Harmonizing historical accounts

1. Many people are suspicious of Gospel harmonization. They think that's special pleading. In our own time, Bart Ehrman has done a lot to foster and fuel that suspicion. 

Speaking for myself, I've never been strongly motivated to harmonized the Gospels, in part because I'm content to take each one as is, and in part because I think there are inherent limitations on our ability to reconstruct the original sequence from selective sources. And so I have a degree of skepticism about the project. Mind you, that's not an all-or-nothing proposition. But I realize there's some value in the exercise, as far as that can be taken, within reason, to defend the inerrancy and historicity of the Gospels. 

2. Let's draw some comparisons. There are folks for whom there's something inherently suspect about trying to combine the four Gospels. But suppose, as I mental exercise, we consider this in reverse. 

Some biographies are overviews of a person's life, but others are quite detailed. Let's pick somebody at random: say, Frank Sinatra. In principle, you could take a major biography of Sinatra, and split it into two. Because Sinatra did so many concerts at so many different times and places, made movies, had multiple affairs, and so on, that material could be subdivided and redistributed into two different documents, yet they'd still give a fairly representative, chronological overview of his life. 

And a reader couldn't necessarily tell from reading just one of these accounts, that anything was missing. One more concert, one less concert. One more affair, one less affair. It somewhat arbitrary how much is included. The general flow of his life could be preserved even if you split the original biography into two smaller biographies. Moreover, a reader might well be unable to tell that these both come from the same source. 

3. Apropos (2), imagine trying to recombine the two partial biographies. I doubt anyone could put them back together in a way that matched the exact sequence of the original biography. And yet they did fall into place in the original. The biographer arranged the material so that one episode happens before another while another episode happens after another. That continues from start to finish. 

In the original, all these episodes did fit together in a particular editorial sequence. So there's nothing artificial or suspect in  principle about harmonization. If you begin with two or more separate documents, it may create the impression that they don't look like they go together, but as my example illustrates, that impression would be the same even if the two biographies derive from a single unified source. So the impression would be mistaken. 

4. Let's take a different comparison. To my knowledge, there are three firsthand sources for the life of John Ruskin: his correspondence, his diaries, and his autobiography (Praeterita). 

You could get a pretty thorough and chronological overview of his life by reading any one of these. But, of course, they're quite different from each other. The letters and diaries were written at the time of the incidents they record, and they were written over the course of a lifetime. Moreover, they are fairly random. By contrast, his autobiography is highly selective, written at toward the end of his life, within the span of a few months. 

Biographers try to weave all this material (plus much additional material) into a coherent narrative. But suppose we didn't know that these three sources come from the same hand? Imagine the fun redaction critics would have explaining the differences. 

5. A final comparison: many critics assume that if something important happened to an individual, it would be mentioned in an accurate biography or autobiography. Yet sometimes things are omitted because they are important, but not something the individual wishes to be remembered for.

For instance, Ruskin was an influential sponsor of the Pre-Raphaelites. Yet you'd never know that from reading his autobiography. There's just a passing reference to Dante Rossetti. 

The reason is that Ruskin was too inhibited to consummate his marriage, so his wife left him for Millais, a leading member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The whole affair was profoundly humiliating for Ruskin, so his solution was to severely minimize any reference to anyone and anything connected to the Pre-Raphaelites.  That's extremely arbitrary, but Ruskin would rather disassociate himself from the Pre-Raphaelites in toto than to discuss his friendships with, and artistic opinions of, the Pre-Raphaelites. He just felt too wounded and vulnerable to revisit that, even though most of it had nothing to do with his acutely embarrassing marital woes.

6. My point is that we need to have realistic expectations about the prospects for Gospel harmonization. On the one hand, there's nothing underhanded about the practice. On the other hand, we should recognize our limitations. Inability to reconstruct the original sequence carries no presumption that our separate accounts are materially discrepant.