Patchworking the Bible
Reflections on the Lectionary for December 29th
How did it come to pass that we have a story like the gospel reading in the lectionary for this week?
I think it’s worth pausing to think about that question. It’s almost always useful to investigate the origins of the stories we find in the Bible; all biblical texts have histories and contexts that are important to pay attention to if we want to understand them. But once we start to pay attention in that way, some passages stick out more than others, for one reason or another: they might be especially detailed, strange, enigmatic, poetic, or patchy. In the case of Luke 2:41-52, the story of a twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem, the text raises some specific questions. Why does this story appear in the Gospel of Luke and nowhere else? Why does Luke not tell us much else about Jesus’ childhood, and why do the other canonical gospels skip over this part of his life? Where might Luke have gotten this anecdote, and why did he feel the need to include it at all, when so little else from this time of Jesus’ life was included in the New Testament? And why does this story about Jesus keep returning to echoes of stories about Samuel and his mother Hannah?
There are many different theories of how the canonical gospels were composed, and scholars still argue vigorously over it. But if we take the model that has been prominent for a while now—the one often called the “priority of Mark,” because it assumes that the Gospel of Mark was written first and that Matthew, Luke, and John followed after—we can sketch out how a story like this one might have ended up in the Bible. Let’s say Mark was composed sometime around the year 70, and that it was something like a first pass at the story. (I love this recent book, if you’re curious to learn more about how the composition of Mark might have worked and how other writers might have used Mark as a jumping-off point). Mark’s gospel might have been meant to be a fully-formed work, or it might have been intended as a set of notes to be improved upon by others (as the book linked above suggests), but in either case at least the authors we know as Matthew and Luke felt compelled to add to it. Luke, in particular, is upfront about this. In the first few verses of his version (what we now know as the Gospel of Luke), Luke points out that others had produced written accounts of Jesus’ life, and that he decided to do his own investigations and write his own version of the story. So Luke creates a new edition of Mark’s basic story, but he adds a lot of flourish to Mark’s words, and he adds a great deal of material to supplement what Mark had done.
In some cases, it’s pretty clear (if we are tracking with this model; it looks different if we assume that Matthew’s gospel was first, for example) that Matthew and Luke both had access to the same extra materials. The stories of Jesus’ iconic sermon, for example—the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke—seem to rely on the same source. We can tell that because even though Matthew and Luke’s versions are different from each other, they are telling parts of the same story in similar ways, and Mark doesn’t tell that story at all. The story had to have come from somewhere, because the parallels are too strong. A lot of Jesus’ teachings are like this—they show up in both Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark, which leads us to believe that Matthew and Luke shared a special source—perhaps a collection of Jesus’ most prominent or memorable teachings. (This is the hypothetical source that many scholars call “Q,” if you’ve studied this stuff before).
But in other cases, things are less clear. Matthew and Luke both contain material that neither the other gospel nor Mark contains, so it’s harder to know where it comes from. The Christmas stories are actually a great place to look at this dynamic, so you can pay attention if you happen to end up at a Nativity play this week. Mark doesn’t have a birth narrative at all, so Matthew and Luke couldn’t rely on that. But Matthew and Luke both do have extensive and complicated birth narratives. The problem is that their two birth narratives have almost nothing to do with each other. Matthew’s story has magi, Herod’s paranoid slaughter of the innocents, and Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt with the newborn Jesus. Luke’s version has shepherds, an imperial census, and a whole saga about finding a place to have the baby. Both accounts contain a genealogy, but the two genealogies have very little in common. (Your Christmas pageant might have Mary riding a donkey, but neither Matthew nor Luke have that part of the story; you have to go to a noncanonical book, the Protoevangelium of James, to find that detail). So, Matthew and Luke both found themselves without any guidance from Mark on the subject of Jesus’ birth, and they both freelanced a bit. It might be that they had special sources to describe these parts of the story—recollections, family histories, written accounts, and so forth. But it is more likely that they invented these stories to fit a gap in the story of Jesus’ life.
Stay with me. I know it’s provocative to suggest that the gospel writers were not always relying on ironclad historical fact. But the truth is that Matthew and Luke were faced with a conundrum. They were writing two or three generations after the events they were describing (around the year 80, probably), and describing the events of Jesus’ birth and childhood that likely took place between 4 BCE and around 10 CE, and they probably had no written sources to rely on. Jesus was obviously getting famous by the time these gospel-writers started writing in the late first century, but decades earlier there would have been no reason for anyone to have written down an account of his birth and childhood. For 99.99% of people in the ancient world, no one ever wrote down anything about their life, and they were born and they died hidden from the eyes of history. That’s how Jesus was born—in the same obscurity as everyone else. It was only later that he became prominent enough that people became curious about his origins.
So Matthew and Luke both did their best to fill the gaps. You can see clues in their stories that show you how they did it. Think about what you do when you need to patch something—some drywall, the knees of some pants, or a broken tile on a floor. The best way to patch something like that is to find something very similar, something that won’t stand out against the rest, something that fits at least a little, and try to make it blend in. You find another piece of drywall that you can paint the right color, or you find a similar color fabric and sew it in, or you try to find a matching tile from somewhere else. Matthew and Luke did the same thing. Matthew’s solution was to take the structure of a story from elsewhere in sacred texts—the story of Pharoah’s paranoia and murderous plot when Moses was born—and rework it to apply to Jesus. Pharoah became Herod, and Jochebed became Mary and Joseph. The innocent baby boys were killed in both stories, and in both stories the special child—Moses in one, Jesus in the other—was spared by the actions of others. Matthew even has Jesus and his parents travel to Egypt, just to complete the symmetry.
Luke took a different path, but he used some of the same techniques. For his scriptural model, Luke chose not Moses like Matthew did, but instead Hannah and Samuel. The Magnificat, Mary’s song, is patterned closely on Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel. Jesus’ presentation in the temple parallels that of Samuel. And the gospel passage in the lectionary this week, the story of a twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, is pieced together from bits of the story of Hannah and Samuel. 1 Samuel 1:3 has Hannah and her husband take an annual pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem, and so Luke describes Joseph and Mary as doing the same thing. And Luke’s concluding words for this passage in 2:52 say that “Jesus increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor.” This is a close parallel to the way 1 Samuel describes Samuel’s growth and development in 2:26: “Now the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the Lord and with the people.” Luke, likely not in possession of any information about Jesus’ birth, patched the gap in the story with pieces taken from somewhere else, and he blended it in with the rest the best he knew how.
There’s a way to view that process of patching skeptically, as a form of deceit. But if Matthew and Luke had thought of it as deceit, they would have hidden it better. They didn’t think it was deceitful to use the stories of Moses and Samuel to tell the story of Jesus, they thought it honored Jesus and put him in the same category as the heroes of Israel’s past. Matthew and Luke thought that the best way to demonstrate Jesus’ importance was to patch his story with pieces of the stories of other important people.
When we read this story of Jesus in the temple at twelve years old, then, we should understand it that way—as reflecting and participating in the stories of Samuel as he came of age, and therefore reflecting and participating in the story of a people and a nation. Luke didn’t know what Jesus said and did at twelve years old, and he didn’t have any way of finding out, so instead he told the story of what Jesus ought to have done at that age, given his place within the story of his people and his importance in Luke’s own eyes. Luke honored Jesus and elevated his story by linking it to the story of Samuel, and using Samuel’s story to patch over the gaps in Jesus’ story.
That’s a good reminder of what the Bible isn’t, and what is, and how we can think of it as useful. The Bible is not a history book, no matter what some people like to claim; it doesn’t record history in any straightforward or uncomplicated way, and the Bible isn’t even trying to do that. The Bible isn’t anything like a news report or a nonfiction book, trying to be factual or objective. Instead, the Bible is a collection of stories from a dizzying number of perspectives, written and rewritten by people who were trying to make sense of their world and trying to make their way through life. The Bible is an archive of experience, and it is a repository of meaning-making. The Bible is the accumulation of centuries of reflection on what’s important, how to belong, how to understand the vagaries of life and its triumphs and disappointments. The Bible never speaks with only one voice, but always with many voices, some of which can be hard to hear.
In a passage like this one from the Gospel of Luke, telling us about an adolescent Jesus gone missing and discovered in the temple, the Bible is passing on to us a practice of sacred imagination, a process by which we can fill the gaps in our own knowledge, and a means by which we can find pieces to fit where something has been missing. The Bible is creative that way, and it offers us creativity, both in how it comes to us through the centuries and how we can use it and make it our own today. We are free to rifle through it, sift its stories, and find something that fits the moment in which we find ourselves today—an experience or a feeling that we somehow share with strangers across centuries. And who knows…maybe for some of us, the thing that fits a space in our life right now is a story of getting lost and being found, of finding our place, of worry that turned out to be needless and of treasuring the odd adventures life throws our way. Maybe that story can patch something for us.