That Pesky Centurion

In which I discuss the centurion incident recorded in Matthew 8 and Luke 7 and the discrepancy between them. Was the centurion there or not? I distinguish between "transferral" in a non-fact-changing sense (as if you said, "John is building a house" when John is hiring contractors) and in a fact-changing sense (as if you described John as personally building the house when you knew that he didn't do so). I discuss a couple of attempts to harmonize these two accounts using a non-fact-changing, unintentionally ambiguous reference to the centurion's conversation with Jesus and ultimately conclude that that is not plausible. It appears that Matthew is portraying the centurion as personally present. But why should we assume that he knew that the centurion wasn't present? Perhaps he misunderstood the story as it was told to him by someone else, if he didn't witness it himself. I show how this could plausibly have happened. Such a conclusion is incompatible with traditional inerrancy, but it is far less corrosive to Matthew's reliability than the conclusion that Matthew deliberately tried to make it look like someone was present when he knew that person wasn't there at all. I recommend a harmonization you should use if you want to retain traditional inerrancy, while admitting openly that I don't find it convincing. I also explain how, if you do this, you can avoid leaving yourself or your audience open to the idea of fact-changing on the part of the evangelists. It's important as well to admit that this is a difficult harmonization and being able to recognize the specific difficulties (such as the singular words in the Greek of Matt. 8:13) so that you harmonize with open eyes and don't grasp at a vague reference to "compositional devices of the time" to paper over the problems. We have no evidence that Matthew's readers expected him to portray people as present who weren't present, nor that this was a known "device of the time"! Be sure to like, subscribe, and share! Orig. uploaded to YouTube Aug 1 2021