In a prior blog post, “The two-part story of the withered fig tree,” I argued that the Matthean and the Markan accounts can be harmonized by realizing that Mark is employing a flash-forward. According to Matthew’s account, it is after the temple cleansing that (1) Jesus curses the fig tree,…
How do the Gospels compare with other contemporary biographies, relative to size? Plutarch was the most prolific biographer of the era, writing in Greek around the end of the first century. The following chart compares the word count of the four Gospels with fifty biographies written by Plutarch. Although Matthew’s…