► Listen on Amazon
► Listen on Apple
► Listen on Spotify
► Listen on YouTube
You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Mike Licona
My name is Mike Licona, and I’m professor of New Testament studies at Houston Christian University.
David Capes
Dr. Mike Licona, Mike, good to see you. Welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast.
Mike Licona
Oh, thanks so much. It’s great to see you again. David. I appreciate you very much for what you do and for your scholarship.
David Capes
You’re kind to say that. I’ve been wanting to have you on the podcast for a while. I’m glad we’ve got a great excuse, which is a great book called Jesus Contradicted. We’ll be talking about it in a few minutes. Now, there are people out there who are in Africa and South America listening to the podcast. They may not know who Mike Licona is. For those who don’t know, who is Mike Lacona?
Mike Licona
Well, I’m 63 years old. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and became a Christian at the age of 10. I started to get doubts about my faith when I was in grad school. It wasn’t really anything I’d learned. It was just me thinking, how do I know that what I believe is true? I believe I’ve got this relationship with the Lord. I was praying an hour to two hours a day, feeling a closeness and intimacy with God, studying scripture several hours a day in the original language of Greek in the New Testament. But I just got thinking, am I deluding myself for some reason.
If I’d been brought up in Afghanistan, would I be a Muslim? If I had been brought up in India, would I be a Hindu? If I’ve been brought up in China, would I be an atheist? One of my roommates suggested that I see Gary Habermas, a Christian philosopher and apologist. So ,I did, and he really helped me through my doubts by pointing me to the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. And that led me into a doing a doctoral program doing research on the resurrection of Jesus. I wanted to investigate it using the tools of a historian to see if we really approach this thing in a fair-minded manner, really looking at the evidence. Would it really support the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead.
David Capes
A lot of that research is later published, right?
Mike Licona
It was, in a pretty large book The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by IVP Academic.
David Capes
Yes. This book, Jesus Contradicted, is a really interesting book. The subtitle is, Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently. I thought that was interesting. That tells a lot about the book. Why the Gospels tell the same story, differently. All right, take us through this. What is the big idea of your book?
Mike Licona
Well, anyone who’s a serious reader of the Gospels will notice that they do tell the same story differently, often. For example, Jesus’s baptism is reported in Matthew, Mark and Luke. Mark and Luke say that when Jesus came up out of the water, God’s voice spoke out of heaven and said, “you are my beloved son. With you I am well pleased.” God is directly addressing Jesus, but Matthew, who’s probably relying on Mark as his source, as most scholars think, wasn’t even around as a disciple at that point. He reports God’s voice as saying, “This is my beloved son. With him I am well pleased.” In Matthew’s gospel, God is directly addressing the crowd.
David Capes
The audience there in Matthew.
Mike Licona
Yes. I think Saint Augustine was correct when he said that Matthew changed the recipient that God was speaking to in order to make God’s message that Jesus is his son, more personable to his readers. That makes perfect sense. The other option is you try to harmonize it and say God said both. Well, if you want to do that, congratulations. Now you agree with the gospel of the Ebionites written in the second century. So, there are a whole lot of differences like this. And over the years, for many Christians the default approach has been to attempt to harmonize these differences. But a lot of times these harmonizations become strained approaches that is like “hermeneutical waterboarding” the text until they tell you what you want to hear. That just doesn’t respect the text. I thought there’s a better way.
Well, as you’re well aware, as a prominent New Testament scholar, most New Testament scholars today regard the Gospels as being ancient biographies, and ancient biographies took some liberties in the way that they reported the details. They were okay in bending some of the details in order to make a point a little more clearly, like Matthew does with the baptism voice. There are many other examples that are even far more radical than that, if we read the gospels through the lens of first century biography and understand the techniques or compositional devices the ancient biographers were taught do when they learned how to write. Then all of a sudden, reading the gospels through that lens, a lot more comes into focus, and more than 90% of the differences in the gospels just melt away.
David Capes
Today, if you read a biography of Winston Churchill, there are going to be certain ideas that a biographer will try to convey. But in the ancient world, they’re doing biography, but they’re doing it a different way. What are some of those differences? You talk about those compositional details. They’re taking a little liberty here or there. How would you compare the modern biography to an ancient biography?
Mike Licona
Here’s an example. The genealogies of Matthew and Luke. A lot of times people try to reconcile these and say, well, one is the genealogy of Jesus through Mary, the other through through Joseph. That doesn’t work, and there’s numerous reasons. In Matthew 1:17, it says these are all the generations. It’s 14 generations, from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the deportation at Babylon, and 14 from the deportation to Jesus. Three sets of 14. But if you look at that same time period in the generations that you have listed in Luke’s gospel, there are more than the 42. What’s interesting is, in the second set of the 14, Matthew ends with Jeconiah. Then he kind of cheats, because the first name in the third set is Jeconiah.
So it’s like he’s not even trying to be exhaustive or extremely careful. What’s going on? Well, a number of scholars, and I think they’re correct, say Matthew is using a Hebrew rhetorical device known as Gematria, where he assigns a numerical value to a letter. We find this in Psalm 119 where each chapter of that psalm is assigned a letter in the Hebrew alphabet. When you look at the name David in Hebrew, you have a Dalit, a D, which is the fourth letter in the Hebrew alphabet, Vav, which is the sixth letter, and then another Dalit, because there’s no vowels, right? So you have 4,6,4, adding to 14, as numerous scholars have acknowledged. You have Matthew here saying on three occasions for emphasis artistically, that Jesus is the Son of David, the Messiah. He’s painting a literary portrait of Jesus. Were those generations involved in Jesus’s line? Yes, but he’s not trying to be exhaustive. He’s not even trying to be extremely careful. He’s more concerned about painting this literary portrait of Jesus as the Son of David, the Messiah.
David Capes
He’s just punctuating that. Because at the very beginning, Matthew 1:1, you know, this is the geneseos (Greek for Genesis or origin). This is the origin of Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of David, the son of Abraham. So he’s just punctuating those. That’s fantastic. So that’s how ancient biographies are. What about modern biography? How would you compare that? What do you see when you look at a modern biography?
