Multiple perspectives which GENERALLY corroborate each other’s testimony while getting some details OFF – are more reliable than four completely identical stories.

Still, I have to go with received history on this and go with Eastern Church accounts. They were a prickly-for-details bunch in the first few centuries. Greeks you know. Same people that were prickly about philosophy and government and logic and mathematics and all that good stuff a few centuries before that.

The 0-150 AD stuff is kinda strange of course. I think the decision to keep multiple Gospel accts was a deliberate move to _retain_ the inconsistency (some attempts even then were made for a “let’s put them into one” Gospel).

The reason for the inconsistencies?

Same reason we do it in Courts today. Multiple perspectives which GENERALLY corroborate each other’s testimony while getting some details OFF – are more reliable than four completely identical stories.

Also, they were literally “closer in time” than we are. Hard to over-state this point:

We’re 2000 years removed from the accounts

Early Church was 200-300 years removed from the accounts -and really, they’re NOT removed from the accounts because they were in some sort of continuity to them.

That’s not to say that we haven’t gained _some_ wisdom in the intervening 1800 years but to me they hold a little more weight.

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