My last post was an obvious (I hope) attempt to parody some of the excesses of Higher Criticism and it’s devotees.
Now I would like to tell you how I wound up posting such a piece.
As I was in the final stages of the painting that I featured in the aforementioned post (Copper Pot), I ended up thinking a good bit about just how literally I should render a few things, like the pattern on the china.
It occured to me that this process could be analagous to writing, and I thought how it might apply to the Gospels particularly.
There at least a couple of big mistakes one could make about the painting. One would be to think that it was a complete fabrication, a product solely of the imagination. This might lead to absurdities like finding all kinds of hidden meanings where there are none, like the Higher Critic of my parody piece.
The other extreme would be to assume that it was like a photograph, and that even the smallest details were a verbatim reproduction, an exact copy of concrete reality. This might lead to equal absurdities, like if someone were to ask me where they could buy the particular china pattern on the little dishes.
In this particular painting, I simplified and muted the pattern on the china in order that it not draw undue attention in the overall composition. So, in a sense, I did fudge a bit, but that’s my job. Certain shadows are deepened, certain colors are amplified, edges are blurred or sharpened. If I blur the edge of a pear, I doubt anyone would accuse me of asserting that pears are fuzzy, or would assume that I need new glasses.
The truth is that it is a painting, a work of art representing real things, but crafted in such a way as to emphasize certain aspects of reality while downplaying others. All the items depicted are real and could be identified by anyone who bothered to rummage through all the junk in my studio (I love flea markets).
I find reality endlessly fascinating and full of surprises. I strive to be faithful to reality, but not obsessed with minute, photographic detail.
BIG RED DISCLAIMER – Unlike Jimmy or Michelle, I am not an apologist. I am not a Bible or a literary scholar. I do not claim to know how the Gospels were written, let alone how Plenary Inspiration would work. I am just an artist speculating wildly on how it might have been. If I venture into heresy or nonsense, I am counting on Jimmy and his readers to put me straight.
Based on my experience as an artist, and applying what I know about the creative process to the Gospel writers, I think that I might venture to make a few assertions;
1) The Gospel accounts are faithful representations of real events, but this does not mean that we should expect the same level of detail or attention to exact chronology that we might find in, say, a modern legal document. The writers were concerned primarily that people understand Who Jesus is and what He did, and not with the minutiae of his daily life. We know that Hebrew writers (as well as their audience) were less concerned with the sequence of events than with the substance and meaning of events.
2) The Gospel writers made full use of their human creative faculties (under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit) to emphasize certain aspects of Jesus’ life and message, while downplaying others. For instance, Jesus’ life as a youth simply doesn’t figure as prominently into the proclamation of the Gospel as His passion and death. The writers wanted to present all that was essential, with little extraneous material. Deciding what to include is the first creative step. Some gospel writers included more, some less, but all are faithful representations of real words and events.
3) Being, in some measure, free in setting down the events of Jesus’ life, the Gospel writers may have used different creative or poetic methods to emphasize certain aspects of His teaching. Placing Him in different settings, or at various times, the writers may have symbolically emphasized the substance of His teaching. We needn’t insist, for instance, that the Sermon on the Mount really happened on a mountain or hill. It may have, but it is not essential. Neither could we call this a "mistake" or an "error" any more than my changing the china pattern in my painting was an error. It was a creative choice that placed the non-essential at the service of the truly essential. Both the hyper-literal and the ultra-liberal interpretations would be wrong. The china dish is real, but the pattern is simplified. The pattern is not the essence of the dish, as it would continue to be a dish even with no pattern at all.
In an age before cameras, if I were asked to make a visual record of some object or person, I like to think that I could take some artistic license without being accused of lying or making a mistake, especially if I enjoyed plenary inspiration. We can trust that God guided the process, and that the creative input of the Gospel writers only served to draw out and clarify the essential truth of the historical events depicted.
JIMMY ADDS: Tim, if the painting thing doesn’t work out, you should try apologetics!
Tangential note:
Many years ago, a friend and I carried out a similar satire of source-criticism style higher criticism by going through the Good News Bible and analyzing the very simple gesture cartoons with which it is illustrated, working out a reasonably self-consistent method of reliably attributing particular illustrations to hypothetical artists, variously identified as “the C artist,” “the A artist,” “the N artist,” and so on. I don’t remember all the details any more, but I could still pick out a “C artist” illustration easily — and so could anyone else who understood the principles. 😉
So if certain historical circumstances of the Gospels’ stories have been “fudged” in order to emphasize the main point of those stories, how do we decide what that point is so we can know which are the true facts? Or do we not need to worry about that because God inspired even the “fudged” parts?
Lovely post, Tim!
And I can’t wait to see more of you work when you get your website set up!
I want to be careful, here, to make clear that I believe the Gospels to be very reliable historical documents.
To say that a minor detail of sequence or setting may have been “fudged” is not the same as saying that it is “wrong”.
We must interpret the Bible in it’s cultural context, and to Hebrew writers things like exact chronology and location were simply not as big a deal as they are for many modern readers.
Let’s say I was trying to tell someone about a phone conversation I had with a friend last week. For the sake of simplicity or brevity, I might actually leave out the fact that the discussion happened over the course of two or three phone calls. By leaving that out, the content or substance of the conversation is “compressed” in the listener’s mind into one event, which, in a sense, it is. It is one event that, in fact, was spread out over multiple phone calls.
For me to tell this person that two of the calls were made from my house, and one from my car, might be a useless bit of trivia that would only serve to take their attention away from the substance of the conversation that I had with my friend.
Compression is one example of how I think the Gospel writers might have worked, at times.
When we see apparent contradictions between two or three accounts of the same event, therefore, we should not assume that one of the writers simply botched it. If one says that Jesus cursed the fig tree on his way to the Temple, and another says that he did it on his way back from the Temple, the important thing is to attend to the cursing of the fig tree, and not to get hung up on what are relatively trivial details of time and place.
Sorry if this is a little long.
Tim, I think this is a good distinction. I have never considered ‘compression’ lying – just brevity so I can get to the point. I have noticed that my children will get hung up on the details of things, and I suspect they are avoiding my real point which is “clean your room” or something. I wonder how many gospel readers do the same thing?
The liberal scholar might say, “Aha! These two accounts of the cursed fig tree contain contradictions, therefore the Bible is historically unreliable.”.
The literalist might say “These two accounts seem different, therefore Jesus must have cursed TWO fig trees, one on his way to the Temple, and one on his way back.”
Both of these would be wrong and unnecessary. I have heard both views.
Hooray! Great stuff, Tim! I have seen exactly what you point out–both the literalist and the liberal side!
I’m not sure what is meant by a “literalist.” If you mean someone who never tries to reconcile events that seem to differ, but just posits two different events, that seems a very peculiar reading of the term.
Can not someone take the text literally, and reconcile the details of the two differing accounts to explain the same event? And indeed isn’t that what Catholic exegetes have been doing for 1900 years before our contemporary enlightenment?
St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Cornelius a Lapide, Maldonatus, and the hundreds of other top-notch exegetes feel no need to admit error about the details in the Sacred Text. Whatever the author asserted, they held, is asserted by the Holy Spirit and is true. Now if there’s some question about what the authors were asserting, and if they could be less precise in thier use of language, that’s a valid point, but it doesn’t cut against a literal reading of the text. It’s just refining what that literal meaning is.
‘zackly.
I am certainly not saying that apparent contradictions can’t be harmonized. Many times they can.
But at times I think those who want badly to interpret every word in a strictly literal sense end up doing mental gymnastics of a kind that are unnecessary and unhelpful.
Believe me, my default mode is to trust the plain sense of the text.