cleansing of the temple, but the placement of the narrative is near the beginning of the story, not near its end. Is this a contradiction or a discrepancy between the accounts? Well, in fact, it is not. Under inspiration, the Gospel writers appear to have followed the conventions of their own day when it came to writing a biography of Jesus, and one of those conventions was that they had a certain freedom to arrange their material. Sometimes it might be a chronological arrangement, sometimes it might