The Importance of Resolving Conflicts in the Gospels

One of the things that you find in all of our earliest sources about Jesus is that he's preaching about the coming kingdom of God. As time goes on, you get less and less of that perspective so that the gospel of John doesn't have that perspective. The gospel of Thomas preaches against that perspective. So what do Christians do about that? Well, they reinterpret it. He didn't really mean that. He meant something else. This is true not just of Jesus, it's true of every figure from the past. How do you go about establishing that somebody actually said and did what they recorded saying and doing? If you have sources that are written decades later by people who didn