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Not one of them suggests any impossibility of knowing what Jesus said!
MATTHEW 26: 36-46 The disciples saw him go to pray. They heard him speak in prayer. They then fell asleep. He then comes back and finds them sleeping. Jesus wakes them and speaks to them. He goes to pray again after waking them. They hear him. They then fall asleep again. He comes back, wakes them, leaves them to pray a third time. They hear him repeating the same words. They fall asleep again. Then he comes back to the disciples and speaks to them.
MARK 14: 32-42 Essentially the same sequence as in Matthew
LUKE 22: 39-46 Goes to pray. The disciples then fall asleep, and Jesus wakes them just as he is about to be arrested. Only in Luke do we have the appearance of an angel and sweat being compared to great drops of blood. He may have been sweating profusely and on a moonlit night the drops of sweat would have appeared dark. The angel reference may simply be a pious supposition, or it could have been something that the Risen Jesus revealed to one or more of his disciples after the Resurrection. However, all the Synoptic authors stress the difficulty the disciples experienced in staying awake, and perhaps the angelic vision occurred in a dream one of them had during a period of sleep.
JOHN 18: 1-11 The Johannine author does not record the specific content of Jesus' prayer or the sleep patterns of his disciples, but simply notes that he crossed the Kedron Valley with his disciples and went to a garden to which he was accustomed to going with his disciples, and that this is where he was then arrested.
Where's the difficulty? Have you never heard something, then fallen asleep, then been awakened, then heard something, then fallen asleep again, then been awakened, then heard something?
I heard my alarm go off, listened to the radio, then fell asleep, then awoke again, heard some more on the radio, then fell asleep again, then awoke again, then heard some more radio one morning last week. It is not impossible, I assure you!
All four authors consistently record that Jesus had a meal with his disciples and then left for a garden-type location where he was arrested. If they were fabricating this, it's rather remarkable that they all choose a similar location for the arrest of Jesus, and all placed the time as following his last meal with his disciples close to the Passover Feast, and identified Judas, one of the Twelve, as his betrayer.
It reads very naturally as a basically accurate recording by separate authors of a real historical event, at least two of whom are reporting indepedent accounts of the essential facts.
Read the many eyewitness accounts of the assassination of President Kennedy. They are not all exactly the same. Does their not being exactly the same disprove that Kennedy was ever assassinated?
Hardly!
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