I recently added a book to my collection that I am pretty geeked about. It is Notes on the Four Gospels Harmonized, produced in 1935 and was published by Julia Mott Hodge. Hodge was from one of the most prominent and earliest settling families in DeKalb County, Indiana. I got the chance to learn more about her when I authored Legendary Locals of Auburn. They made their homestead in Auburn, Indiana, which is also my home town, and I think it is safe to say that most everyone in the community know of her grave site even if they know nothing of her and her work for God’s kingdom. Following her 1897 graduation from Auburn High School, she attended and became a graduate of the University of Michigan and then taught school until 1912 before becoming a Presbyterian missionary. In that role, Hodge spent 29 years in the Philippines. That is significant and impressive in its own right. But even more compelling to me is that while she was doing God’s work abroad, she was captured with more than two-thousand others and imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. It is believed that United States Army forces liberated her and the others a mere thirty minutes before execution.

What is harmonizing the gospels?

With this find, I of course had to do a little bit more to gather an understanding of what it means to “harmonize the Gospels” and here’s the basic conclusion. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were four chosen who were responsible for recording events and teachings of Christ. Because each of them had different backgrounds, wrote from different locales and had their own experiences, each frames their account a little differently and therefore communicates the gospel from those individual perspectives. If you would like to unpack that idea more, here’s a good place to learn more about harmonizing the Gospels. I do aim to do more research on Julia Mott Hodge and her family in the future. If you happen to have any resources that you can share, lend, or otherwise provide, I would be much appreciative.