SMITH: Sure. So I take canonicity seriously. I think there's inspiration in what is in the canon or not in the canon in that sense. So I don't think it's an accident that there are four records of Jesus's life in the canon. That's kind of weird when you think about it, right? Why don't we just have one record of his life? The reason we have four is because they are not meant to provide identical portraits of Jesus.If I can, I'm borrowing this analogy from someone else, if you gave the same script and the same actors to four different directors, they would give you four very different movies. In this case the script isn't identical in the sense that Jesus ministers for years, and each Gospel gives us about two hours of his ministry if you were to read one of the Gospels out loud. Mark's a little shorter, more like an hour and a half, an hour and fifteen, but you've got two hours of material from years and years of ministering. So in that sense it's not the same script, because they have to be so very, very selective in the material they select for presentation. We are getting four different perspectives for a reason. I think there's something very important and very beautiful about this canonized diversity.I think one thing we might take from it is increased charity to people who view the gospel or the life of Christ very differently from the way we might, or find it important to emphasize different facets of Jesus's life and ministry and gospel than we might. So I think there's a call to charity there. A call to recognize that there's not one true way to tell Jesus's story. There's different aspects that are equally canonical, equally important, equally inspired, and that we need to take that seriously. It reminds me of the famous Joseph Smith quote about how as mortals we are living in this sort of a day of crooked, broken, imperfect language—I think that's the quote, maybe scattered and imperfect language. So those are the limitations of any text and our four Gospel authors try to break out of that prison in four different ways as they depict the life of Christ, and they each do it differently and beautifully, but they do it differently.HODGES: I've seen a lot of value in bringing that up with members of the church and just observing that this is how the church works as well. We have multiple church leaders.SMITH: Right. And one way that I've presented this to classes is we all love the distinct voice of a President Uchtdorf versus a President Oaks versus a President Monson versus a President Packer, where if I took names off of their conference talks and handed them to you, you could probably tell who was who because of their distinctive voices. I think the Gospel writers give us the same gift of different perspectives on the gospel, and so when we harmonize it would be sort of just as sad as listening to conference talks that had all the aviation analogies and stories about widows ripped out of them. We would miss those distinct voices.