Matthew 27:46-50 (following Mark 15:34-37) has Jesus die crying out the cry of dereliction — *Eli Eli lama sabachthani*, 'my God my God why hast thou forsaken me.' Luke 23:46 has him die with a serene self-commendation: 'Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.' John 19:30 has him die with the triumphant 'It is finished' (*tetelestai*). Three different last words for the same death.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
46About the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lima sabachthani?” That is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”47Some of them who stood there, when they heard it, said, “This man is calling Elijah.”48Immediately one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him a drink.49The rest said, “Let him be. Let’s see whether Elijah comes to save him.”50Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit.
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: Widely regarded as 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.
The three Gospels that report Jesus' dying words give three different climactic utterances, and each frames its saying as *the* final cry — the last thing out of his mouth before he expires. Matthew 27:46–50, following Mark 15:34–37, has him die quoting Psalm 22:1: *Ēli Ēli lema sabachthani*, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Luke 23:46 replaces this with a serene self-commendation drawn from Psalm 31:5: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." John 19:30 has the single triumphant word *tetelestai*, "It is finished." The verb is the perfect of *teleō* — a completed action with abiding result, the language of a discharged debt or an accomplished commission, not a death-rattle.
The harmonizing reading, run by Gleason Archer and by John Wenham in *Easter Enigma*, is sequential: Jesus said all three (plus the other Lukan and Johannine sayings), and each evangelist preserved the one most significant to him. Mechanically this is possible; nothing forbids a dying man several utterances. But it dissolves under redactional analysis, because each evangelist does not merely *select* a saying — he constructs the entire death scene around it, and the resulting theologies are incompatible.
Mark's Jesus dies in desolation. His only word from the cross is the cry of dereliction, screamed *phōnē megalē*, and Mark surrounds it with mockery, darkness, and a torn temple veil. Joel Marcus argues that Mark wants the reader to feel the scandal of a crucified messiah experiencing genuine divine abandonment — an apocalyptic sense of God's withdrawal that the resurrection will reverse. (A noteworthy textual datum: the transliterated cry mixes Hebrew *Eli* with Aramaic *sabachthani*, and the manuscripts vary — Mark's witnesses lean toward Aramaic *Elōi*, Matthew's toward Hebrew *Ēli*, the latter making the bystanders' confusion with "Elias/Elijah" more intelligible. The variation shows the tradition itself was unstable.)
Luke found the cry of dereliction theologically intolerable and systematically rewrote the scene. Joseph Fitzmyer, in the Anchor Bible Luke, documents the changes: the dereliction cry is removed and replaced with the calm Psalm 31:5 commendation; the daughters of Jerusalem are addressed with compassion on the way; the penitent thief is promised paradise; and the centurion calls Jesus "a righteous man" rather than "the Son of God." Luke's Jesus dies as the *dikaios paschōn*, the suffering righteous one of Wisdom of Solomon 2–5 and the Maccabean martyrs — composed, forgiving, vindicated, in command of his own spirit. This is not Mark's abandoned sufferer; it is its deliberate correction. François Bovon reads Luke 23:46 as the calm death of a martyr-witness modeling how the persecuted disciple should die (cf. Stephen's near-identical commendation in Acts 7:59).
John pushes furthest. Throughout the Fourth Gospel Jesus is sovereign over the Passion — he lays down his life of his own accord (John 10:18), he is not seized but gives himself up (18:4–8), and he goes to the cross to complete the work the Father gave him (17:4). *Tetelestai* is therefore the verdict on a finished mission, the seal on the Lamb's offering, not a cry of pain. Raymond Brown's John commentary stresses that the word echoes 19:28 ("that the scripture might be fulfilled") and signals accomplishment, not collapse.
Bart Ehrman uses these three death scenes as his clearest illustration that the evangelists are not transcribing one event but proclaiming three distinct theologies of the cross — abandonment, righteous martyrdom, and sovereign completion. Steel-manning the harmonizers fully: three sayings in sequence cannot be disproved, and an oral tradition might well have remembered several utterances. But the sequential composite is told by no one ancient or modern in a coherent narrative form, and it erases the very thing each evangelist labored to construct.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction at the level of which words were last and what the death meant; the divergence is redactional, not reportorial.
Sources for this reading
Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave (ABRL; Doubleday, 1994), vol. 2 pp. 1043-1088on the death cries across the gospels
Joel Marcus, Mark 8-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AYB 27A; Yale University Press, 2009) pp. 1062-1068on Mark 15:34 and Psalm 22Mark 15:34, Psalms 22
Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV (AB 28A; Doubleday, 1985) pp. 1515-1520on Luke 23:46Luke 23:46
Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (XIII-XXI) (AB 29A; Doubleday, 1970) pp. 929-931on John 19:30 tetelestaiJohn 19:30
Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) (HarperOne, 2009) pp. 62-69
W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Vol. 3 (ICC; T&T Clark, 1997) pp. 620-625
François Bovon, Luke 3: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 19:28-24:53, trans. James Crouch (Hermeneia; Fortress, 2012) pp. 326-331on Luke 23:46Luke 23:46
Gleason L. Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Zondervan, 1982) p. 348
John Wenham, Easter Enigma: Are the Resurrection Accounts in Conflict?, 2nd ed. (Baker, 1992)
Examining the tension
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: Widely regarded as 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.
The three Gospels that report Jesus' dying words give three different climactic utterances, and each frames its saying as *the* final cry — the last thing out of his mouth before he expires. Matthew 27:46–50, following Mark 15:34–37, has him die quoting Psalm 22:1: *Ēli Ēli lema sabachthani*, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Luke 23:46 replaces this with a serene self-commendation drawn from Psalm 31:5: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." John 19:30 has the single triumphant word *tetelestai*, "It is finished." The verb is the perfect of *teleō* — a completed action with abiding result, the language of a discharged debt or an accomplished commission, not a death-rattle.
The harmonizing reading, run by Gleason Archer and by John Wenham in *Easter Enigma*, is sequential: Jesus said all three (plus the other Lukan and Johannine sayings), and each evangelist preserved the one most significant to him. Mechanically this is possible; nothing forbids a dying man several utterances. But it dissolves under redactional analysis, because each evangelist does not merely *select* a saying — he constructs the entire death scene around it, and the resulting theologies are incompatible.
Mark's Jesus dies in desolation. His only word from the cross is the cry of dereliction, screamed *phōnē megalē*, and Mark surrounds it with mockery, darkness, and a torn temple veil. Joel Marcus argues that Mark wants the reader to feel the scandal of a crucified messiah experiencing genuine divine abandonment — an apocalyptic sense of God's withdrawal that the resurrection will reverse. (A noteworthy textual datum: the transliterated cry mixes Hebrew *Eli* with Aramaic *sabachthani*, and the manuscripts vary — Mark's witnesses lean toward Aramaic *Elōi*, Matthew's toward Hebrew *Ēli*, the latter making the bystanders' confusion with "Elias/Elijah" more intelligible. The variation shows the tradition itself was unstable.)
Luke found the cry of dereliction theologically intolerable and systematically rewrote the scene. Joseph Fitzmyer, in the Anchor Bible Luke, documents the changes: the dereliction cry is removed and replaced with the calm Psalm 31:5 commendation; the daughters of Jerusalem are addressed with compassion on the way; the penitent thief is promised paradise; and the centurion calls Jesus "a righteous man" rather than "the Son of God." Luke's Jesus dies as the *dikaios paschōn*, the suffering righteous one of Wisdom of Solomon 2–5 and the Maccabean martyrs — composed, forgiving, vindicated, in command of his own spirit. This is not Mark's abandoned sufferer; it is its deliberate correction. François Bovon reads Luke 23:46 as the calm death of a martyr-witness modeling how the persecuted disciple should die (cf. Stephen's near-identical commendation in Acts 7:59).
John pushes furthest. Throughout the Fourth Gospel Jesus is sovereign over the Passion — he lays down his life of his own accord (John 10:18), he is not seized but gives himself up (18:4–8), and he goes to the cross to complete the work the Father gave him (17:4). *Tetelestai* is therefore the verdict on a finished mission, the seal on the Lamb's offering, not a cry of pain. Raymond Brown's John commentary stresses that the word echoes 19:28 ("that the scripture might be fulfilled") and signals accomplishment, not collapse.
Bart Ehrman uses these three death scenes as his clearest illustration that the evangelists are not transcribing one event but proclaiming three distinct theologies of the cross — abandonment, righteous martyrdom, and sovereign completion. Steel-manning the harmonizers fully: three sayings in sequence cannot be disproved, and an oral tradition might well have remembered several utterances. But the sequential composite is told by no one ancient or modern in a coherent narrative form, and it erases the very thing each evangelist labored to construct.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction at the level of which words were last and what the death meant; the divergence is redactional, not reportorial.
Sources for this reading