History belongs to God, and the way we study it can either help us understand Him better or drive us away from Him. We have been discussing this reality for several weeks now as we interact with the history of the Scriptures and its relation to the doctrine of inerrancy. There are several key aspects of history that may yet help us wrestle with this relationship: selectivity, artistry, and mental pictures.
Key to properly evaluating historical writing is understanding that not all writers communicate in the same way, nor do they communicate the same details. We recall that all writings, and particularly the writings of the Bible, have meaning and agenda behind them. Theology and history go together. But theological agenda requires communicating the truths of the actual events in such a way as to highlight the point of the agenda, the point of the author. Again, we stress the importance of not seeing this as a contamination of truth, but an inherent part of communicating the real truth. As people critique the Scriptures on their historical accuracy this is important to remember. The principles of historical selectivity and artistry help resolve some of the tensions that people find in the history of the Bible.
Challenging inerrancy on historical grounds has long been a trend of Biblical critics. They often pay attention to so-called discrepancies within the Gospel accounts. It is obvious to even the most novice reader of the four Biblical Gospels that they are telling the same general story. And yet it is equally obvious that in the details the four accounts can differ. So, for example Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record that Jesus heals a man possessed of a demon, and also that after the demon is cast out of the man it goes into a herd of pigs. But Matthew records that there were “two demon-possessed men” (Matt. 8:28), while Mark and Luke mention only one. Should we understand this as a contradiction? Not when we remember that all historical writings utilize variation and contain different theological agendas. Historical selectivity says that a single writer may include and exclude various details in order to focus the reader on the point of his writing. It does not make his writing less true, only different from the writing of other authors. Vern Poythress explains:
Each of the four Gospels gives us the truth about the life of Jesus. No one Gospel is exhaustive, nor does it claim to be – each is selective. And each makes choices about how it is going to tell the history. Each is interested in highlighting theological significances and relationships to the Old Testament. (Inerrancy and the Gospels, 74)
Critics read the Bible and often find what they immediately identify as contradictions. In the case of the demoniac they would assert that either Mark and Luke are only telling part of the story or Matthew is adding to it. They would conclude that this is a contradiction. But the principles of historical selectivity and artistry actually remind us that not all historical writers communicate the same way. Each has a different agenda and each is telling the truth. By not mentioning the second man Luke and Mark are not denying his presence, they are simply focusing on a different point. If they had stated, “There was only one demon-possessed man, not two” that would be a contradiction, but that isn’t what they do. Instead the compress the story for purposes of their own agenda.
Part of the problem lies in the way we think about historical accounts. Sometimes our expectations about what makes a trustworthy account do not accord with what we find. Often this happens as we formulate mental pictures of the account. The picture we have in our mind may or may not conform to the reality of the event, but in part we can’t help but formulate this picture. When, however, our mental picture of the event does not match the actual account it is we who need to change, not the text. An example is useful here.
In both Matthew and Luke we find the account of Jesus healing the centurion’s servant. In Matthew we read that Jesus speaks with the centurion himself, but in Luke we find that Jesus spoke with intermediaries: Jewish elders (Luke 7:3-4) and the centurion’s friends (7:6). If we read Matthew’s accounts and populate our mind with the images from that account we would picture Jesus and the centurion standing before him talking. This is our mental-picture of the truth. Poythress gives us a helpful description of a mental-picture theory and what it does. He writes:
A “mental-picture” theory of truth expects that a true account will produce in readers a mental picture in direct correspondence to the actual events. Ideally, such a picture would enjoy a one-to-one correspondence. Each participant in the events would correspond to a person present in the mental picture. The sequence of events would correspond in one-to-one fashion to a sequence of mental pictures. The positions of the persons would correspond to the positions in the mental picture. And so on. If we push expectations far enough in this direction, we might call the result a “video-recording” concept of truth. A “true” narrative, according to this theory, produces a mental picture equivalent to a video recording of the entire episode. (49)
The problem, of course, lies in the correspondence of our mental-picture with the truth of the actual events. In the case of Matthew’s account of healing of the centurion’s servant we do not picture the elders or friends from Luke’s account, nor do we picture the centurion some distance away sending these emissaries to meet Jesus. Thus, our mental picture does not accord with the actual telling of this story in Luke’s Gospel. What are we to make of this discrepancy?
The problem lies with our expectations. The reality is that neither Matthew nor Luke give us very much detail about the event. Certainly nothing close enough to a “video recording” theory of truth. Poythress notes that even video-recording only gives us one camera location, one camera angle, specific lighting, specific placement of the microphone, and specific lens focus. Our mental picture actually views the scene from a greater perspective than even this. But of course that’s just not the way the human communication works. Verbal and written communication does not provide us with all that detail, and it certainly doesn’t do that and maintain the specific theological agenda it has set for itself. We know this implicitly, and yet we set our mental-picture of the truth as the actual standard for the event. That is where the failure lies. Poythress notes:
What has gone wrong with the mental-picture theory of truth? It does not respect the nature of verbal communication as sparse. We may wonder whether it is contaminated with a desire for complete and even absolute knowledge – divine knowledge. In an approach like this, anything short of exhaustive divine knowledge might be regarded as defective. (50)
The problem, then, lies with us and our expectations, not with God’s Word.
We will look at more examples like this (and clarify the example of the centurion’s servant), but the point I want to stress is that we must be careful about identifying “contradictions” in the pages of Scripture. When we are confronted with tensions or seeming discrepancies we must ask questions about our expectations. We must confront the realities of historical writing. If there are problems the most likely answer is that our standards for true historical writings are not justified. A proper understanding of historical writing can allow us to maintain a healthy view of Biblical inerrancy in the face of historical criticism.
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