Reporting the truth

As a journalist, I’m used to the accusation that you can’t believe anything you read in the news. Let me be the first to admit that we’re not perfect. But I wonder if you’ve ever read a few different reports about the same topic, and thought, hang on, these are not quite the same, they must be unreliable.

I’ve come across a similar accusation about the Bible. People sometimes read the four reports of Jesus’ life – the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – and think hang on, these are not quite the same, they must be unreliable. This suggestion is sometimes made about the claim that Jesus rose from the dead as the four accounts have differences in detail. Did Mary go to the empty tomb alone, or did other women go with her? Was there one angel at the tomb or two? Did the women tell anyone what they saw or not? Did the women go to the tomb just after sunrise or while it was still dark? Did the women only go to the tomb once or did they go back a second time with Peter? It depends which Gospel you read, University of North Carolina professor Bart Erhman concludes.

As with the news, understanding more about how the Gospels were produced helps clarify that they’re still reliable historical documents despite differences in detail. In fact, these differences make them more reliable, not less.

Rules guide the production of news

There’s a set of conventions journalists follow when reporting quotes. It’s acceptable to paraphrase, stripping out jargon but keeping the meaning the same. It’s okay to quote one sentence of a interview, close the quote marks, leave the next few sentences of the interview out, and then quote another.

There are also conventions about what order we arrange information in. The most important information needs to be at the beginning as most readers won’t read to the end of my news stories. But different publications have different ideas about what the most important information is. I’ve covered speeches, for example, and watched rival news outlets pick a completely different angle to lead with.

Figures can also be reported differently. Economic data releases offer the choice of seasonally adjusted figures or trend figures. Big banks disclose both cash profit and net profit figures. Very precise numbers are rounded to different numbers of decimal places, depending on style. American business news may or may not have dollar values converted into Australian dollars, depending on who reports it.

The Gospels aren’t news reports. The first one to be written down was written within a generation of Jesus’ life, which seems like a fairly generous deadline compared to my experience as a breaking news reporter. But there were also conventions that applied to this writing style.

Generic conventions

The Gospels are written in the genre of Greco-Roman biography . When compared to cases in other surviving biographies where the same writer tells the same story differently in different accounts, a set of deliberate compositional devices become evident. New Testament scholar Michael Licona talks about his research into this topic in this video

These compositional devices include:

- Compression, where an author knowingly portrays events over a shorter period of time than they actually occurred in
- Transferral, where one person did or said something, but the author attributes the words or deeds to the person who caused them to do or say it
- Spotlighting, where an author focuses on one person in a scene but doesn’t mention others who were also involved
- Displacement, where an author knowingly removes an event from its original context and transplants it in another.

These conventions help explain the differences between the four accounts of the resurrection. For example, the writers offer different lists of women who visited the empty tomb. Luke lists Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna and “the others”, while John only mentions Mary Magdalene. This appears to be an example of the spotlighting device – multiple women went to Jesus’ empty tomb to anoint his body with spices, but John only highlights Mary, knowingly. The angels receive similar treatment. Matthew mentions one angel, Mark shows a young man in a white robe, Luke lists two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning and John has two angels. This spotlighting of one angel in two of the gospels doesn’t prevent there from being another angel alongside him.

It seems the device of compression is used to describe Peter’s involvement. Luke says the women come back from the tomb and tell the disciples what they’ve seen, then Peter gets up and goes to see the tomb for himself. John says Mary goes to the tomb, runs back to Peter and the beloved disciple to tell them it’s empty, they all go back to the tomb, and then the men go home and Mary stays. It appears that Luke is knowingly compressing the narrative, giving the reader the gist while following the rules of the genre. Mark offers an extremely compressed account, concluding with the women fleeing from the tomb and not saying anything to anyone because they were afraid. But in other versions, they tell the disciples. Mark’s knowing compression is evident: if the women didn’t say anything to anyone immediately, they must have said something to someone later, or he wouldn’t have known about it.

Audience expectations

The readers or hearers of the Gospels would have expected them to embody eyewitness testimony, professor emeritus at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, Richard Bauckham points out. Readers or hearers would be alert to indicators of who the eyewitnesses were, he says. So he points out a phenomenon where key people in the stories are named, and lots of minor characters are anonymous, but there are some minor characters who are named. He concludes that these minor, named characters, who had met Jesus, would have told people the stories that appear in the Gospels before they were written down, and these oral traditions were transmitted under their names.

This provides an insight into the different names we get in different accounts of the women at the empty tomb. It’s a modern misunderstanding of the context to say that the lists of named women must be complete, and any differences are contradictions. We can understand the named women as the eyewitnesses who passed on the story of finding the tomb empty. The writers are letting their audience know they got this information from Mary, or Joanna, and she was there, and you can go ask her and check if you want.

Oral tradition

The witnesses of Jesus would have told the stories of his life over and over before the Gospels were written, and critics say the stories were changed in the retelling. But this also ignores context. Professor of Middle Eastern New Testament Studies Kenneth Bailey, who spent 40 years living in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus, outlines three types of storytelling in Middle Eastern culture:

• Informal, uncontrolled oral tradition. Also known as rumour transmission, these stories are not key to community life and may get changed completely.
• Formal, controlled oral tradition. This includes the memorisation of the entire Qur’an.
• Informal, controlled oral tradition. This features proverbs, poetry, parables and accounts of important figures, which sounds like the Gospels.

Stories in the informal, controlled oral tradition are passed on in public gatherings, with the community exercising control over how the tradition is recited. The main lines of the story can’t be changed, but the storyteller has the flexibility to tell it their own way or using their own words. Jesus’ followers would have been taking care to preserve the tradition in this way to affirm their unique identity, Kenneth Bailey says.

It follows that if the storytellers could use their own words, there are remnants of the different oral performances in the written accounts. This might explain why Matthew describes an angel of the Lord with clothes as white as snow, while in Mark, there’s a young man in a white robe, and in John, the angels are simply wearing white. In Matthew the women go to look at the tomb at dawn, in Mark they go just after sunrise, in Luke they go very early in the morning and in John Mary goes while it was still dark. The main lines of the story are the same – there was at least one angel in white, the women go to the tomb very early in the morning – but each tells the story in his own words.

More reliable, not less

The differences in the gospels make them more reliable as eyewitness testimony, not less. Former Anglican bishop Tom Wright explains that if the four accounts were a fiction, or written very late, their inconsistencies would be ironed out to make everything look right. He and many other scholars have pointed out that all four accounts say that women, not men, were the first witnesses of the empty tomb. But women weren’t considered credible witnesses in legal cases in Jesus’ day. So if the early church had needed to fabricate a story, then writing down four accounts of women finding the empty tomb would have been the last thing they would have done.

We also have four separate accounts, not only one, which is like being able to read a story in four different news outlets. And when we compare the similarities in these accounts, instead of the differences, the story checks out. After Jesus died and was buried, all four accounts say his tomb was empty. And that’s definitely a truth worth reporting.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-person-doing-paperwork-7681419/