A listener named Peg asks Father Dave about the Gospels. “While listening to or reading the Gospel readings during the Lenten season, I wonder about the actual time between the stories. Is it months, weeks or days? Can you help us understand the timeline?”
Father Dave first notes that a full answer to this question would require much lengthier study. “Understanding the timeline in the four Gospels is like an entire course or more in seminary,” he begins. “What we have now in the Bible, for many, many years, was passed down as oral accounts, meaning people speaking these stories to one another to keep the memory alive. In their day, it was not common to write things down. Most people were illiterate, and so most communication happened verbally.”
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These accounts were later divinely inspired to be written down for future generations. “The ancient peoples had a very different approach than we would in telling a story,” Father Dave adds. “If we compare the three Gospels that are very similar in the events that they talk about — Matthew Mark and Luke — they place things in different orders within their Gospels. For instance, the baptism of Jesus occurs in a different ‘timeline’ in these Gospels relative to Christ’s ministry. Where it happens physically and geographically is the same, but the timeline is off.”
“We would describe something a lot more empirically with timestamps,” he continues. “They didn’t use those kinds of conventions back then, so even though they’re describing things that indeed happened and are truthful, they had more flexibility in crafting a verbal story and then a written work than we would in terms of making sure that time lines up.”
Father Dave addresses concerns about the Bible’s accuracy amid different styles of storytelling. “God protects his word and has down through the ages. We see this in the Scriptures, and the Church affirms this, particularly in major documents about the Bible. One that Pope Leo XIV has recently been talking about is Dei Verbum, [meaning] ‘the word of God’ in Latin,” he says. “The Church affirms that Scripture is true. It relates God’s truth, but it would be a fallacy for us to equate truth with chronological timelines and facts — truth can be conveyed in a lot of ways.”
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He talks about the Gospel readings we hear at Mass during Lent. “Once we get into Lent, we’re definitely choosing the readings much more thematically…We’re not just trying to stay in order, like backing up to the six weeks before Christ was crucified,” Father Dave says. “In Holy Week, we do more closely follow a sequence of events that played out over a certain number of days. So in that case, much more so than really any other time of the Church year, are we somewhat stepping into a timeline.”
Father Dave offers a book recommendation of “Reading the New Testament” by Pheme Perkins for those looking to dive deeper into the historical aspects of the Gospels. “I would still stand by that even [with extensive study] there would still be some gaps, because that’s not how the biblical authors intended to tell the story,” he concludes. “In the real story of Jesus really living among us that we believe, it is far more pertinent to have the biblical and spiritual truths than [things like] what time of day it was or how many weeks did it take to walk from Galilee to Jerusalem.”
