Mark 10 vs. Matthew 20

Who Asked Jesus?

In the Bible, Jesus is asked by many to sit at his right hand. In Mark 10:35-37, James and John ask Jesus while in Matthew 20:20-21, their mother asks; however, there is no contradiction in these accounts. 

One likely interpretation is that all three did ask; however, Mark and Matthew just did not record both events. It is not contradictory to neglect to mention an event. For example, let us say I went to a concert. If I tell one of my friends, "It was amazing to meet my favorite singer Mc. Sings a lot", then tell another friend, "It was so nice to hang out with my father at the concert" I never did contradict myself. I did not tell my friends every person I met, but there is no contradiction as both events happened. The same is so with the prior accounts. 

As Dr. Keener says: "The indirect intercession of a motherly woman (c.f. Mt 15:22) was often more effective than a man's direct petition for himself, in both Jewish and Roman circles ...Women also could get away with making some requests that men could not. In this case, however, it does not work," (Keener 96; C.f. Crossway 1863). 

Let us say one child desires to get ice cream so he asks his parents, but his parents say no. The boy then asks his younger sibling to ask the parents because he knows they are much softer on him so they may reconsider, this is a similar idea here. James and John ask Jesus, but they get rejected. Instead of giving up as the boy did not, they ask their mother to ask Jesus.  

The ESV Study Bible also theorizes: "Based on the principle that an agent of a person counts as the person himself ... Mark may be reporting the mother's words as the words of James and John, who had told her to ask this," (Crossway 1863). The concept here is that if someone says something in your name, it is as, in this culture, that you had said it yourself. If a king sends a messenger to say something, it would be correct to say that the king had said it. Thus, there does not seem to be any contradiction as there are plenty of alternative explanations.

References:

ESV Study Bible. United States, Crossway, 2008.

Keener, Craig S., The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, 2nd Edition. United Kingdom, InterVarsity Press, 2014.

New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. All rights reserved.