I happen to hold the guinness book of records citation for the number of major changes in one semester. Once, I was a journalism major. The professor of the intro writing class pulled a stunt in the final exam, having another professor and a graduate student act out a little, “unscheduled” skit in front of the room, then turned to us after we had witnessed a possible crime and said, “That’s your final exam task — you saw this altercation, now write it.”

Groans were pretty much universal.

The prof was also my advisor, and he told me later that he had substantial differences in each news story that the examinees turned in, and that NONE of us got the sequence 100% without error. All of us presumed an action that didn’t take place in the ‘skit.’

Yet we were all witnesses.

I have always been taught in the Protestant faith (and we live or die by the Bible, as you know) that supposed contradictions were just like the scam pulled by good old Charlie Fair in the Journalism department at VCU. Different perspectives, different positions, changes everything. Leave us not forget that the more likely explanation for discrepancies such as Acts of the Apostles variation within the same “book” over whether the guys with St. Paul heard something or saw something is scribal error.