by Peter Kozushko
In a previous essay, I established that while discrepancies in the Gospels are real and merit attention, they do not pose an insurmountable challenge to the reliability or inspiration of Scripture. Scholars, both ancient and modern, have recognized and addressed these issues without abandoning their confidence in the Bible as a truthful and trustworthy guide. When understood within their cultural and literary contexts, discrepancies and other textual challenges do not negate Scripture's truth claims. There are plausible cultural and literary explanations for these differences. In this essay, I will highlight two: oral tradition and compositional devices.
I. Oral Tradition
Scholars from various religious perspectives agree that the words and deeds of Jesus were transmitted orally before the Gospels were written. In the first-century Mediterranean world, where only 5-10 percent of the population could read or write, oral communication was the most trusted means of learning, preserving, and disseminating important information. Although modern individuals may liken oral tradition to the “telephone game,” where details distort with each retelling, recent studies show that oral cultures remember with remarkable accuracy. Evangelical scholars generally recognize three robust models of oral tradition behind the Gospels: two proposed by Kenneth Bailey, called formal controlled oral tradition and informal controlled oral tradition, and a third model by Richard Bauckham and Paul Barnett, which they term a particular kind of formal controlled oral tradition.
Formal Controlled Oral Tradition
The formal controlled model, first introduced by Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson, compares early Christian oral tradition to rabbinic teaching, where students memorized large portions of material using mnemonic techniques. In this model, Jesus is portrayed as a rabbinic teacher, instructing his disciples to memorize his teachings and deeds. It is formal in the sense that both the teacher and the students are clearly identified, and the material being passed down is fixed. It is controlled because the tradition is memorized, and thus preserved intact.
This model’s strength lies in its recognition of Jesus’ structured teachings and the New Testament’s language of “receiving” and “handing on” tradition. However, the model has notable weaknesses. First, Rabbinic schools developed after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, making it implausible to assume these methods were in place during Jesus’ ministry. Second, the variations within the Gospels are too diverse to support a tightly controlled memorization process. Finally, the rapid expansion of the early church would have made it difficult for a small group of Apostles to control the tradition from Jerusalem once the number of churches grew beyond their reach.
Informal Controlled Oral Tradition
The informal controlled model, as advocated by Kenneth Bailey, offers a more flexible framework. Based on oral practices observed in Middle Eastern communities, Bailey notes that the transmission of stories often occurs in communal settings where there is no set teacher or student. Instead, the older, more gifted, or socially prominent members of the community tend to lead the storytelling. While informal, the transmission is still controlled. The community exercises control in three ways: only members who have grown up in the community are allowed to recite the stories, the stories are always told publicly, and levels of flexibility are maintained based on the story’s importance. Some stories permit no flexibility, others allow for minor variations, and some are entirely flexible, depending on relevance to the community.
James Dunn and N.T. Wright have adopted Bailey’s model as the best explanation for the balance between fixity and flexibility within the Gospel accounts. Bailey’s model accounts for minor variations in detail while preserving the core narrative of the tradition. However, critics argue that this model fails to consider the critical role of eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word, as mentioned by Luke (Luke 1:2). Without Apostolic oversight, communities could potentially modify or add to the Jesus tradition over time.
A Particular Kind of Formal Controlled Oral Tradition
The model proposed by Richard Bauckham and Paul Barnett refines Bailey’s by emphasizing the role of eyewitnesses and community teachers in transmitting the Jesus tradition. According to these scholars, eyewitnesses and community teachers, rather than merely the hearing community, guaranteed the accuracy of the tradition. They further assert that memorization was essential, though not in the rigid manner of later rabbinic schools, and that written texts were also used to some degree to preserve the Jesus tradition.
This model aligns with what we would expect in a first-century Palestinian synagogue culture. Although the formal rabbinic institution had not yet fully developed, early Christianity exhibited many rabbinic characteristics. Jesus acted as a teacher, and his disciples were learners, receiving his teachings in structured, memorable forms. Paul’s writings, too, use rabbinic language to describe the transmission of traditions from teacher to disciple, as seen in 1 Corinthians and other epistles. This mirrors the rabbinic tradition of handing down religious knowledge authoritatively.
Bauckham and Barnett argue that both Jewish and Hellenistic cultures relied heavily on memorization for education, with varying degrees of precision depending on the material. Jesus’ teachings, often composed in parallelism and poetic form, were designed for easy memorization. Bauckham suggests that short, pithy sayings were likely memorized verbatim, while longer narratives allowed for more flexibility. Barnett speculates that texts—such as narratives of Jesus’ final days—might have been written as early as the 40s CE for use in instruction and worship. Early examples of textual use, such as Paul’s letters and the Jerusalem council decree, support this theory. Though Bauckham envisions a more limited role for written texts, both scholars agree that textuality reinforced oral tradition, especially in churches where oral and written transmission coexisted.
This model, however, faces the same critique brought against the formal controlled model: it likely wasn’t employed uniformly throughout the early Church. While the tradition may have begun in Judea under Apostolic oversight, it is unlikely to have prevailed in more remote regions, where churches received the Jesus tradition second or third hand. Nevertheless, this wouldn’t have been the case in the communities where the Gospels were written. As will be discussed in the next essay, there is strong historical and literary evidence that eyewitnesses and authorized teachers were present in the communities where the Gospels were composed. Their presence makes it more plausible that the particular kind of fixed and flexible oral tradition described by Bauckham and Barnett governed the Gospel transmission in these communities, rather than Bailey’s informal controlled model.
II. Compositional Devices
A robust oral tradition characteristic of fixity and flexibility has been the prevailing explanation among evangelical scholars for the similarities and differences in the Gospels. The differences are often seen as modifications to minor details while preserving the core traditions. However, some evangelical and orthodox scholars are now acknowledging that the differences may also be explained by the Gospel authors’ intentional use of compositional devices, common in Greco-Roman historiography. The Gospel authors didn’t merely transcribe the oral traditions; they may have altered them in ways acceptable within the Greco-Roman historiographical framework.
The best evangelical commentators recognize the use of compositional devices. Spotlighting, for example, is seen as a plausible explanation for why John’s Gospel presents Mary Magdalene as the only woman who visited the tomb, whereas Matthew includes other women. John’s intent was to highlight Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus, rather than providing a comprehensive account. Simplification is also common, as seen when Luke and Matthew omit or alter material found in Mark to focus on the central message.
Michael Licona, who has extensively researched Greco-Roman compositional devices, agrees with such explanations and has identified other examples. In the account of Jesus raising Jairus’ daughter, he suggests that compression—which presents an event as occurring over a shorter period than it actually did—may explain the differences between Matthew and Mark. Licona contends that Matthew condensed the story, omitting certain details to move the narrative forward.
Licona also believes that the differences in Jesus’ baptism could be explained by the use of transferal, where an author attributes the actions or words of one person to another. He proposes that Matthew shifted the recipient of God’s declaration from Jesus to the crowd, as seen in the phrase, “This is my beloved Son,” rather than the personal, “You are my beloved Son.” This explanation seems more plausible than Augustine’s suggestion that God spoke twice—once to Jesus and then to the crowd.
Other compositional devices employed by the Gospel writers include conflation (combining multiple events into a single account), displacement (reordering events for thematic reasons), and several others, such as substituting words, altering syntax, or changing the inflection of a term. Licona has observed these techniques in the works of Plutarch, one of the most important Greco-Roman biographers. Plutarch often reported the same event multiple times across different biographies, with significant variations. In most cases, these differences are explained by the use of compositional devices. If these techniques were used by Plutarch, it is reasonable to expect that the Gospel writers employed them as well.
One key distinction, however, is that the Gospel authors were far more conservative in their use of these devices than Plutarch. They did not paraphrase as freely. The same comparison has been made with Josephus. While skeptics may focus on the divergencies between the Gospels, what’s truly remarkable is the extent of verbal similarity. The question we should ask is, why were the Gospel writers content to copy so much when this wasn’t conventional in their literary culture?
Conclusion
In conclusion, the discrepancies in the Gospels can be explained by either the fixed and flexible nature of the oral tradition or by the deliberate use of compositional devices common to ancient historians. The fixed and flexible controlled oral tradition model preserves the core truth of Jesus' teachings while allowing for minor variations. Simultaneously, compositional devices demonstrate how the Gospel writers crafted their narratives to convey theological and rhetorical truths. Both explanations account for the Gospel discrepancies in light of the cultural and literary conventions of their time.
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Key Sources:
Bailey, Kenneth E. “Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels.” Themelios 20, no. 2 (January 1995): 4–11.
Barnett, Paul. Finding the Historical Christ. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, n.d.
Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006.
Dunn, James D.G. Jesus Remembered. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003.
Gerhardsson, Birger. Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity. Translated by Eric J. Sharpe. Uppsala: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1961.
Licona, Micael R. Jesus Contradicted. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, n.d.
———. Why Are There Differences in the Gospels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Riesenfeld, Harald. The Gospel Tradition and Its Beginnings: A Study in the Limits of “Formgeschichted.” London: A. R. Mowbray, 1957.
Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God. Augsburg: Fortress Press, 1996.
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Peter Kozushko (DMIN Acadia University) is Associate Pastor of Countryside Community Church, Sherwood OR
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Related Resources
Part I: So Bart Ehrman is Right about Discrepancies in the Gospels? by Peter Kozushko
Mind the gap: the role of eyewitness testimony, orality, and memory in the development of the Gospel tradition - Kozushko's doctoral dissertation: