Historiography (As a Literary Genre)

Peter Enns:

All written accounts of history are literary products that are based on historical events that are shaped to conform to the purpose the historian wants to get across. …I want to emphasize as strongly as possible that to explain the nature of historiography in . . . this way is not to paint it in a negative light, as if it is bad historiography because it is biased. The truth of the matter is that all historiography exhibits the interplay between event, presentation, and purpose. To be direct, there is no historiography that does not have a decidedly interpretive element.

(Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005], p. 62.)

Peter Enns:

In 2 Samuel 7:16, the prophet Nathan promises that David’s descendants would still sit on the throne in Jerusalem forever:

Your house and your king will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.

Chronicles reports this same exchange differently in 1 Chronicles 17:14:

I will set him over my house and my kingdom forever, his throne will be established forever.

It is worth noting—to make the somewhat obvious point—that these two accounts report the same event (Nathan’s words to David) in different ways. This is indicative of what we find throughout Chronicles’ historiography—the author shapes the events to suit his theological purpose.

     I want to focus on the first half of these verses. In 2 Samuel, Nathan is speaking to David and refers to “your house . . . your king”—meaning David’s descendants. In Chronicles this becomes “my house . . . my kingdom.” What is happening? In Samuel-Kings, Israel’s future is centered on the perpetuation of the line of David. In Chronicles, which was written after Israel’s return from exile, the focus is no longer David and his descendants but God himself. (When Nathan refers to my house, he does not mean his own! He is speaking for God, as all prophets did.)

     It has been common practice among evangelicals to harmonize accounts such as these, for example, to say that somehow Nathan said both to David (perhaps he had two separate audiences with him) and that Samuel-Kings is reporting one speech while Chronicles is reporting the other. But such an explanation will run into many problems if it is applied consistently wherever one sees diverse accounts of the same phenomenon. To insist that, somehow, Samuel-Kings and Chronicles must say the same thing about the same event tells us more about the modern interpreter than it does about the biblical texts. Moreover, it flies in the face of both the evidence and common sense. The plain fact of the matter is that in Scripture we have two divergent accounts of the same event. The only question before us is how to handle this fact with integrity.

     It may help to look at a more familiar example of this problem: the four Gospels. The fact is that there are four, not one, and they differ. For example, we have the well-known incident of Jesus cleansing the temple. In John it occurs at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry (John 2). In the other three Gospels it occurs at the end of Jesus’ public ministry (the beginning of Passion Week). It is a distortion of the highest order to argue that Jesus must have cleansed the temple twice. For one thing, none of the Gospels say he did it twice. Second, although such a maneuver is motivated by the worthy desire to maintain the historical integrity of the Gospel accounts, it is based on an assumption about what constitutes good historiography that the Gospels themselves do not support, namely, that historiography must maintain chronological order.

     A moment’s examination will show that this is an unwarranted assumption. For example, when I come home from work, my wife may well ask how my day went. Here is one answer to that question:

Well, you’ll never believe the traffic coming home. Horrible. But that was nothing compared to the drive in—so much construction. But the afternoon faculty meeting went well, and I was even able to finish my grading before it began. I also had lunch with some students and that was a good time.

Notice how I reported the “history” of my day to my wife. The first thing I reported was the last thing I did before I came home. Then I jumped to the morning commute, then to the afternoon faculty meeting, then to morning grading, then to lunch. Have I reported my day “inaccurately”? Am I “in error” because I did not maintain a rigid chronological sequence? Perhaps I reported my day in such a way to highlight what I felt was most important (I hate traffic jams with a fiery passion). Now imagine if my wife had called my departmental secretary to ask how my day went (not that the secretary can ever find me). She would get a very different reporting of the basic facts of my day, focusing no doubt on what I did while I was on campus, but it wouldn’t be any less wrong.

     Of course, the Bible is different. It is God’s word. But what is true of all historiography is also true of biblical historiography—it is not objective. In fact—and this is getting more to the heart of the matter—in the strict sense of the word, there really is no such thing as objective historiography. Rather, all attempts to communicate the significance of historical events are shaped according to the historian’s purpose. And in the Old Testament we see this not only in Samuel-Kings alone (as we saw above) but—as if the Holy Spirit could make it any more obvious—in the Bible’s having different perspectives on the same historical events.

(Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005], pp. 64-66.)

Kevin J. Vanhoozer:

Repetition with slight variations was one of the rhetorical tools ancient authors had in their arsenal to reinforce their message or to highlight certain themes.

(Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Augustinian Inerrancy: Literary Meaning, Literal Truth, and Literate Interpretation in the Economy of Biblical Discourse;” In: Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy, gen. eds. J. Merrick, Stephen M. Garrett, [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013], p. 230.)

Gavin Ortlund:

In general, I think the writers of biblical narratives were more comfortable with authorial freedom to alter detail for theological or literary purposes than modern historiography would allow. …the American inerrancy tradition has often understood inerrancy to require the harmonization of details and discrepancies. I don’t think inerrancy pure and proper requires this, however, since inerrancy concerns the meaning of the text, and the text itself should determine its meaning, not modern understandings of historical narration.

(Gavin Ortlund, “A Review Of Five Views On Biblical Inerrancy,” [December 25, 2013], https://truthunites.org/2013/12/25/a-review-of-five-views-on-biblical-inerrancy/.)

John Calvin:

     And his mother and his brethren came to him. There is an apparent discrepancy here between Luke and the other two Evangelists; for, according to their arrangement of the narrative, they represent Christ’s mother and cousins as having come, while he was discoursing about the unclean spirit, while he refers to a different occasion, and mentions only the woman’s exclamation, which we have just now explained. But we know that the Evangelists were not very exact as to the order of dates, or even in detailing minutely every thing that Christ did or said, so that the difficulty is soon removed.

(John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke: Volume Second, trens. William Pringle, [Edinburgh: Printed for the Calvin Translation Society, 1845], on Luke 8:19, p. 89.)

John Stott:

     A second question concerns the Gospels. We must not impose on them our standards of computer accuracy, and expect them to conform to it. Chronology is an example. Matthew and Mark both place Jesus’ visit to Nazareth (together with his synagogue sermon and his rejection by his own people) in the middle of his public ministry. But Luke places it at the very beginning, immediately after his baptism and temptations (Lk 4:14ff.). There is no need, however, to accuse Luke of error. He evidently sees the Nazareth incident as forecasting Jesus’ ministry and rejection. So he puts it at the beginning as a kind of signpost, deliberately presenting his chronology to make a theological point. We must allow every biblical author to lay down his own theological emphases and literary principles, and to abide by them.

(John Stott, Evangelical Truth: A Personal Plea For Unity, Integrity & Faithfulness: Revised Edition, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003], p. 64.)

Robert Letham:

Events are reported in ways that do not accord with twenty-first-century historiography, since they were not set down in the twenty-first century.

(Robert Letham, Systematic Theology, [Wheaton: Crossway, 2019], 6.3.1, p. 194.) Preview.

Clark H. Pinnock, Barry L. Callen:

…the overall impression is of a style of historical narration different from ours and not to be twisted against its will into conformity with ours. We may be creating problems for ourselves because of our unwillingness to let the text be itself. …When we study the Gospels, we find different wordings of the same sayings of Jesus, placed in different settings. In one story Jesus will say something that someone else says in the parallel account. Many questions occur to us: How often did Jesus go up to Jerusalem? On what day was he put to death? What exactly was written on the sign above his head? How often did the cock crow? How interesting it is to compare the catechetical plan of Matthew’s arrangement with Luke’s order and his unique account of Jesus’s journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. In cases such as these, rather than force the material into an unnatural harmony, we should admit that these texts were not written to satisfy modern historians or to conform to our current standards of historiography. They were written to lead people to know and love God and were designed on historiographical principles native to the ancient world. Neither should we charge the Bible with error or struggle to eliminate what we should just accept. If we would stop objecting to the form of the Bible for our own apologetic reasons and let the phenomena be what they are, we could be more relaxed with the Bible and do less violence to the text and ourselves. So many of our difficulties are not in the Bible at all, but in our own heads.

(Clark H. Pinnock, Barry L. Callen, The Scripture Principle: Reclaiming the Full Authority of the Bible: Second Edition, [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006], p. 147.)

Herman Bavinck:

…the historiography of Holy Scripture has a character of its own. Its purpose is not to tell us precisely all that has happened in times past with the human race and with Israel but to relate to us the history of God’s revelation. Scripture only tells us what is associated with that history and aims by it to reveal God to us in his search for and coming to humanity. Sacred history is religious history.

     Considered from the viewpoint and by the standards of secular history, Scripture is often incomplete, full of gaps and certainly not written by the rules of contemporary historical criticism. From this it surely does not follow that the historiography of Scripture is untrue and unreliable. Just as a person with common sense can put up a good logical argument without ever having studied logic, so a reporter can very well offer a true account of what has happened without having first studied the rules of historical criticism. If historical criticism should deny this aspect of real life, it degenerates into hypercriticism and destroys the object it is designed to address. But all the historiography in Holy Scripture bears witness to the fact that it follows a direction of its own and aims at a goal of its own. In its determination of time and place, in the order of events, in the grouping of circumstances, it certainly does not give us the degree of exactness we might frequently wish for. The reports about the main events, say, the time of Jesus’ birth, the duration of his public activity, the words he spoke at the institution of the Lord’s Supper, his resurrection, etc., are far from homogeneous and leave room for a variety of views.

(Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Volume 1: Prolegomena, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003], §. 117, p. 447.)

Michael F. Bird:

     The language of revelation is accommodated to the worldview and expectations of its audience in matters of cosmology and historiography, but the accommodation is never a capitulation to error. God does not speak erroneously nor does he feed us nuts of truth lodged inside shells of falsehood.

(Michael F. Bird, Evangelical Theology: Second Edition, [Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020], 6.3.5.2, pp. 720-721. Cf. Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy, gen. eds. J. Merrick, Stephen M. Garrett, [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013], p. 159.)

Cf. G. W. Bromiley:

…for while it is no doubt a paradox that eternal truth is revealed in temporal events and witnessed through a human book, it is sheer unreason to say that that truth is revealed in and through that which is erroneous.

(G. W. Bromiley, “The Authority of Scripture;” In: The New Bible Commentary, ed. F. Davidson, [London: The Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1954], p. 22.)

Note: See further: Inspiration and Inerrancy.

Note: See further: Michael R. Licona, Why are There Differences in the Gospels? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography, [New York: Oxford University Press, 2017]. Preview.

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria