From Timothy Keller’s book “The Reason for God”:
C. S. Lewis was a world-class literary critic. When reading the gospels, he noted: “I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this. Of this [Gospel] text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage . . . or else, some unknown [ancient] writer . . . without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic, realistic narrative. . . .16
Lewis meant that ancient fiction was nothing like modern fiction. Modern fiction is realistic. It contains details and dialogue and reads like an eyewitness account. This genre of fiction, however, only developed within the last three hundred years. In ancient times, romances, epics, and legends were high and remote—details were spare and only included if they promoted character development and drove the plot. That is why if you are reading Beowulf or Iliad you don’t see characters noticing the rain or falling asleep with a sigh. In modern novels, details are added to create the aura of realism, but that was never the case in ancient fiction.
The gospel accounts are not fiction. In Mark 4, we are told that Jesus was asleep on a cushion in the stern of a boat. In John 21 we are told that Peter was a hundred yards out in the water when he saw Jesus on the beach. He then jumped out of the boat and together they caught 153 fish. In John 8, Jesus listened to the men who caught a woman in adultery, we are told he doodled with his finger in the dust. We are never told what he was writing or why he did it. None of these details are relevant to the plot or character development at all. If you or I were making up an exciting story about Jesus, we would include such remarks just to fill out the story’s air of realism. But that kind of fictional writing was unknown in the first century. The only explanation why an ancient writer would mention the cushion, the 153 fish, the doodling in the dust is because the details had been retained in the eyewitnesses’ memory.
Richard Bauckham has compiled a great deal of research by psychologists on the marks of recollective memory. He looks at the marks of eyewitness events and how they differ from speculative or fictional accounts, or of composite historical reconstructions. Recollective memory.is selective—it fixes on unique and consequential events, it retains irrelevant detail (as Lewis observes), it takes the limited vantage of a participant rather than of an omniscient narrator, and it shows signs of frequent rehearsal.17 Bauckham then shows these same marks in gospel narrative. Vivid and important events can stay with you for decades if frequently rehearsed and/or retold. Factor in the fact that disciples in the ancient world were expected to memorize masters’ teachings and that many of Jesus’ statements were presented in a form that was actually deigned for memorization, and you have every reason to trust the accounts.
Bauckham also looks to anthropology for evidence that the gospel writers did not feel free to embellish or fabricate words or events in the life of Jesus. Critical scholars from earlier in the twentieth century assumed the earlier Christians would have used a relatively fluid process for transmitting popular folktales and that they would have felt free to change the tales from the past in order to correspond to their present realities and situation. Bauckham however, cites Jan Vansina;s study of oral traditions in primitive African cultures, in which fictional legends and historical accounts are clearly distinguished from each other and much greater care is taken to preserve historical accounts more accurately. This finding undermines hundreds of years of critical scholarship.
Gospel scholars, from the form critics onward, [believed] that the early Christians in the transmission onward of Jesus traditions would not have made any distinction between the past time of the history of Jesus and their own present because oral societies do not make such distinctions. This is untrue.
. . . . All these revisionist histories completely ignore the growing body of careful scholarship that shows there were a very large number of eyewitnesses to Jesus’s life who lived on for years. As British scholar Vincent Taylor famously remarked, “If the skeptics about the Bible are right, “the disciples must have been translated into heaven immediately after the resurrection.”20 That is the only way that legendary elements could have come into the story of Jesus by the time the gospels were written, but that did not happen. So, ironically, as the popular media is promoting accounts of Jesus’s life based on the highly skeptical biblical scholarship that arose a century ago, the actual foundations of the scholarship are eroding fast.21.
~~Timothy Keller, ‘The Reason for God’, (Penguin Random House LLC, 375 Hudsin St.,New York, NY 10014, penguin.comp), p.110-113
