Another alleged Bible contradiction is the conflicting chronology of John's Gospel with the other Synoptic Gospels concerning Jesus' cleansing the Temple.
The writers of the first three Gospels report that Jesus cleared the temple of the money-changers in the week leading up to his death (Matthew 21:12-13; Mark 11:15-17; Luke 19:45-46). The fourth Gospel (John), places this incident in chapter 2 -- very early in Jesus' active ministry.
The first thing that must be noted is that all four Gospels are in agreement that Jesus cleansed the temple of money-changers. The chronology may differ, but the incident itself is unanimously affirmed by the Gospels. In almost any other case, historians would accept an incident as factual if there were four ancient manuscripts attesting to its having happened. Even though there seems to be a discriminatory bias against the Bible in that many secular historians hold it to a much higher standard of proof, all reasonable people should conclude that, based on the documenary evidence, a man named Jesus of Nazareth really did live in history and that he did in fact cleanse the Jerusalem Temple of money-changers.
Okay, so, it happened. Why the conflict in chronology? There are three possibilities:
- Either the Synoptic Gospels or the Gospel of John are in error
- There are two different incidents - i.e., Jesus cleared the temple twice
- John's Gospel is not chronologically accurate, and was not intended to be
Before I give you my opinion, what do YOU think?
