Context of Authorship

As I was reading chapter five of Timothy Beal’s The Rise and Fall of the Bible, the importance of authorship and time differences between author and subject really came into focus. The section of the Bible that Beal spends the majority of this chapter examining is a passage from Luke.  This passage depicts Jesus reading from a text in front of a group, offering an interpretation, and the subsequent reaction of the crowd.  Beal does not focus on the crowd or Jesus’s interpretation of the text he reads, but focuses instead upon the way that Jesus would have read it.

Beal’s description of the scroll that was read and the setting that Jesus would have been in is very detailed, but what I find interesting is that the person who wrote down this story would not have actually been there to see Jesus read.  Luke was written at least half a century after this would have taken place (96). Not being able to see this event firsthand, and being aware of the existence of other Gospels, the author of Luke would have been conscious of the changes that  they were making to the history as well as the interpretation. The author of this gospel was writing about their own Christian scriptural culture at least as much as they were writing about the culture of Jesus’s time.

This example of a text being written significantly after the events it describes is not the only time it has occurred, and I cannot imagine that it represents the one with the most changes between history and writing.  This section of Beal has made me wonder just how much more has been changed because of the historical and cultural contexts of the writers in opposition to the actual events that the writings describe.