Critics of the Bible often refer to the accounts of Mark 6:8, Luke 9:3, and Matthew 10:10 as evidence the Bible, or at least the New Testament, is not "inspired" or preserved by God. While the conflict between these accounts presents some challenges to those who believe in the absolute inerrancy of the New Testament, as well as to those who rely solely on religious authority to resolve the conflict over what Jesus told his disciples, for those who follow solus veritas or "truth alone" the conflict is easy to resolve.
There are no credible disputes in terms of the Greek texts which are used for the majority of New Testament translations. Note the underlined word in the readings below, which in all three texts means “not.” It is used idiomatically in Mark together with “if” to mean “except.” This is also likely what led to the word for "only" (monon) being added to later Greek copies of Mark, that is, if the original was in agreement with Luke and Matthew, or if a change occurred during the translation of a Hebrew or Aramaic original text of Mark.
Here are the key parts of each text. I have translated more literally so you can see the negative element
common to all three texts:
Mark 6:8 - εἰ μὴ ῥάβδον μόνον (“if not a staff only”).
Luke 9:3 - μήτε ῥάβδον (“no staff”); many manuscripts read μηδὲ.
Matthew
10:10 - μηδὲ ῥάβδον (“nor a staff”).
Even a person unfamiliar with Greek can likely see that the words μὴ, μήτε, and μηδὲ, in addition to being negatives, all look very similar. Nevertheless, this is a legitimate conflict between the accepted texts of Mark, Luke, and Matthew in the same account. Based on the above comparison of the texts, it is easy to see how the contradiction could have come about through a scribal error during the early transmission of an original Greek text of Mark. Or the error could have occurred during translation if Mark was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic. It is also possible one (Mark) or two (Luke and Matthew) of the three witnesses simply got the account wrong. Even if this is the case, it does not affect the historicity of the rest of Mark.
Identifying error and accepting truth alone is fundamental to solus veritas and presents no issues for Christians who use it to reject what can be shown to be likely error, versus what can be shown to be likely correct. As we have two witnesses (Luke and Matthew) in agreement and with text authority equal to Mark, as well as the reasonable explanations from translation to transmission error based on similar terms, we can resolve the conflict as follows: Leave the contradiction in our copies of the New Testament with a note in each account explaining what likely occurred, as well as note the reliability of two of the three witnesses to this account which, consistent with Jesus' own teaching about determining whose witness to accept, provide us with a reliable understanding of the account.—Matthew 18:16.
To watch a video which goes into more detail about this issue, see "Using Solus Veritas to Resolve the Conflict in Mark 6:8 with Luke 9:3 and Matthew 10:10" (08/28/24).
To learn more about using solus veritas as a means of determining what to believe and to teach, see the following three videos:
