The life of Christ in one continuous sequence — every event set side by side across Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with a fifth column showing wherever that event or teaching surfaces again in Acts and the Epistles.
“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us… so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.” — Luke 1:1, 4
Read across a row to see which Gospels record an event and where. A blank cell means that Gospel does not report it — and the blanks are as informative as the entries. A gold bar on the left marks the twenty events all four Gospels record. The last column shows where the event or its teaching resurfaces in Acts or the Epistles, with a note on the connection.
Use the filters to isolate what is unique to one Gospel, to see only the events all four share, or to show only the rows that carry a mention outside the Gospels. The whole table prints in landscape.
Patterns that only become visible when the columns sit side by side
Of 224 events, only twenty appear in all four — and almost all of them cluster at the two ends: John the Baptist and the baptism at the start, then the arrest through the empty tomb at the end. Between the baptism and the triumphal entry, exactly one event makes all four columns: the feeding of the five thousand. The middle of Jesus' ministry is told by three Gospels or fewer.
John records 67 of the 224 events, and 40 of those appear in no other Gospel — a higher proportion of unique material than any other Gospel. Lose John and you lose Cana, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, Bethesda, the bread of life, the man born blind, Lazarus, the foot washing, and five chapters of the upper room. John converges with the Synoptics mainly at the baptism, one feeding, and the passion.
Only two events are unique to Mark: the parable of the growing seed and the two-stage healing of the blind man at Bethsaida. Nearly everything else Mark records also appears in Matthew or Luke. Yet Mark is often the fullest teller of the shared scenes — the extra detail, the Aramaic word, the sigh, the look around the room.
Forty-one events appear only in Luke, more than any Gospel except John — and they are the ones the church has loved most: the good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the rich fool, Zacchaeus, the Pharisee and the tax collector, the widow of Nain, the ten lepers, the criminal on the cross, the road to Emmaus.
102 of 224 rows carry a mention outside the Gospels, but the distribution is lopsided. The Epistles say almost nothing about the miracles, the journeys, or the confrontations, and a great deal about the incarnation, the night of betrayal, the crucifixion, the burial, the resurrection, and the ascension. Where they do cite the ministry, they usually cite Jesus' teaching rather than his deeds — the divorce command, the worker's wages, love of neighbor, do not retaliate.
The appearance to more than five hundred at once and the appearance to James are recorded nowhere in the four Gospels — only in 1 Corinthians 15:6-7. Paul's list of resurrection witnesses is both the earliest written account of the resurrection and, at two points, the only one.
What a harmony is: an arrangement of the four Gospels into a single sequence so parallel accounts can be compared side by side. The genre goes back to Tatian's Diatessaron in the second century, and modern harmonies — Robertson, Aland's Synopsis, Thomas and Gundry — differ from one another in ordering. This one follows the mainstream arrangement, and the section divisions are conventional rather than stated in the text.
Order is the interpretive part. The Gospels themselves are not uniformly chronological: Matthew groups material thematically, and Luke says he wrote 'an orderly account' without claiming strict sequence. Where harmonists disagree, the row carries a note. The main cases: whether John 2's temple cleansing is the same event as the Passion-week cleansing or a separate earlier one; whether Luke's miraculous catch is the same occasion as the calling of the four; and where to place the anointing at Bethany, which Matthew and Mark set thematically beside the betrayal while John dates it six days before the Passover.
Reference boundaries are editorial. Where one Gospel tells in two paragraphs what another tells in one, the rows are drawn at the most natural break; another harmony would divide some of them differently. Two passages carry textual notes on their rows — Mark 16:9-20 (the longer ending) and John 7:53-8:11 — since the earliest manuscripts do not include them.
The Epistles column includes two kinds of entry, distinguished in each note: places where Acts or a letter refers to the same event (the betrayal night, the burial, the ascension), and places where a letter takes up the same teaching, whether by explicit citation ('not I, but the Lord' in 1 Corinthians 7:10) or clear echo. Echoes are a matter of judgment, and scholars weigh them differently; the strongest cases are the ones flagged as direct citations. Absence of an entry means no clear reference was identified, not proof that none exists. Quotations follow the NIV.