Part 3: The Bible and History

The following should be read aloud as a group, with each person reading one paragraph before passing on to the next person. Afterwards discussion will follow with the provided discussion questions.

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe…

John 20:30-31 1

The Bible is not New York Times style reporting.

Fr. Philip Zymaris 2

The Bible contains historical narratives of many events that happened in the past. This has led some people to conclude that the Bible is primarily a book of history in the modern sense, that is, a book recording past events in an objective and precise manner, much like the manner in which police reports or history textbooks are written today. Consequently, under the assumption that the Bible is a book of history inspired and authored by God, many people find themselves disturbed and doubting the veracity of the Bible when encountering supposed contradictions within the biblical narrative. For example, consider Jesus raising Jarius’ daughter from the dead as recorded in the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew. In Mark’s account, Jairus, the ruler of a local synagogue, comes to Jesus begging him to heal his daughter who is about to die. Jesus goes with him to heal his daughter, but while on the way messengers arrive who tell Jesus that Jairus’ daughter has already died. Jesus insists on still going to Jairus’ house and proceeds to raise his daughter from the dead.3   4 

Now compare this to Matthew’s account of the event, in which Jairus approaches Jesus when his daughter has already died and asks him to raise her from the dead. 4  In Mark, Jairus’ daughter was not yet dead when he asks Jesus to come, while in Matthew, she was already dead when he asks him. Which of these two narratives is correct? Is one “true” and the other one “false”?

This example of an alleged contradiction in the Bible serves to highlight an important point: the Biblical authors, and ancient peoples more generally, did not view history in the way we do today. For ancient peoples, the point of writing down historical events was primarily to understand the meaning and causes of the event while giving a general outline of what occurred, not to give an exact beat-by-beat chronology of the event or the exact words that were spoken. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides, writing around 400 BC, says this openly about various speeches he records when writing his History of the Peloponesian War:

With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said. And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible.5

The Church Fathers endorse and utilize this ancient methodology of conveying the general sense of what occurred and was said rather than a precise account. This endorsement of ancient historiography is confirmed in how they interpret the Scriptures. St. John Chrysostom, for example, when writing about the historical discrepancies found among the four Gospels, says the following:

“What then? Was not one Evangelist sufficient to tell all?”  [a critic may say.] One indeed was sufficient; but if there are four that write, not at the same times, nor in the same places, neither after having met together, and conversed one with another, and then they speak all things as it were out of one mouth, this becomes a very great demonstration of the truth.

“But the opposite,” it may be said, “has come to pass, for in many places they are convicted of discordance.” No, this very thing is a very great evidence of their truth. For if they had agreed in all things exactly even to time, and place, and to the very words, none of our enemies would have believed, but that they had met together, and had written what they wrote by some human compact; because such entire agreement as this does not come from simplicity. But now even that discordance which seems to exist in little matters delivers them from all suspicion, and speaks clearly on behalf of the character of the writers.

But if there is anything touching times or places, which they have related differently, this nothing injures the truth of what they have said. And these things too, so far as God shall enable us, we will endeavour, as we proceed, to point out; requiring you, together with what we have mentioned, to observe, that in the chief heads, those which constitute our life and furnish out our doctrine, no where is any of them found to have disagreed, no not ever so little.6

For St. John Chrysostom, then, the various differences in the Gospels actually are a demonstration of their truth, showing that their records of the events were not part of a human conspiracy to have an exact beat-by-beat chronology. Ancient peoples also, generally speaking, did not write down records of events only for the purpose of keeping records. Rather, their goal was to convey the causes and meaning of events so that the reader might learn from them and change his life accordingly. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus says this explicitly in his Histories:

Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his research so that human events do not fade with time. May the great and wonderful deeds—some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians—not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other.7

If history in the ancient world was written to discern the causes of specific events, for what purpose were the books of the Bible written? While the individual purpose of each book varies depending on the human author and time and place in which the book was written, the biblical authors are explicit that they wrote specifically for us to believe in God as revealed by Jesus and be faithful to him:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.

[…]

This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.8

In other words, there are many things about Jesus’ life that John the Theologian could have written down, but he chose to write down these specific things in this order so that we may believe that Jesus is the Son of God and have life by believing in him. In this sense Scripture can be viewed like we would view a movie; everything that ends up in the final shot of a scene is there because the director deliberately intended for it to be there to tell the story he wants to tell. Similarly, the specific events and ways in which events are described in the Bible are there because the human author (and God who inspired the human author) intended them to be there.

The fact that John carefully composed and selected what events he would narrate from Jesus’ life relates to another important difference between ancient and modern ways of thinking: ancient peoples viewed physical reality and meaning as inherently and necessarily connected. That is to say, the ancients did not view anything that occurred in the world as accidental or meaningless. This can be seen in the ancient practice of dream interpretation, in which dreams during sleep were considered to be potential messages from spirits or other higher beings rather than random brain activity during sleep. This happens many times in the Bible, perhaps most prominently in the book of Daniel, where the Prophet Daniel interprets a dream for King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon which tells of future events:

The king answered and said to Daniel, whose name was Belshazzar, “Can you report the dream that I saw and its decision to me?” Daniel answered before the king and said, “The secret that the king inquired is not of wise men, magicians, enchanters, and soothsayers to report to the king. But it is God in heaven who reveals mysteries, and he has made what is necessary to happen at the final days known to King Nebuchadnezzar.”9

The twentieth century St. Nikolai Velimirovich goes beyond the interpretation of dreams, saying that all of Scripture, and indeed all of creation is permeated by symbolism which reveals the nature of reality and God to us:

Many people in the West think of the mysticism of Eastern Christianity as something unreal and imaginary, as a dreamy and vague thinking in the clouds. I will try in the following pages to prove the contrary to that opinion.

Our Christian mysticism is wholly different from Buddhist mysticism just as much as it is from modern materialism. It is a vision of realities beyond and through transparent symbols and signs of the material universe. This is one of the fundamental teachings of our ancient Church of Christ, based upon Scripture and the Fathers.

It is true that there were some persons in the Western World, among Germans, Dutch, Spaniards, French, English, and others who were great mystics. But our mysticism is not individualistic but collective. Our Church as a whole, from the beginning, has been mystical in its interpretation of the visible universe, of things and events, as well as of man’s and mankind’s life and destiny.10

We will return to the topic of symbolism in the Bible in more depth in part four. May God continue to enlighten us to the meaning of Holy Scripture through the prayers of his most pure mother and all the saints!

Discussion Questions:

  1. How is the purpose of biblical history different from the way we usually think about history today?
  2. What do the differences between the Gospel accounts show us about the authors and their message?
  3. How does knowing that Scripture was written “so that we may believe” influence the way you read it?

________

1 John 20:30-31 RSV.
2 Fr. Philip Zymaris was my professor of liturgics at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. This phrase was often said by him in his classes and continues to be said by him to this day.
3 Mark 5:21-43.
4 Matthew 9:18-26.
5 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 1, Chapter 1. Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf Editions.
6 St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily 1. Translated by John Henry Parker.
7 Herodotus, The Histories, Book 1, Chapter 1. Translated by Andrea Purvis.
8 John 20:30-31, 21:24-25 RSV.
9 Daniel 2:26-32, Theodotion.
10 St. Nikolai Velimirovich, “The Universe as Signs and Symbols: An Essay on Mysticism in the Eastern Church.” Edited by Sergei D. Arhipov.