Letters - 10 January 2014
From gospels to lethargy
Writing of the gospels
Alec Davison has written a good story (20 & 27 December 2013). But is it ‘true’? Of course, we can’t go back 2,000 years, but we have got scholars and we can only trust them – or not.
Only Matthew and Luke tell the birth stories of Christ. Mark comes straight in with the energetic figure of Jesus at thirty years and John, with great insight, brings his vision of Light and Life coming into the world (John 1:4). Luke writes his gospel and Acts to his friend, Theophilus, from eye-witnesses such as Mary, Herod the king and Zechariah, a priest. Matthew, the Jew, gives Jesus’ genealogy – that can be checked historically. Papias, an early church historian says, ‘Matthew collected the sayings of Jesus in the Hebrew tongue.’ Luke sets the registration for taxes before the one when Quirinius was governor of Syria (taxes and Syria – what’s new?) (Luke 2:2) These gospels went through rigorous examination before they were accepted into the canon of scripture in 325CE (Council of Nicea).
In the end, it is up to us to take them at their word or to disbelieve. ‘I believe, help thou my unbelief’ (Mark 9:24).
Jill Allum
Our Friend Alec Davison shares with us his image of the writer of Matthew’s gospel sitting at his desk with an empty scroll and making up stories about the conception and birth of Jesus, to give his role as prophet some convincing divine backing. I think this is unlikely.
It is widely recognised by scholars that the first three gospels (at least) are the outcome of a process that began with oral eyewitness accounts of particular episodes in the life of Jesus, and of his teaching; that written versions were made later on to allow them to be made known more widely and to safeguard against their being lost through the death of the bearers of the oral memory; and that these were later pulled together, leading eventually to the gospels as we know them.
It is a reasonable presumption that Mary, the mother of Jesus, being the central – and to an extent the only – eyewitness to the events surrounding his conception, birth and childhood, would be the source of the accounts that eventually appear in Luke and Matthew. In relation to the shepherds’ experience in their grazings, and their visit to the stable, Luke records that Mary ‘treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart’. It can be presumed that, when she felt it right to speak about them and the other events in his childhood, she would have spoken the truth, and that her accounts were then the basis for what is recorded in those two gospels.
Michael Otter
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