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Friday, November 18, 2005

About the Gospels

I have often heard people say something about the Gospels that intrigues me: "the gospel writers give us different versions of the same event. >

I found myself thinking "Why shouldn't the gospel writers give us different versions of the same event?  And are we certain that it is the same event, in all cases?"

Thinking here of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew) and the Sermon on the Plain (Luke) as an example.  My own take is that these are 2 separate events.  We already know that the Gospels do not give us a day by day, event by event record of what Jesus did in His 3 years of public ministry. These are Gospels, a brand new genre of literature at the time they were written, and not journalism. Sometimes I think we try to make the Gospels into journalism or a sort of court recording.

So when the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain have much in common, they are not identical.  I think the most like explanation for this is that Jesus gave sermons like this all the time in various and sundry locations. Also I was thinking about the differences in the accounts of Jesus'arrest, trials, crucifixion and resurrection. I have often thought that in our liturgical observations of these events, we do them a disservice by conflating them into 4 days.  Personally I don't see how Jesus could have been celebrating the Last Supper, enduring the agony in the garden, been arrested and had all those trials, interrogations, been flogged, had that conversation with Pilate in time to have been crucified at high noon Friday.  I suspect that there might have been a week at least for all of this to have taken place.

And what a week it must have been for the disciples.  Stress, fear, hope, faith, courage, cowardice they must have experienced the gamut of human emotion as well as gossip, innuendo and maybe even slander. I daresay tempers flared and some disciples probably abandoned Jesus. I can't imagine what it must have been like for them.  One day they were convinced the Messiah was with them, one day they were convinced that God incarnate was among them and the next they see him hauled off as a criminal.

It has been my experience to live through certain traumatic events in the company of others, people of intelligence and integrity, human just as the disciples were human.,  And what I note is that while we agree on the general outline of events, we don't agree 100% on the details,for the simple reason that we were feeling different things at different times and some details were more meaningful to us and others less.

I think that was the experience of the apostles and their fellow disciples. Does that make one account wrong and another right?  Does it make one account accurate and the others not?  I don't think so.  It's not an either/or. It's a both/and.

So it seems to me that the thing to do with the Biblical accounts is to consider them for what they are and not try to force them into what they are not.

I have spent many years exploring provenance, authorship, dating, textual criticism etc. and have come to the conclusion that in my own life such studies have been a source of unbelief, distrust and even sin because this was the only sort of Bible study in which I engaged at the time. Very academic.  

When I first  pursued lectio divina, I found it elusive and challenging because all this other info would pop up and distract me.  But being a stubborn biddy  I persevered and have come to the conclusion that for me, lectio is the better road because through it, scripture gets not only into my mind, but my heart, my frequent thoughts and it is my prayer that it is sinking into my personality and neurons, sinews and neural pathways, changing and refining me.

May the Holy Spirit dance in your heart!!

Sr. Gloriamarie Amalfitano

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