Did both thieves revile Jesus?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Mark 15:32 states flatly that 'they that were crucified with him reviled him' — both of them. Matthew 27:44, following Mark, has 'the thieves' (plural) cast the same insults in his teeth. Luke 23:39-43 tells a different story: one criminal rails at Jesus ('If thou be Christ, save thyself and us'), while the other rebukes the first, affirms Jesus' innocence ('this man hath done nothing amiss'), and asks to be remembered in Jesus' kingdom, receiving the promise, 'Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.' Mark and Matthew have two mockers; Luke has one mocker and one penitent.

The standard harmonization, argued by Gleason Archer, John Wenham, and Craig Blomberg, is chronological: both criminals mocked Jesus at first (the moment Mark and Matthew preserve), and one of them later underwent a change of heart and became the penitent thief Luke records. Crucifixion was a slow death lasting hours, and the proposal that a dying man, watching Jesus' bearing, came to repentance over time is psychologically plausible and internally consistent. A second, weaker supporting move notes that Greek (like English) can use a plural loosely for a group when strictly only part of the group acts — 'they reviled him' could be a generalizing plural. These observations earn the harmonization a hearing.

But the harmonization founders on the wider evidence of Luke's redactional program, which the conversion theory does not merely supplement but contradicts in spirit. Luke systematically reshapes Mark's crucifixion. He removes the cry of dereliction — Mark's 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me' (Mark 15:34) is absent from Luke — and replaces the Markan portrait of an anguished, forsaken Jesus with a serene, sovereign one who prays 'Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do' (23:34) and dies committing his spirit calmly to the Father (23:46). Within this thoroughgoing recasting, the penitent thief is not an isolated extra fact but an integral element: he is the climactic instance of Luke's signature theme of last-minute repentance and the embrace of the outcast, of a piece with the prodigal son (Luke 15), the tax collector justified over the Pharisee (18:9-14), and Zacchaeus (19:1-10). Joseph Fitzmyer in the Anchor Bible Luke reads the scene as Lukan composition serving these theological ends, and Bart Ehrman in *Jesus, Interrupted* uses it as a paradigm case of how Luke transforms Mark's dying Jesus into a model of forgiveness. The good thief, on this reading, is a figure Luke's theology requires, not a memory Luke alone retained.

The decisive point against the conversion harmonization is narrative: no Gospel actually tells the two-stage story. Mark and Matthew give no hint of any subsequent softening — for them the mockery from both sides is part of the total abandonment of Jesus, joined by passersby and chief priests. Luke gives no hint that his penitent thief ever mocked; from his first words the man fears God and defends Jesus. The reconstruction in which both first revile and then one repents is a composite reverse-engineered to reconcile the texts, narrated by none of them. The generic-plural defense is also strained: Mark's and Matthew's plural is most naturally read as genuinely dual, paralleling the dual mockery from rulers, soldiers, and crowd that frames the scene, and Matthew has independently chosen to retain and even underscore Mark's 'both.'

The most economical explanation is redaction: Luke has rewritten the shared Markan datum of dual mockery to create the penitent thief, in service of his distinctive theology of forgiveness. The differing accounts cannot both be straightforwardly historical without importing a sequence neither narrates.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction at the narrative level; best explained as Lukan redaction rather than a single harmonizable sequence.