Did the Gospel Writers Lie?

How do we deal with the fact that the gospel writers made stuff up?

Well, for a good introduction there is a site that provides excellent scripture resources on the Gospel writers. http://www.americancatholic.org/Newsletters/SFS/an0196.asp.

But let me at least say that Matthew, an educated Jew, was writing for an educated Jewish audience of Pharisees and other scripture scholars. So he structured his whole gospel with Judaic symbolism and bible commentary in mind. His colorful story of the magi is, like so much of his gospel, a midrash (commentary) on prophecies from the Jewish Scriuptures. If people take his gospel on face value only and are looking for an historical memory, they are completely missing his point.

I don't know, it is disturbing to people to suggest that the bible cannot be taken on face value.

Did it disturb you when you heard it in college?

Well, no, it actually excited me more than disturbed me. Because I saw the possibility that the problems I had with scripture were'nt problems with you or with God but with the human writers who were involved. So that made sense. And then the journey of studying the background and authors and historical context of each book made the bible so much richer. But Catholics are traditionally unmotivated when it comes to scripture study. The Protestants have always been better at that.

But, sadly, many non-Catholic Christians take a very "face value alone" approach and I am not sure that they don't sometimes miss the point entirely.

What point?

My point. What I was about. Take the "Prosperity Gospel" for example. I really don't know how anybody who has tried to understand me at all can decide that is what I was all about. It doesn't matter what a verse here or there says. We are dealing with human writers; they had their own agendas and sometimes their writing wasn't the best. But if you get stuck on the "take things literally as they say it" approach to the scriptures, you may, first of all, miss me entirely, and secondly, you may actually end up preaching and teaching and believing something I would find offensive and even appalling.

The Theological Agenda of the Gospel Writers

Ok, I admit, I have too many questions. Let’s take this slow. Tell me what you mean about the gospel writers and anachronism.

Perhaps the first thing I need to clarify is that I wasn’t ever anything but Jewish. And my followers, and my mother? They were never anything but Jewish. I’ll deal with Maryology another time. But suffice it to say that if my mother knew what people had done in her name and to her memory she would be appalled. My mother wanted nothing more than to raise me to be a good man and a good Jew. She believed in me, that the Father had chosen me. But she wouldn’t let me get away with anything. She knew me better than anyone; it was my mother who knew when I was ready to speak for the Father and not for myself. As a teenager she saw that my mind was ready but my heart had a lot to learn. And she let me know when she thought I was ready. John was right about that!

Now to the anachronism issue. As you know an anachronism occurs in a piece of writing when something is present that belongs to a different time. The truth is that when the gospels took their written form it was already in the era known as the “Early Church.” I was long gone and the Jewish roots of my followers and I were no longer as important as they had once been. Having become rejected by and separated from their own Jewish community, my followers were developing a different understanding of how to continue teaching my message. They were also developing a different routine of prayer and fellowship and outreach that included non-Jews. I am truly proud of what they accomplished; they took my words and ideas and opened themselves up to the Father and followed where the spirit of God led them. But people shouldn’t interpret what happened long after my death with what was happening during my lifetime and with what I spoke about.

Take Luke for example. I never met Luke. Luke became a follower of my followers, a second generation “Christian.” And Luke wanted to write about how the events in the Greek cities and Roman cities fifty years after my death was what had been intended all along by me. He wrote a beautiful 2-part work called Luke-Acts (The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles). Luke did not witness my life nor the events in Paul’s early life, but he crafted a beautiful work with a central theme showing the symmetry of events which moved my teachings and my followers from the center of the Jewish world to the center of the Roman world. His assumption was, “If this is happening it must be how God intended it to be.” So he wrote about things as if they had been foreshadowed or intended all along.

Can you give me a concrete example?

My birth. I was there but Luke certainly wasn’t and neither was Matthew. If my mother had told them or I had told them about those events surely they would have had the same story. But they don’t. And that’s fine as long as we understand that the stories they wrote about my birth were not historical narrative but theological reflection. For Luke it was important to show that God was directing things from the moment of my conception, and that my message was for everyone, the poor and lowly and even the non-Jews, like himself and so many Christians by the time he was writing.

So, it’s not that he was lying, and its not just beautiful creative writing, Luke actually had a theological agenda, a message about you that he was trying to teach.

Exactly! He didn’t see this as deceptive. He was writing the truth about me and my message as he understood it and with certain concerns or issues in mind, and his stories of my birth, for example, were the vehicles for that truth.

And Matthew?

Matthew had a similar intention and a similar method, but his personal, theological agenda was different from Luke’s.