramaic. And we’re reading a Greek translation of it. And by the way, we don’t even exactly know how the ancient Greeks sounded anyway, because the Gospels do differ in the way they report the words. In many cases, they aren’t his precise words. They’re how he was remembered to say these things. They are communicating an essentially faithful representation of what he said, but these are not likely to be transcripts of what he said.

Not to put doubt in their mind, because he would have repeated the same type of things over and over. They would have heard these things hundreds of times. But that’s not to say that he said the exact same words each time. When you teach a course, you’re not going to use the exact precise words, in precise order every time. But we could still get an essentially faithful representation, a very accurate
gist of what David Capes said.

David Capes
It’s a terrific book. It’s entitled, Jesus Contradicted: Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently. Dr. Michael Licona, thanks for being with us today on The Stone Chapel Podcast,

Mike Licona
Thanks for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai