David went into the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of offering that only the priests could lawfully eat. This passage from Mark has created a flood of commentary for scholars. The problem is that the incident as recorded in the Old Testament says that Ahimelech was high priest! (Abiathar was his son and became high priest a generation later.) When Matthew and Luke report this scene they omit mention of who was high priest — perhaps to avoid passing on erroneous information? There are as many explantions of how to understand this text as their are scholars. The simplest is that Mark simply mis-remembered what Jesus said. Abiathar is a big player in the David story so he could have simply assumed that he was the high priest in question. (Remember that the presence of an actual text was rare since the Bible had to be copied out by hand in those days.) Many scholars are reluctant to say that it was not Mark but Jesus who made the mistake. How could the Son of God err? For me, since Jesus was, as the Bible says, “like us in all things but sin” the fact that he forgot something is not sinful, but human. I get consolation thinking of Jesus slapping his head when he couldn’t remember something just like me.
