Trevelyan

“And if we must take historical blunders in our stride, how will we cope with flat-out contradictions? Did Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb of Jesus see an angel of the Lord [Matthew 28:2] or merely a young man in white [Mark 16:5]? Or was it two men in shining garments [Luke 24:4]? Or two angels [John 20:12]? And how do we deal with the omission of pivotal events? Did Mary see Jesus himself near the tomb, at first mistaking him for a gardener [John 20:14-15]? Surely a sighting of Jesus is critically important evidence of the resurrection, the central mystery of the Christian faith. Yet the encounter at the tomb is mentioned only in the Gospel of John. How could Matthew, Mark and Luke have missed such a crucial point? Historical scholars, and most theologians, recognize that the authors who penned the ancient documents were doing the best they could with the sources available to them, writing in the traditions and expectations of their time, more concerned with presenting a coherent message than with precise historical accuracy. Some biblical scholars, however, even to this day maintain the inerrancy of scripture. They see the Bible as the Word of God, divinely inspired and supernaturally protected from error down the centuries. Unless one reads without comprehension (a distressingly common affliction), a belief in biblical inerrancy demands considerable mental gymnastics. Adherents typically construct a unified account of the gospel stories, not by resolving conflicts, but by adding together all the elements from the different narratives. Thus, Mary Magdalene visited the tomb several times, seeing the different combinations of divine presences on different occasions. For some inscrutable reason, God chose to drop the accounts of those visits into different gospels instead of presenting them logically in a single document.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“The opening verse of John is probably the most quoted in scripture: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Unfortunately, it is also the most blatant mistranslation in the whole of the Christian canon. It sounds from the English (and also from the Latin of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate) as if the reference is to the Word of God, meaning the teachings or message of God. But the Greek in the source documents is logos. In Greek philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus of Ephesus who flourished around 500 BCE, the logos is logic or reason, the universal principle by which nature is governed and all things are interrelated. In the original Greek text of the Gospel of John, Jesus is the logic of the universe – a far more powerful conception than merely the word, or spokesperson, of God. Sadly, we can probably blame the influence of the Latin Vulgate for this linguistic vandalism. Latin has a rather small vocabulary compared with modern English. The Latin noun verbum can mean word, but it can also mean idea, concept, point of view, thesis… Translating the Greek logos as the Latin verbum was probably excusable – Saint Jerome agonized over the translation – but taking it back into English as word was a scholarly sin of the highest order.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics