I didn’t keep a daily diary or record every conversation, but thirty-five years later I can still reconstruct the people, places, conversations, tragedies and turning points of a two year period that shaped my early life.
But what does this have to do with the Gospels?
Forty years ago I was troubled by differing accounts of the same Gospel event. In Luke 6:20 Jesus is “down” on “a level place” when he tells them “blessed are you who are poor”. But in Matthew 5:3 he is on a mountain and says “blessed are the poor in spirit”. If we believe scripture is God’s inspired Word then why are they different? Critics also claim the Gospel writers made things up because people could not possibly have remembered details when Luke wrote his Gospel thirty years after the events.
While my pastor provided some helpful explanations, I didn’t find them to be the compelling, “slam dunk” counter arguments I wanted. However, since that time I have accumulated life experience, and using recent insight from writing my memoir Encounter, I want to address these challenges.
Like Matthew and Luke I describe events that occurred more than thirty years ago in a different time and place – in my case Samoa. Encounter begins by sharing the trauma of being separated from our passports on leaving Australia, enduring a devastating cyclone on arrival, and searching for water and food in its aftermath. I discovered that trauma impresses event details into memory, so the trauma of watching Jesus being crucified would have cemented details into the disciples’ minds. People who suffer from trauma-related PTSD can well remember event details; their problem is that they can’t forget.
However, some readily agree that while trauma might help the disciples recall crucifixion details, there was nothing traumatic about the Sermon on the Mount, or conversations with Jesus on the road. However, like the disciples, I shared my stories many times in the following decades and found that regular storytelling also maintains memory. My readers are often delighted but surprised that I recount event details, conversations and my thoughts about those events at the time.
But critics also claim that because many of Jesus’ followers were illiterate, they were unable to make reliable records, so their memories cannot be accurate. Like first century Palestine, many adults in Samoa could not read or write in 1990, so it was largely an oral culture. However, people in oral cultures cultivate an effective and reliable memory as a matter of necessity. For example, to avoid being cheated they have an excellent memory for prices, food quantities, and details of agreements and conversations. Nineteenth century Europeans documented their astonished observation of Samoans’ ability to accurately remember contemporary event details, along with the centuries of family history associated with chiefly titles.
Oral cultures value accurate storytelling far more than literate cultures because they use stories to teach critical life skills and important truth. There was no power in cyclone-devastated Samoa, so we spent evenings sitting around the embers of our cooking fire learning about our new country and culture by listening to stories. Learning through stories also helped us contextualise new knowledge into our lived experience of that time and place.
Oral cultures also use poetry and song to maintain story accuracy. I learned the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by heart forty years ago, and I can still recite the poem because Coleridge’s rhyme, rhythm and repetition act as memory guide rails. The passage on Christ’s supremacy in Colossians 1:15 and the rhythmic creed in 1 Timothy 3:16 are evidence the early church used poetic forms to share Gospel truth in a way that people could remember all their lives without written records.
Critics claim slightly differing accounts of the same event are problematic. However, it would be absurd to claim Jesus said “blessed are the poor in spirit” to his disciples only once in three years. As a teacher in Samoa, I repeated my lessons over again in different ways using different methods. Moreover, “Blessed are you who are poor” and “blessed are the poor in spirit” are both equally true.
It is important to recognise that the Gospels record only a tiny fragment of all Jesus’ conversations. In 1990 we had hundreds of conversations about Samoan school disciplinary methods, but I chose just one conversation to cover the controversial subject in my memoir. A colleague writing about the same subject might easily have chosen a different conversation. A single story can be used to teach many different truths, and each Gospel writer selected the time and setting for each story to best reach their particular audience.
Furthermore, a written conversation is only a simplified representation of reality. In a real conversation people “um” and “ah”, repeat themselves, stop mid-sentence, and interject over each other. An author untangles and arranges conversations into a linear, readable format, removing anything unnecessary and adding punctuation. In 2 Timothy 3:16 Paul writes that scripture is God “breathed”, not dictated. We should not create a stumbling block of unreasonable expectation that the Gospel writers had to have chosen exactly the same words for their record of conversations to be true.
Similarly, the fact that the Gospel writers recorded stories unique to their Gospel is not evidence of contradiction but an author focussed on reaching their target audience. In 1990 I wrote contemporaneous vignettes and journal entries that ended up in my memoir in some form. However, to maintain reader focus on the primary story thread I also discarded three quarters of my first draft. There’s plenty of evidence the Gospel writers had to resolve the same problems I did. Who is my audience? What is the point I’m making? What do I put in, and leave out? Should this parable go before or after that one?
When Luke opens his Gospel with “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative…”, he makes it clear he researched other contemporaneous written accounts just like today’s authors. He did not sit down under a halo and write his Gospel from start to finish, without drafts, correction, or checking with original sources. Each witness saw the same event from a different perspective, and like contemporary authors constrained by word count, Luke was constrained by parchment and ink to choose one perspective for his Gospel.
The Gospels are rich with the messy reality of life on the road with Jesus because they were written by real people who were there. The fact they align so closely with each other, despite the passage of time, and despite being written for different audiences using differing writing styles, provides strong evidence that the Holy Spirit “breathed” this work through fallible human writers. We can be encouraged that the same Holy Spirit still uses those written words, now translated into more than a thousand tongues, to convict, convert and comfort hearts today.
Ian Reilly is the author of Encounter – A Journey into Chaos, Culture and Compassion (Ark House Press). Ian and his wife Heather worship at Donvale Presbyterian Church, Melbourne, Australia.
