“I have.”
“Then which one says Jesus was born in a manger?”
“Luke.”
“And which one says Jesus was visited by three wise men?”
“Matthew.”
“So why does Luke not mention the wise men, and Matthew not mention the manger?”
Ugo shrugged.
“Because they’re both trying to explain how Jesus could’ve been born in Bethlehem even though he grew up in Nazareth. And they come up with completely different explanations. Matthew tells us about an evil king named Herod who wants to kill baby Jesus, but when the wise men won’t tell him where Jesus is, Herod kills all the babies in that whole region. So Mary and Joseph flee, and that’s how they end up in Nazareth. Luke, on the other hand, says Jesus’ family started in Nazareth. But the Roman emperor declared a huge census, and for some reason everyone had to go back to their ancestral hometown to be counted. Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem, because that’s where Joseph’s family came from, and that’s why Jesus was born in a manger: because there was no room at the inn. The stories are completely different. And since there’s no evidence Herod really killed those babies or Caesar Augustus really declared that census, it’s likely that neither story actually happened.”
Popa stared at me with a crawling sadness in his eyes. He said, as if Ugo weren’t even in the room, “Is this really what you believe, Father? That the gospels don’t agree? That they lie to us?”
“The gospels don’t agree. And that doesn’t mean they’re lying.” I picked up the stack of books again. “Ugo, I’ll come back later sometime when—”
But all three of us knew, even before Ugo interrupted me, that it was done. Most Orthodox hew to the traditional way of reading the gospels: there are few new answers, mainly just faith in the old ones. Catholics used to share that belief, until we recognized the power of biblical science.
“Father Alex, wait,” Ugo said. “Stay a moment. Please.”
He didn’t need to say another word. Popa and I knew which path he had chosen.
* * *
IT WAS AS IF Ugo’s accusations in the mess hall had never been spoken. Our lessons were broad at first. Like most laymen, he had only a basic understanding of how the gospels should be read, and not enough confidence to apply it. So we began at the beginning.
But for me, unlike for Father Popa, that meant the hard evidence. The oldest unchanged facts. The books.
Before the Diatessaron, and before the Alogi, there were our four gospels, named after the men who were believed to be their authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew and John were disciples, Jesus’ closest followers. Tradition says Mark took dictation from the chief disciple, Peter. And Luke tells us that he gathered his information from people who saw Jesus firsthand. This means our gospels, if they were really written by these four men, give us a portrait of Jesus’ life based almost entirely on eyewitness testimony.
But it isn’t so simple. Three of the four gospels are so similar that they seem less like independent accounts than like replicas of each other. Mark, Matthew, and Luke not only record Jesus’ words almost identically, they translate those words almost identically from Jesus’ Aramaic into gospel Greek. Their thumbnail sketches of many minor characters are verbatim duplicates, and at times all three gospels stop midstream, at the same point in the same sentence, to offer the same stage directions and asides:
MATTHEW 9:6: