What’s Wrong with the World

Now, as I made clear here, I am not saying that every scholar who attributes dyschronological narration to a Gospel author is failing to make this distinction. Perhaps a scholar makes the distinction, makes it quite clear that he means dyschronological narration, and says that's what the Gospel author is doing. In that case, I think he's wrong. There is no case where we have good reason to believe that the Gospel authors deliberately changed chronology. But he may not be eliding the distinction. He may just be openly, clearly wrong.

But I will say this: If a scholar wants to defend the claim that "the ancients" thought dyschronological narration was fine, that it was "accepted at the time" that the Gospels were written, rather than just asserting it without argument, he is not even going to be able to make a passable pretense of such a defense without eliding this distinction. The reason for that is quite simple: There is no good evidence that the ancients, much less the evangelists and their audiences, did accept dyschronological narration as a "literary device," but there is lots of evidence for the use of achronological narration. Indeed, we do a fair amount of achronological narration ourselves, especially in informal speech.

Therefore, any time a scholar starts claiming to give citations and arguments that the ancients just accepted dyschronological narration, you can pretty much take it to the bank that he is going to start eliding that distinction, citing passages that exhibit or discuss narrating achronologically and treating them as if they support narrating dyschronologically.

Unfortunately, other scholars don't know this. So they just docilely accept Eminent Scholar A's assertion that, "The ancients didn't think it was necessary to narrate chronologically" as if Eminent Scholar A must have some knock-down evidence that "the ancients" were all in favor of dyschronological narration. And thus the meme gets passed along.

As far as I know, I'm the first person in modern times to come along and point out this problem, to track down the alleged evidence that "the ancients" accepted dyschronological narration, and to challenge the conclusion.

Recently I was doing such tracking down by following up some cross-references in Craig Keener's commentary on John's Gospel. Keener suggests that John changed the time of Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple from late in his ministry (when, according to Keener, it actually occurred only once), making it appear to have occurred early. He claims that such a dyschronological change would be compatible with ancient narrative practices. Says Keener, “As noted in the introduction, ch. 1, ancient readers did not expect ancient biographies to adhere to chronological sequence.” (Keener, John, p. 518)

So back I went to the introduction to read up about this. Obviously, as the concept is used on p. 518, it refers to dyschronological narration, since that is what Keener is attributing to John. But, exactly as expected, the references in the introduction support only the practice of achronological narration. For example, Keener refers to the fact that Plutarch accidentally narrates the same incident twice in his Life of Alexander. In this little anecdote, one of Alexander’s followers, then getting on in life, says that those Greeks were deprived of great pleasure who died without seeing (as he saw) Alexander sitting on the throne of Darius. (Life of Alexander, 37.7, 56.1) But this repetition is not dyschronological. Plutarch merely drops in this particular short anecdote in two different places without at all implying that it happened at any time contrary to fact. The accidental duplicate narrative (the second time he tells it) is not time-stamped in any clear way at all.

One of the most surprising citations Keener gives in support of the statement that "ancient readers did not expect ancient biographies to adhere to chronological sequence" is to St. Augustine. Keener says of Augustine, "Nor did early Christians expect the Gospels to reflect chronological sequence; Augustine suggested the evangelists wrote their Gospels as God recalled the accounts to their memory." (John, p. 13) If one reads just this early part of the commentary, this is frustratingly ambiguous. What does "reflect chronological sequence" mean? If something does not "reflect chronological sequence," is it achronological or dyschronological? But five hundred pages later, Keener will refer back to this segment of the introduction to defend what he is expressly identifying as a dyschronological narration in John. So apparently, he thinks that at least inter alia, this claim about ancient readers and the Gospels, supported inter alia by his reference to Augustine, means that readers of the Gospels thought it was okay for the evangelists to narrate dyschronologically.

So I chased down the citation in Augustine. Indeed, Augustine does say that the Gospel authors probably wrote as God brought things to their minds. And indeed he does say that this might result in their narrating in an order that is not the chronological order of events.

But there the resemblance to the use Keener wants to make of the citation ends. And ends abruptly. And ends dramatically. For St. Augustine (in this passage of his Harmony of the Gospels, which Keener cites) is explicit in distinguishing between achronological narration and apparent narrative discrepancies. He is emphatic that he is only saying that the Gospel authors may have sometimes narrated achronologically. In fact, he goes even farther: He expressly states that, if they are clear about chronology, and if there is an apparent discrepancy between what appear to be clear chronologies, then such an apparent discrepancy does require harmonization. Augustine could not be clearer in his rejection of dyschronological narration and his insistence upon traditional harmonization when there is an apparent discrepancy. He is merely saying that the evangelists sometimes narrated without being clear about chronological sequence.

This point, by the way, has been a standard tool of traditional harmonizers throughout the ages. It is by no means something that literary device theorists have given us. Very much to the contrary. The literary device theorist will repeatedly claim that the author has a chronology when he doesn't, that it is in conflict with the chronology in some other document, and then, voila! He will claim a "literary device" in which the author changes chronology in order to resolve a "discrepancy" of his own making. I discuss that point here.

Back to Augustine. Augustine's actual statements in context are entirely antithetical to the use that Keener will (indirectly) make of them to defend the alleged acceptance of dyschronological narration by early Christians and hence by John. Here is the passage in Augustine, at length:

Matthew proceeds in the following terms: And when Jesus had come into Peter's house, He saw his wife's mother laid, and sick of a fever. And He touched her hand, and the fever left her: and she arose, and ministered unto them. Matthew has not indicated the date of this incident; that is to say, he has specified neither before what event nor after what occurrence it took place. For we are certainly under no necessity of supposing that, because it is recorded after a certain event, it must also have happened in actual matter of fact after that event. And unquestionably, in this case, we are to understand that he has introduced for record here something which he had omitted to notice previously. For Mark brings in this narrative before his account of that cleansing of the leper which he would appear to have placed after the delivery of the sermon on the mount; which discourse, however, he has left unrelated.... For of what consequence is it in what place any of them may give his account; or what difference does it make whether he inserts the matter in its proper order, or brings in at a particular point what was previously omitted, or mentions at an earlier stage what really happened at a later, provided only that he contradicts neither himself nor a second writer in the narrative of the same facts or of others?... [I]t is reasonable enough to suppose that each of the evangelists believed it to have been his duty to relate what he had to relate in that order in which it had pleased God to suggest to his recollection the matters he was engaged in recording. At least this might hold good in the case of those incidents with regard to which the question of order, whether it were this or that, detracted nothing from evangelical authority and truth.... For this reason, therefore, when the order of times is not apparent, we ought not to feel it a matter of any consequence what order any of them may have adopted in relating the events. But wherever the order is apparent, if the evangelist then presents anything which seems to be inconsistent with his own statements, or with those of another, we must certainly take the passage into consideration, and endeavor to clear up the difficulty (emphasis added). (The Harmony of the Gospels, II.21.51-52)

It would have been difficult for Augustine to be clearer on the matter.

I believe that the failure to distinguish achronological from dyschronological narration is a very serious problem in discussions of these matters, especially when scholars try to justify the implication that "the ancients" accepted dyschronological narration as a literary device. See Dr. Keener discussing the issue of chronology in the same ambiguous way here with reference to the cursing of the fig tree. After setting up a chart that indicates a contradiction between Matthew and Mark in explicit chronology, Keener "resolves" this with the slightly arch comment, "But guess what? Ancient readers didn’t expect ancient biographies to be in chronological order, and moving material around was considered a matter of arrangement, not of accuracy." While we are using that phrase, I will go ahead and use it myself: Guess what? We don't have any evidence that ancient readers expected ancient biographies to change chronology from true to false.

It simply is not well-understood that there is no good evidence for this and that the evidence for achronological narration is being "ported over" and treated as if it supports acceptance of dyschronological narration. The astonishing thing in the Augustine quote is that Augustine expressly blocks that use of what he says about the Gospel authors, and yet his quotation is being used (indirectly, in a conclusion drawn five hundred pages later) in that way anyway, apparently through a sheer failure to realize the importance of the distinction.

We simply must be more precise than this, particularly when research conclusions are going to be taken up and repeated from scholar to scholar. And they are. William Lane Craig states expressly that for John to move the Temple cleansing--to narrate dyschronologically--was accepted by the "standards of the day." Why does he think that? Well, he doesn't give any citations of his own, but I have followed up all the citations I've found from scholars, and none of them provide good support for this statement! Not one. In some cases the claim (particularly in Licona's book) is that he has actually found Plutarch or another ancient author narrating dyschronologically, which is supposed to be part of an inductive case for such acceptance, but all of these fail, for a variety of reasons. (See some Plutarchan examples discussed here.) Sometimes they fail precisely because Plutarch appears to be narrating achronologically but Licona insists on interpreting him as implying a chronology. Sometimes they fail because Plutarch or some other author could be making an honest error. Sometimes they fail because the accounts can be readily harmonized by some other normal means. See the flowchart here and note, while we're at it, that secular authors at least may engage in propaganda or truth-changing without using an "accepted literary device."

When it comes to supposed actual statements from ancient historiographers and historians about order, these never turn out to support dyschronological narration. At most, they sometimes talk about achronological narration. As does St. Augustine, for that matter, making a careful distinction between this and places where the order is indeed indicated.

We have to follow up the evidence, not just repeat the conclusion. It's bad enough when the alleged evidence simply fails to support the conclusion in question. It's even worse when, as here, the quotation in context goes directly against the use that is ultimately being made of the citation. These are dusty matters, but they are important for understanding important matters, and unfortunately we can't afford at this point to take the word of the experts with unquestioning faith.