The Literary Freedom of the Hellenistic Biographer or Historian

I'm back to my series on the reliability of the gospels. Once again, these are excerpts from my manuscript that will be published next spring as Can We Trust the Gospels? If you have any comments to share on this and the following posts, I'd be glad to hear them.

Those who do not believe the New Testament gospels provide much reliable historical information about Jesus often point to variations in the wording of sayings as they appear in different gospels, to differences in the order of events between gospels, or similar characteristics that seem inconsistent with the genres of biography and history. For example, when Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan River, a voice from heaven speaks, but the words differ slightly between Matthew and Mark (Luke agrees with Mark):

• And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matt 3:17)

• And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:11)

This sort of difference delights detractors of the gospels and perplexes the faithful. It would be pretty hard to argue that the voice from heaven said the same sentence twice in slightly different ways (though I expect this argument has been made somewhere). No, it seems more likely that Matthew and Mark used slightly different words for the same vocal event. If Matthew was using Mark, as is likely, then he made a few changes. How could he do this if he is writing biography or history? Do the differences between Matthew and Mark prove that one of the gospels is wrong? Does this mean that either Matthew or Mark was a sloppy historian?

If we evaluate the evangelists in light of contemporary history writing, then we'd have to say that one of them doesn't measure up. We expect historians and biographers to quote their sources with precision. For example, my friend Ronald C. White Jr. wrote a highly acclaimed study of Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural, Lincoln's Greatest Speech.  If Ron had misquoted Lincoln's words, or paraphrased then and put them in quotation marks, he would have been blasted by critics. In fact, his book would never have been published in such a form.

Yet in the ancient world, before there were transcripts, tape recordings, and podcasts, biographers and historians exercised greater freedom in paraphrasing or slightly altering spoken words for stylistic reasons. A good historian, if he knew that a character had made a speech at a certain time, would get available information about that speech and then write the speech with his own words as if these words had been uttered by the character. Nowadays, a historian who did this would be considered sloppy at best, or even dishonest. (Remember the case of Jayson Blair, not a historian, but a reporter for the New York Times. He disgraced the Times and himself by, among other things, making up quotes that his sources could have side, but didn't in fact say.)

So, assuming for a moment that Matthew used Mark as a source, if we evaluate Matthew according to today's standards, then we'd say he's not completely reliable, even though he mostly agrees with Mark. Yet this sort of anachronistic approach is unhelpful, not to mention unfair to Matthew. For reasons of style or story, Matthew was doing what historians and biographers in his day were expected to do. Nobody would have accused him of falsehood back then. Neither should we.

The proof of this is obvious and, I think, incontrovertible. Both Matthew and Mark were accepted as authoritative in the early church, even though the sayings of Jesus are usually worded differently in Matthew and Mark. The events of the gospels don't always come in exactly the same order, either. The early Christians didn't see these variations as a problem because that's what they were accustomed to in their biographical and historical writings.

It sometimes comes as a shock when Christians discover that the gospels don't present the sayings of Jesus in exactly the same way, or don't give the same details when telling what must obviously be the same story. Skeptics love this sort of thing, and use it to diminish confidence in the gospels. But both scandalized Christians and zealous skeptics must learn to see the gospels in the context of their own time and history.

Moreover, we must remember that the gospels give us what is technically called the ipsissima vox (his own voice) of Jesus rather than the ipsissima verba (his own words). Since it's highly unlikely that Jesus did much teaching in Greek, the autographs of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John do not preserve his original words (except in a few cases). They do, however, authentically capture his voice.