In Biblical studies, "harmony" is a technical term for an attempt to combine all four Gospels into a single narrative. A gospel harmony has two purposes: first, it tries to establish the correct order of the events in Jesus' life (tricky to do, since the same story can appear in different places in each Gospel), and second, it tries to explain ("harmonize") the discrepancies in those stories.

The temptation to do this has existed for nearly as long as the gospels themselves. Their narratives all follow more or less the same plot -- the son of God teaches crowds and performs miracles, but then gets betrayed and killed and then rises again -- but there are lots of niggling little contradictions in the text, and besides, reading the story four times in a row feels so repetitive, doesn't it? Moreover, three of the gospels are so similar, and one so different. The paradoxical combination of unity and diversity in the New Testament has been a source of fascination and frustration for Christians for the entire history of the religion.

The first known attempt to harmonize the gospels was by a man named Tatian, a student of Justin Martyr who lived in the second century. Around the year 150, Tatian wrote a book called the Diatessaron (the title translates roughly as "one through four"). In this book, Tatian reduced the 3,780 verses of the four gospels to 2,769, while claiming to preserve every event in the life of Jesus. The book was very popular, particularly in Syria, but it was eventually banned in the fifth century by the bishop of Edessa who declared that all four gospels were necessary in Bibles. Even after this condemnation of the book, the Diatessaron continued to circulate; a full generation later, Theodoret complained that he was still finding copies everywhere. Today the book does not survive in its entirety, but references to it still turn up in surprising places.

The first use of the word harmonia to describe the gospels appears in the work of one Ammonius of Alexandria in the first quarter of the third century. What Ammonius wrote was not exactly a harmony, though; it was more like what modern scholars would call a synopsis, which is to say that he laid the gospels side-by-side in columns for the purpose of comparison. Eusebius made great use of Ammonius' harmony/synopsis when constructing his Canons in the fourth century; Eusebius' research is still used by Biblical scholars today.

At the beginning of the fifth century, Saint Augustine wrote a book called De Consensu Evangelistarum ("On the Agreement of the Evangelists") which argued that the accounts of Jesus' life in the New Testament do not contradict one another. Yet Augustine disagrees in one important way with today's biblical literalists: the possibility that the gospels do not quote exactly what Jesus said on any particular occasion does not trouble Augustine especially. Augustine believed that the truth was captured in the Bible even if the actual words were not recorded precisely by the evangelists. For example, when comparing the two versions of the Sermon on the Mount, Augustine decides that each author used slightly different terms to record the same fundamental truth (2.19). That said, he does suggest that Jesus might have delivered that particular speech on more than one occasion (once on a mountain and once on a plain), which is how modern Christians tend to explain the differences between the two versions.

With the invention of the printing press, harmonies became even more popular... and some of them, to modern eyes, can appear rather silly. In 1537, Andreas Osiander created the Harmoniae Evangelicae, which went to rather absurd lengths to preserve the integrity of the gospels. Since Osiander believed that the entire New Testament was divinely inspired, he refused to believe in the existence of any contradictions at all -- not even in the sequence of events in Jesus' life. Stein's explanation of Osiander's approach is hilarious and deserves to be quoted in full:

Noting that the order of Jesus' crossing of the Sea of Galilee and his raising of Jairus's daughter from the dead occur in a somewhat different progression in Matthew and Mark, he suggested the following solution: Jesus immediately, upon crossing the Sea of Galilee (Mark 5:21), raised Jairus's daughter from the dead (Mark 5:21-43). After this he performed another healing (Matt. 9:1-8), called Levi (Matthew 9:9-13), and taught (Matt. 9:14-17). In the meantime Jairus's daughter died a second time, and thus Jesus had to return and raise her a second time from the dead, as recorded in Matthew 9:18-26. (Stein, p. 167)

Similarly, Osiander argues that there were four separate healings of blind men at Jericho, two healings of the Gerasene demoniac, that Peter warmed himself at a fire four times, and so on. Clearly this is a man unclear on the concept of textual studies.

Christians still harmonize now, in a way, though they are not always aware that they are doing it since most of them don't actually bother to read the Bible. Every Nativity scene I've ever encountered contains both shepherds and wise men, even though the shepherds only appear in Luke and the wise men only appear in Matthew. It's not impossible that both groups were present at Jesus' birth, of course, and the image certainly makes a pretty creche. But if the reader combines narratives too carelessly, she will lose sight of the uniqueness and the complexity of each gospel.

Further Reading:

Most of my examples in this node were drawn from Robert Stein's book, Studying the Synoptic Gospels: Origin and Interpretation, published by Baker in 2003. The first edition of this book appeared in 1987 under the title The Synoptic Gospels: An Introduction.