Read Along: Compare, Contrast (Luke 16–John 13)

We’re Reading the Gospels in September. Here’s the Place to Share What We’re Discovering

Sep 29, 2025

Jesus’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. Anthony van Dyck.

One of the easiest things to notice when reading the gospels back to back—as we’ve been doing in our September gospel project—is how much they share in common. At the same time, it’s just as easy to see how much they don’t. Each gospel has its own distinguishing features, highlighting the evangelists’ unique perspectives.

This naturally invites a compare-and-contrast way of reading. Take, for example, the question of Jesus’s visits to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem or Bust

In Matthew, he seems to go only once—at the end of his life. Same for Mark. But Luke tells us that Jesus’s family traveled to Jerusalem every year for Passover (2.41) and records three of Jesus’s visits: as an infant, as a boy of twelve, and as an adult during the triumphal entry that Christians commemorate on Palm Sunday; two of those trips were for Passover.

John, however, reports several additional visits, not just for Passover but for other festivals as well:

Passover (chapter 2)
An unspecified feast (chapter 5)
Feast of Booths/Tabernacles (chapter 7)
Feast of Dedication/Hanukkah (chapter 10)
Passover (chapter 12)

The implications are considerable. All four gospels, for instance, depict Jesus cleansing the Temple—tossing tables and chasing out the moneychangers. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this takes place at the end of his life, sparking a direct confrontation with the Temple bureaucrats and setting the stage for his arrest and crucifixion.

Curiously, however, John places the cleansing during the first of Jesus’s Passover visits in his gospel (chapter 2). Did such a fiery scene really happen twice? John gives no hint of it happening later. Yet it’s just as hard to imagine it happening once, early on, only to simmer for years despite Jesus’s repeated returns to Jerusalem; wouldn’t the Temple authorities have done something about him then? Or is John deliberately relocating the event to make a distinct point, one unique to his telling?

This is only one of dozens of examples where the gospels diverge, often with significant interpretive consequences. What does it mean, for another example, that Matthew and Luke both include genealogies of Jesus but place them in different locations of their account and present them in different ways?

Such questions preoccupied ancient readers of the gospels as much as they do us. Among them, Eusebius of Caesarea emerges for his distinctive approach to these and related conundrums.

Eusebius Tosses Tables of His Own

As bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius inherited one of the greatest Christian libraries of the fourth century, stocked by his book-crazed predecessors Origen and Pamphilus. One of the books in this library was Origen’s own Hexpla, a copy of the Hebrew scriptures in six parallel columns splayed across the open pages of a codex: Hebrew, Hebrew transliterated into Greek characters, and four separate Greek translations, each with their own style.

The result? Readers could read down through the passage and across to see the different treatment of the same bits: scripture as spreadsheet.

Eusebius of Caesarea from the Rabbula Gospels. Source.

While tables had been used to display astronomical data and other such information, Origen’s Hexpla was one of the very first books—possibly the very first book—to utilize tables for literary analysis. But the best innovations usually spawn new ones, and Eusebius realized that this same kind of tabular formatting could help him make better sense of the similarities and dissimilarities of the gospels.

Long before the medieval divisions of the scriptures into chapters and verses, Eusebius divvied up the gospels, arriving at 1,162 sections in all: 355 from Matthew, 232 from Mark, 343 from Luke, and 232 from John. He then numbered the individual bits and pieces and plotted them in ten separate tables to track convergences and divergences across all four gospels.

Eusebian canon tables from the Rabbula Gospels, featuring portraits of the four evangelists, from left to right: John, Matthew, Luke, and Mark. Source.

The first of these tables, Eusebius explained,

contains numbers in which the four, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, have said similar things. The second, in which the three, Matthew, Mark, Luke [have said similar things]. The third, in which the three, Matthew, Luke, John [have said similar things]. The fourth, in which the three, Matthew, Mark, John [have said similar things). The fifth, in which the two, Matthew, Luke [have said similar things]. The sixth, in which the two, Matthew, Mark [have said similar things]. The seventh, in which the two, Matthew, John [have said similar things]. The eighth, in which the two, Luke, Mark [have said similar things]. The ninth, in which the two, Luke, John (have said similar things]. The tenth, in which each of them wrote uniquely concerning certain things.

Readers could then, while marinating in a particular passage, bounce to the relevant table and see how the other evangelists treated the same story—or if they did at all. More importantly, they could compare, contrast, and reflect on what similarities or dissimilarities might mean. “One can think with a table,” says Jeremiah Coogan in Eusebius the Evangelist.

Given how familiar we are with tabular reference material today, this might fail to impress. Pity. The truth is no one had really seen anything like these Eusebian canon tables before. “The tabular structure of the Eusebian apparatus affords systematic comparison in unprecedented ways,” says Coogan (my emphasis). The cross-referenced tables were, as Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams put it in Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, “the world’s first hot links.” Eusebius’s tables proved revolutionary and helped set the trajectory of gospel study for at least a millennium.

Jeremiah Coogan, *Eusebius the Evangelist* (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, *Christianity and the Transformation of the Book* (Belknap, 2006).

And what about the differences themselves? Eusebius regarded them as evidence of the evangelists’ fidelity. “They were,” he said, “compelled by love of truth to speak in their own way.”

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