The Bible disproved by staffs…? I appreciate some of Bart Ehrman’s scholarship, which is often useful in the defense of the Christian faith (of course, this is not his intention). But I do find him wearying and insincere, as he seems inadequately interested in possible solutions to the “contradictions” or “conundrums” he perpetually parades before the eyes and ears of his audience.

Let’s take one example. In his recent conversation with Ross Douthat (for which, I must sadly note, Douthat was under-prepared), he mentions the supposed contradiction between Mk. 6:8-9 and Mt. 10:9-10, as to whether Jesus commanded or forbade the carrying of a staff (ῥάβδον).

This superficial discrepancy was noted as early as St. Jerome, and was discussed at length by St. Thomas in his Commentary on Matthew. As such, it has produced more than half a dozen widely-circulated possible solutions, which either attempt to verbally or conceptually harmonize the passages, as described in, e.g., Fr. Barnabas Ahern’s well known survey “Staff or No Staff” in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3 (July, 1943), pp. 332-337. The proposed harmonizations range from the unpersuasive to the plausible, in my estimate, but each must be evaluated with care, for they all come from the pens of erudite and thoughtful commentators.

There are possible explanations not covered by Fr. Ahern, I should add. For example, there is much evidence that Palestinian shepherds carried, or carry, two staffs: one, a striking club, the other, a walking stick. See, e.g., “The Shepherd’s Two Rods in Modern Palestine and in Some Passages of the Old Testament” by E. Power, Biblica, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1928), pp. 434-442. We must at least seriously consider that this custom — of carrying a club and a stick — extended beyond shepherds. In which case, Mark, perhaps, records a dominical command to take a walking stick, whereas Matthew records a dominical prohibition on taking a club.

Moreover, the need for rational harmonization seems necessary within Ehrman’s own understanding of the relationship between Matthew and Mark. He would have us believe that Matthew used Mark as a source (he says this to Douthat). If so, why this seemingly arbitrary change? Either it is a scrivener’s error (which might be accepted even in many constructions of inerrancy) or it is a deliberate modification. If the latter, why? Might it be because Matthew, writing to other Jews, recognized the potential for misunderstanding, i.e., that the Lord was commanding them to take a weapon? We must at least entertain this possibility. (See, though, Luke, who like Matthew expresses the prohibition (Lk. 9:2), and compare to Lk. 22:36 and the scene that follows, for other possible insights…)

All of which is to say, the glib, tendentious, and frankly somewhat puffed-up attitude with which Ehrman handles such Biblical difficulties — indeed, handles the Bible as a whole — makes his sweeping and self-assured declarations rather tedious and quite frustrating to endure.