Last month we explored techniques that ancient historical writers—including the biblical authors—employed in their craft. This month we’ll look at more.
In particular, we’ll look at how they reported speeches and conversations. This subject is at the heart of many apologetics discussions. Some authors declare that Jesus never said many of the things the Gospels attribute to him. Others insist that he said each and every one of the precise words that he is recorded as saying.
Where does the truth lie? To determine this, one needs to understand how ancient authors recorded speeches and conversations and how this compares with the way we do.
How We Do It
In historical works, we are precise about reporting someone’s exact words. If you see quotations marks around words, these have to represent exactly what the person said. The author is expected to have consulted a source that gave what the person said verbatim—a source such as an audio or video tape, a court reporter, a stenographer, or at least a journalist who jotted down notes on the spot.
What happens if a historian can’t give exactly what a person says? Depending on the situation, one of a number of things.
Brackets and ellipses are sufficient to handle minor insertions, substitutions, and deletions in quotations. They are used to make minor clarifications and to smooth the way a quote fits in with the flow of what an author is saying. They have to be used sparingly, though. If used too much, the reader will think that the author may be taking undue liberties with the quote and distorting its meaning.
The Rules Go out the Window
Quotations in today’s writings have to obey a rigid set of rules, but there is one place in which our culture throws the rules completely out the window: conversation.
We are much looser about exact wording when we orally report quotations. We have to be. Our memories aren’t as good as tape recorders in preserving precisely what someone said, and English doesn’t have oral equivalents of the punctuation marks we use in writing.
If we want to signal such things, we have to laboriously point them out by saying things like “Those were exactly the words he used” or “He said—quote—I want to go for a walk tonight—unquote.” Most of the time we don’t do such things, and our hearers know that most of what we tell them will be paraphrase rather than verbatim quotation.
But paraphrase is a matter of degree, and how much of it people do can vary from culture to culture. Middle Eastern cultures, such as the one in which the Bible was written, can be particularly open to paraphrase.
How the Ancients Did It
There were devices that the ancients had to signal the transition in texts into direct discourse. The word hoti is used to do this in New Testament Greek, for example. But this word doesn’t function exactly like a quotation mark. It doesn’t guarantee that what follows is verbatim.
The result is often surprising for English speakers used to seeing quote marks in their Bibles, but the upshot is this: The biblical text does not make claims one way or the other about whether the conversations it reports are verbatim.
The technical apparatus we use to make such claims in our texts did not exist when the Bible was written, and so such claims simply aren’t made. This means that we have to be aware that what we are reading may be paraphrase.
Since electronic recording didn’t exist in the ancient world, and since stenographers weren’t that common (though several systems of shorthand did exist), people mostly relied on their memories of what had been said, sometimes supported by hastily jotted notes.
The result was that ancient audiences had a much lower insistence on verbatim accounts. They expected paraphrase.
There were exceptions to this rule. For example, a sage might require his disciples to memorize and repeat back his teachings exactly. Religious rites might (or might not) have fixed forms that priests could be counted on to recite. There might be stock phrases used on specific occasions (“Let the games begin!”). But these were the exceptions. Paraphrase was the rule.
Beyond Paraphrase
In fact, the ancients sometimes went beyond paraphrase. Sometimes they composed speeches and put them on the lips of historical figures. We know this because they admit doing it.
A historian might want to record a general’s thoughts on the eve of a historic battle. These might be expressed in the address he gave to his troops, but there was little chance that a transcript of it was made, and the historian probably didn’t have access to anyone who was likely to remember precisely what was said.
Faced with a situation like this, the historian might compose what could be called a “type speech”—that is, a speech of the type commanders typically give to their troops in such situations.
The Church Teaches
How are we to apply all of this to Scripture? Pope Pius XII noted that “the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech that we use today, but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East” (Divino Afflante Spiritu 36).
Nevertheless, the fact that Scripture is divinely inspired protects it from error: “For of the modes of expression that . . . human language used to express its thought, none is excluded from the sacred books, provided the way of speaking adopted in no wise contradicts the holiness and truth of God. . . . For as the substantial Word of God became like to men in all things except sin, so the words of God, expressed in human language, are made like to human speech in every respect, except error” (DAS 37).
Thus Pius notes that Scripture often contains “so-called approximations, and certain hyperbolical modes of expression, nay, at times, even paradoxical, that even help to impress the ideas more deeply on the mind” (DAS 37).
Such modes of expression are often the solution to charges of error made against Scripture: “When then such modes of expression are met within the sacred text, which, being meant for men, is couched in human language, justice demands that they be no more taxed with error than when they occur in the ordinary intercourse of daily life. By this knowledge and exact appreciation of the modes of speaking and writing in use among the ancients can be solved many difficulties, which are raised against the veracity and historical value of Scripture” (DAS 39).
Scripture
Christians have recognized since the beginning that there is paraphrase in the Gospels. After all, the ancients—including the original audience—expected it. But how much paraphrase is there, and do the biblical authors ever go beyond it?
Many contemporary critics of the Gospels assert that they do, and on a regular basis. The Jesus Seminar is particularly known for claiming that Jesus said virtually nothing that the Gospels record, but others have made less extreme claims along the same lines.
What evidence is there regarding this?
It depends on what one is talking about. Consider Matthew 8:1–3, where we read: “When he [Jesus] came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him; and behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.’ And he stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, ‘I will; be clean.’ And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.”
How likely is it that someone transcribed this conversation when it took place? Not good—it’s too minor an incident. Since Jesus wasn’t giving a teaching here, what is the likelihood that his disciples would have memorized what he said? Again, not good. At a minimum, we’re probably dealing with paraphrase.
The incident is so minor and the exchange so brief, though, that we may be dealing with a type speech. People may have remembered that Jesus healed the leper but not precisely what was said on the occasion. After all, this was one miracle among countless ones Jesus did.
It isn’t unreasonable to see this as a reconstructed “type conversation,” with the leper saying the type of thing people would say to Jesus when asking to be healed and Jesus saying the type of thing he customarily replied with.
If it’s not out of place to regard some of the minor, “housekeeping conversations” as type speeches, what about places where Jesus is giving a teaching?
We saw last month that Matthew likes to bring together and organize Jesus’ teachings, whereas the other Gospels have the same teachings spread out in different places. A plausible explanation for this is that Matthew is just an organizer. Perhaps, not having at hand a detailed chronology of what Jesus said at which points during his three-year ministry, he chose to group together things that Jesus said on similar subjects, regardless of when they may have been said.
This raises the possibility that individual speeches Jesus gives in the Gospels represent the type of things he customarily taught. Jesus probably gave the same teachings on a lot of different occasions, with somewhat different wording. Within the license that the ancients had to paraphrase and reorganize material, many of Jesus’ individual teaching speeches in the Gospels may represent the teachings he commonly gave, without it being necessarily implied that he gave this particular teaching on this particular occasion.
They might be type speeches in this sense, but not in another sense: They don’t represent the type of teachings people only imagined Jesus would give.
This is contrary to what many higher critics today claim. Their idea is that the early Christians felt comfortable freely attributing teachings to Jesus that in fact came up in the Christian community after Jesus’ time. In other words, they felt comfortable projecting back onto Jesus’ lips teachings from a later stage of Christian development.
This is not borne out by the Gospels. It’s true that the questions that arose at a later stage of Christian history sometimes affect what was written in the Gospels, but the result is not that the evangelists project later material back onto Jesus.
For example, the Pharisees ask Jesus about why his disciples eat with unwashed hands, contrary to Jewish tradition. He replies by saying, “Do you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and so passes on?” to which Mark adds the parenthetical comment, “Thus he declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:18–19).
The question of whether all foods are clean didn’t arise in the Christian community until well after Jesus’ ministry. For a time, this was a bitterly divisive question, as illustrated by Romans and Galatians.
Christians on both sides would have loved to cite words from the Master to unambiguously support their position, and would certainly have done so if such words were available—or if they felt at liberty to freely attribute new material to Jesus.
But that isn’t what we find in Mark 7. Instead of making up a pro-cleanness quote and attributing it to Jesus, Mark draws out the implications of an existing saying of Jesus. This is a risky move because the saying did not deal with whether all foods are clean but with whether one needed to wash his hands. Because of this, Mark’s reader may not agree that he is accurately drawing out the implications of what Jesus said.
The fact that Mark employs a quotation that less clearly supports his position suggests that he doesn’t feel at liberty to make up a new quote.
This isn’t the only evidence that the evangelists felt this way. In addition, the evangelists never attribute to Jesus anything known to have been said by Paul.
Paul’s influence in early Christianity—particularly the strands represented by the Gospels—was enormous. He was the most prolific author of the age, and his words carried tremendous weight. If anyone was in a position to popularize ideas that might be attributed to Jesus, it was Paul.
One can’t help be struck, then, by just how different Paul sounds from Jesus. If we take the set of things Paul wrote (construed conservatively or liberally) and compare it to what Jesus says in the Gospels, we find virtually no common quotes.
In the clearest instance where we do find one—1 Timothy 5:18—Paul expressly indicates that he is quoting another scriptural source, which can only be Luke 10:7. This has led many to say that it isn’t Paul writing, because they don’t think Luke’s Gospel was written during Paul’s life. But all are agreed that in this case, Paul (or pseudo-Paul) is quoting the Gospels rather than vice versa. We simply do not find the reverse happening.
If the evangelists felt free to attribute non-original material to Jesus, they would have done so with Pauline material, and they didn’t. This means that when we are reading Jesus’ teachings, we at most are dealing with paraphrases of things Jesus actually said and not free compositions of things later Christians might have wished he had said.
The amount of paraphrase is likely to vary depending on the text in question. When Jesus is giving short teachings easily suited to memorization—like the Lord’s Prayer or the Beatitudes—then there will be less paraphrasing.
If the passage is longer, exhibits less structure, and is harder to memorize, there is likely to be more paraphrasing in it. Some biblical authors may also paraphrase more than others. It is quite likely, for example, that John paraphrases more than the Synoptic evangelists, given the quite different style of the discourses in his Gospel.
However much paraphrasing there may be, the material is not simply made up. The text may not always be conveying the exact words Jesus used (what has been called the ipsissima verba), but it is his true voice that is speaking (the ipsissima vox).
In the absence of quote marks, and given the way speeches were reported in the ancient world, the text does not claim to offer Christ’s ipsissima verba. What the text does claim to offer—and what not only the historical evidence but also the guarantee of divine inspiration indicate that it does offer—is Christ’s ipssima vox.