There’s an incident in the Bible that all four writers describe from the night Jesus was arrested, but when you put their accounts side by side and read them, it turns into a full-on “witness protection” story.
When soldiers came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, one of the disciples drew his sword and cut off the high priest’s servant’s ear. Now you open Matthew, Mark, and Luke and read them; all three say, as if they’d agreed on it, “One of those with Jesus drew his sword and cut off the high priest’s servant’s ear.” Neither the person who drew the sword nor the person whose ear was cut off is named. Both sides are completely anonymous.
But when you open the Gospel of John (18:10), written years later, John lifts the entire censorship and just gives the names: “Simon Peter drew his sword and cut off the high priest’s servant’s right ear. The servant’s name was Malchus.”
Of course, you can’t help asking: why did the first three writers hide these names, while John wrote them openly years later?
The reason is actually very simple. When the first three Gospels were written, Peter was still alive, and the high priest’s family still held power in Jerusalem. Drawing a sword on the high priest’s man was a capital offense at the time. The first writers deliberately hide Peter’s name to keep him from being brought before the authorities—in other words, to avoid turning him in. But by the time John wrote his book (in the 90s AD), Peter had long since died, Jerusalem had been destroyed, and there was no high priest left and no danger. So, with nothing left to hide, John records the truth, names and all.
Even more interesting is this: how does John know the name of the servant at the high priest’s gate amid the chaos that night? His answer appears five verses later (18:15): it turns out John was personally known to the high priest’s family and could come and go from the house. So he knew Malchus personally, and he even writes that the person in the garden who recognized Peter was a relative of Malchus.
The best part is in Luke. Of these four writers, Luke is the only doctor. And of the four Gospels, the only one that says Jesus touched the severed ear and healed the man right there (Luke 22:51) is the doctor Luke! In fact, if Jesus hadn’t put that ear back on that night, there would have been an assault charge left hanging, so Peter couldn’t have walked out of that garden alive; he would have gone to the cross with Jesus. While Jesus is healing his enemy there, he’s actually saving Peter’s life too.
When you read the accounts against one another like this, you see very clearly just how much these lines, which people assume are fiction, are actually genuine records kept by people who were right there in the middle of the event.
Source: Erkut SARIKAYA(C.ROCHER)