“… You may lose some form of biblical inerrancy if there are contradictions in the Gospels, but you still have the truth of Christianity that Jesus rose from the dead, and I think that’s the most important point we can make,” Licona said.

Mike Licona, an evangelical apologist whose interpretation of a portion of Scripture led to concerns over biblical inerrancy, joined the faculty of Houston Baptist University last fall and recently addressed what some claim are contradictions in the Gospels.

Houston Baptist University is affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas and has a ministry relationship with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. The SBTC does not place trustees on the HBU board or allocate Cooperative Program funds to the university.

Licona’s handling of Scripture, as voiced in an interview in November, drew concern from R. Albert Mohler Jr. of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Jim Richards of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention and support from Robert Sloan, Houston Baptist University’s president, in subsequent comments to Baptist Press.

In an interview with Lenny Esposito of Come Reason Ministries at the Evangelical Theological Society’s annual meeting, Licona, a former apologetics coordinator at the North American Mission Board, said it had not necessarily ever bothered him that some facts reported in the Gospels appeared to be contradictions.

“I believe in biblical inerrancy, but I also realize that biblical inerrancy is not one of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. The resurrection is,” Licona told Esposito. “So if Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is still true even if it turned out that some things in the Bible weren’t. So it didn’t really bother me a whole lot even if some contradictions existed. But it did bother a lot of Christians.”

Licona recalled a student in a class he was teaching at Southern Evangelical Seminary who, with tears forming in her eyes, wanted to know whether there were indeed contradictions. A majority of the class, he said, raised their hands to indicate they were troubled by apparent contradictions. Then he realized it was something he should address.

As he studied the Gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Licona began keeping a document of the differences he noticed. The document grew to 50 pages. He then read ancient biographies written around the time of Jesus because New Testament scholars often regard the Gospels as ancient biographies, he said.

Licona focused on Plutarch’s biographies. The assassination of Julius Caesar, he noted, is told in five different biographies by Plutarch.

“So you have the same biographer telling the same story five different times. By noticing how Plutarch tells the story of Caesar’s assassination differently, we can notice the kinds of biographical liberties that Plutarch took, and he’s writing around the same time that some of the Gospels are being written and in the same language — Greek — to boot,” Licona told Esposito.

“As I started to note some of these liberties that he took, I immediately started recognizing these are the same liberties that I noticed that the evangelists take — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,” Licona said.

“… If this is the case, then these most commonly cited differences in the Gospels … aren’t contradictions after all. They’re just the standard biographical liberties that ancient biographers of that day took.”

“I would point out that when the Titanic sank 100 years ago, the eyewitnesses contradicted one another on some peripheral details. For example, some said the ship broke in half prior to sinking,” Licona said. “Others said, ‘No, it went down intact.’ Well, how do you get that wrong?

“… I don’t know how they got it wrong, but no one concludes therefore that the Titanic didn’t sink. It just meant there was a peripheral detail that they didn’t know what had happened until they discovered [the sunken Titanic] in the 1980s.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on Baptist Press—however, the link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]