A Harmony of the Gospels

An excerpt from the beginning of the PREFACE: THE uses of a "Harmony of the Gospels" are twofold: first to enable each reader to draw up for himself a connected narrative of our Lord's History containing the fullest possible account that can be given: this I have endeavoured to do in my "Gospel History," which I have published for the use of others. I have been surprised by the number of correspondents, both men and women, who have told me that they had attempted this, but had not time or patience enough to complete it, and have thanked me for doing it for them. The second use is to enable the reader, by seeing all the different accounts of each event before his eyes at the same moment, to judge how very few and unimportant the actual variations are, and how utterly mistaken are those persons who would represent the holy witnesses as "contradicting each other" in any essential matters. No two persons ever give precisely the same account of the same event; if they did their testimony would at once be open to the suspicion of having been made up and agreed upon beforehand; and the honest, independent witness of two or more would be reduced to the suspected testimony of one. In this Harmony, which follows the order of S. Luke and the same arrangement of sections as my "Gospel History," I have endeavoured to set forth the parallel passages in a clearer and therefore more useful form than has generally been the case in similar publications; avoiding, at the cost of increased bulk, that snake-like wriggling about of the text which mars the beauty of the page and fatigues the eye. Wherever it has been necessary on account of their length to present the parallels of any section on more than two pages, I have tried to divide them at the same points of the narrative, adding "T. O." at the foot of the unfinished extracts, the completion of which will be found in the same order on the next page or pages, so that the same portions of the histories are always before the eye simultaneously. The necessity of arranging the parallels so that the eye could take in both or all at the same moment, entailed in several places some vacant spaces, and these I have for the most part filled with what I have called Quasi-parallels, or passages from other parts of Scripture illustrative of the text, which a student might find it very convenient to have before his eye together; such as, all of our Lord's words about the Sabbath, on page 29; all the Scriptural accounts of the raising of the dead, p. 162; and others, of which a list is given in the Table of Contents, after the list of the Sections, on page xx. Such passages are printed in Italics, to avoid any possibility of mistake. The Italics of the Revised Version are printed in the same Roman type with the rest of the text. For my own part, I do not see any need of retaining these Italics in our Bibles at all: if the words so printed are not necessary to the translation they ought not to have been introduced: if they are necessary, they form part of the translation. Certainly they are very misleading to many simple people, who imagine that they ought to be read with special emphasis. In most sections, the fullest account is printed first. The reader cannot fail to notice how very often, from Section 31 onwards, this is the account of S. Mark. One can scarcely study these extracts without feeling that we have the words of an eye-witness very observant of little details, who was almost certainly S. Peter. Nothing can be more mistaken than the common notion that S. Mark's Gospel is merely an epitome of S. Matthew's; Section 73 is a sufficient refutation of that idea. I cannot see any indications which would lead me to think that any one of the first three Evangelists had seen the work of another, except that perhaps S. Matthew's "Blessed are the poor in spirit," "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness" ....