The four gospels and their very different endings

In a well-known talk, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the dangers of a single story: about the tendency to collapse rich, diverse strands into a flat, one-sided narrative. This “creates stereotypes,” she said, “and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

One reason to be uneasy with a single, dominant narrative is that some things in life feel too big for just one story. How, for instance, does one tell the story of a world-changing event like the resurrection of Jesus? The Bible tacitly acknowledges the enormity of this task by giving us four gospels, which tell the stories of Jesus in multiple registers from various angles. If there are sharp variations between these accounts, they point to the nuances beyond the reach of human language.

Uncomfortable with loose ends, many have tried to harmonize these narratives. Yet there is danger in riding roughshod over discrepancies in a canon comprising diverse books. I’ve had too many conversations over the years with people who lost their faith because they believed there was only one way to interpret and apply scripture. In contrast, the gospel endings offer us a fourfold reminder of the multivocal call of resurrection spirituality. It’s hard to imagine four more different gospel endings. It’s as if the authors got together and decided that one narrative simply would not do, that they needed to present four dissimilar trajectories.