[squirt]

here's a test that skeptics often charge the gospels with failing, after all, aren't they hopelessly contradictory with each other? aren't there irreconcilable discrepancies among the various gospel accounts? and if there are, how can anyone trust what they say? once you allow for the elements talked about earlier - of paraphrase, of abridgment, of explanatory additions, of selection, of omission - the gospels are extremely consistent with each other by ancient standards, which are the only standards by which it is fair to judge them, ironically, if the gospels had been identical to each other, word for word, this would have raised charges that the authors had conspired among themselves to coordinate their stories in advance, and that would have cast doubt on them, if the gospels were too consistent, that in itself would invalidate them as independent witnesses, people would then say we really only have one testimony that everybody else is just parroting, flashing to the words of Simon Greenleaf of Harvard Law School, one of history's most important legal figures and author of an influential treatise on evidence, after studying the consistency among the four gospel writers, he offered this evaluation, "There is enough of a dispcrepancy to show that there could have been no previous concert among them; and at the same time such substantial agreement as to show that they all were independent narrators of the same great transaction." from the perspective of a classical historian, German scholar Hans Stier has concurred that agreement over basic data and divergence of details suggest credibility, because fabricated accounts tend to be fully consistent and harmonized, "Every historian," he wrote, "is especially skeptical at that moment when an extraoridinary happening is only reported in accounts which are completely free of contradictions."