Brilliant essay by Matthius on historial biblical criticism:

... the Gospels are not really biased or ahistorical in any way that we understand these terms. They were, and are, precisely what their authors intended them to be, as best they knew how to create them. Because their belief was so fervent, so real, and so urgent, they were willing to take some chances on the factual authenticity of what they wrote. John rearranges the history of the Gospel narrative not because he thinks that's the way it really happened, but because that's how he's chosen to tell his story. To John, the facts do not determine the truth; they are determined by the truth. Another way to look at this is to say simply that he is not a biographer of Jesus; he is an evangelist for the Christian faith. And the concepts of historicity and narrative factualness that we use as standards today simply hadn't been invented yet. Or to put it a better way, historicity and narrative factuality would have been conceived entirely differently by the Gospel writer than by you or me.

....

I think sometimes that intellectual and liberal Christians are looking for an excuse to read the Gospels as fiction. I say, go for it. The way that we approach our fiction is much closer to what I believe the Gospel writers intended than the way we approach our history. Don't think of them as historical narratives at all. Think of them as poems written to describe something utterly beyond the power of the artist to describe. Think of them as love poems. Think of them as historical novels expressing a social and religious conviction that extends so far beyond the mundane facts of experience as to render them nearly meaningless.

But whatever else we do as modern Christians, I think the worst thing that we can do is push the Gospels to the back of our minds and pretend that they're not there. We cannot give ourselves to Christ if we're holding back some part of ourselves in shame of the illogic and inconsistency of the message regarding Christ. We need to celebrate the Bible for what it is: not wish that it were something else, or simply pretend that it is what it is not. Both reactions do it and ourselves a disservice.

  ¶ 2:49 PM