I think much of the struggles of understanding the Gospels presentation of Jesus has more to do with not understanding the nature of ancient history than what is actually recorded.

I always thought there are two basic principles for understanding ancient history.

1) ancient historical texts must be studied in their original historical contexts to be properly understood; and 2) modern post-Enlightenment historiography is at odds with the historiography of most ancients, particularly when it comes to the issue of God’s involvement in human history.

I am not much of a theologian, but I am very familiar with ancient communication theories, and their corollary, genre.  I think in order to understand the Gospels or Acts we need to understand the features and characteristics of such ancient literature—in short their respective genres. The Gospels are written like ancient biographies, not modern ones, or in the case of Luke-Acts like an ancient work of Hellenistic (and Septuagintal) historiography. Unless we know the conventions and limitations that apply to such literature, I think we are in no position at all to evaluate whether there are inconsistencies. Error can only be assessed on the basis of what an author is attempting to do and what literary conventions he is following.

For example, in John's Gospel ( this example is used by Erhman, in his newest book, which by the way laid the seed for this post.) the cleansing of the temple comes early in the Gospel account, whereas in the Synoptics it is found in the Passion narrative.Some modern conservative Christians have attempted to reconcile these differences by suggesting Jesus did the deed twice--- once at the beginning and once at the end of the ministry. The problem is, that this conclusion is just as anachronistic (and genre ignoring) as the conclusion that the Gospels contradict each other on this point.  The same with the order of the temptations of Jesus in Matthew and Luke

If you actually bother to read ancient biographies (Tacitus’s Life of Agricola, or Plutarch’s famous parallel lives) you will discover that the ancients were not pedants when it comes to the issue of strict chronology as we are today.When we claim contradictions, or try to explain them, like the resurrection accounts, we are simply imposing our world view on them.

The ancient biographical or historiographical work operated with the freedom to arrange there material in several different ways, including topically, geographically, chronologically, to mention but three. Yes they had a secondary interest in chronology in broad strokes, but only a secondary interest in that.

And that is my main axe to grid with may posters here, both left and right.  That much of the argumentation is meaningless because we impose our expectations on the text.