There is disagreement between the gospels, and Christians themselves do not agree on how best to resolve disagreements. Disagreements do not indicate that the gospels are wholly false, but certainly they do not provide evidence as to their accuracy either. What is most interesting to me is the Christian obsession to explain away inaccuracies saying it MAY have been because of such and such, with little if any evidence that such and such was indeed the cause. If your belief is independent of coming up with these explanations that are based mostly on conjecture, why waste the time?
For example, take the difference between Mark and Luke saying that demons were driven into swine at Gerasa, while Matthew says that this even occurred in Gadara. Blomberg's first explanation was that it was "possible" that one was a town and the other a province. Lee Strobel, who I must say at that very moment appears quite the skeptic for the first time in the book, points out to Dr. Blomberg that Gerasa the town isn't anywhere close to the Sea of Galilee, which is where supposedly the event took place. Here is Dr. Blomberg's response:
"But there have been ruins of a town that have been excavated at exactly the right point on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The English form of the town's name often gets pronounced 'Khersa,' but as a Hebrew word translated or transliterated into Greek, it could have come out sounding something very much like 'Gerasa.' So it may very well have been in Khersa--whose spelling in Greek was rendered as Gerasa--in the province of Gadara."
Dr. Blomberg may be right. However, if there is a possibility that he may be right, or as he says if it "may very well have been," then there is also a possibility that one of the accounts, or possibly both are wrong. Does this prove that Jesus didn't throw out demons and place them into a herd of swine? Of course not! Yet it doesn't give us any increased confidence in the three different accounts, either.
Blomberg also tackles the lineage of Jesus which differs greatly between Matthew and Luke. Once again, he can only deal in possibilities. No one knows for sure why the lineage of Jesus is different in Matthew and Luke. Blomberg gives two possible explanations, but then has this added advice:
"...there are occasions when we may need to hold judgement in abeyance and simply say that since we've made sense out of the vast majority of the texts and determined them to be trustworthy, we can give them the benefit of the doubt when we're not sure on some of the other details."
Why does Lee Strobel include advice like this given his challenge? To me this sounds like I'm being asked to set aside my commonsense and logic. It seems to say "if something doesn't fit the picture, don't worry about it, because most of it does." Finding possible ways to have multiple accounts be consistent with one another does not prove the validity of the stories and beliefs that they contain. I can see how such advice can calm doubts in the believer when examining inconsistencies between in-errant texts, but it does not provide much help to me, the skeptic.
