Still, I have to go with received history on this and go with
Eastern Church accounts. They were a prickly-for-details bunch
in the first few centuries. Greeks you know. Same people that
were prickly about philosophy and government and logic and
mathematics and all that good stuff a few centuries before that.
The 0-150 AD stuff is kinda strange of course. I think the
decision to keep multiple Gospel accts was a deliberate move to
_retain_ the inconsistency (some attempts even then were made
for a "let's put them into one" Gospel).
The reason for the inconsistencies?
Same reason we do it in Courts today. Multiple perspectives
which GENERALLY corroborate each other's testimony while getting
some details OFF - are more reliable than four completely
identical stories. Also, they were literally "closer in time"
than we are. Hard to over-state this point:
We're 2000 years removed from the accounts
Early Church was 200-300 years removed from the accounts -and
really, they're NOT removed from the accounts because they were
in some sort of continuity to them.
That's not to say that we haven't gained _some_ wisdom in the
intervening 1800 years but to me they hold a little more weight.
