Our One Year Bible is compiled as a harmonized account. In other words, where two or more books speak about an episode in the Biblical narrative, all of the writers' writings are added together to give a "complete" account of what happened. This is called a harmonized account.
Throughout the Synoptic Gospels (Syn - one + optic - eye or through one eye), there is a great deal of overlap - that's why they are called the Synoptic Gospels. Over 90% of the content of the Gospel of John is not contained in the other gospels. Having said these things, each of the gospel writers were writing to convey slightly different things to their individual audiences. For example, Matthew was trying to convince Jews that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah as spoken about throughout the OT. This why that Matthew has many OT references and allusions.
Although Matthew, mark, and Luke are very similar, they are also different. They chose to include certain material and leave out other material that another writer chose to include.
The point that I am making is that a harmonized account of Jesus' life, like what we are reading gives us a fuller picture of Jesus' life than any one of the gospels, yet it may dilute a point that a particular gospel writer was trying to make about an episode in Jesus' life.
When I preached through the Book of Matthew, I read all of the other gospels that had material about the same event in Matthew so I could get a fuller picture. However, I normally only used the information from Matthew to preach the passage. I did so because I wanted to make Matthew's point(s) alone and not Mark, Luke's, or John's. I seldom brought in any of the details that those writers had that Matthew excluded. I forced myself to stay true to the text that I was preaching.
Don't think that each writer didn't necessarily have all the facts or wasn't detailed enough. They were not history writers, they were theologians and evangelists giving their audience enough info to see the point they needed to hear.
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