Something that has always
worried me, from a credibility perspective, about both Jesus’ mountain sermons and
Pericles’ speeches is their perfectness. That the writers in each case somehow,
without any recording equipment besides their brains—and afterwards, perhaps,
pen and papyrus—managed to capture what was said so convincingly word for word.
Without being too
there-really-is-scientific-proof-of-a-man-swallowed-up-and-vomited-out-live-by-an-enormous-fish
about the matter, though, I have to remind myself that, even absent miracles,
such a feat of documentation is possible. Back in the early days of my
acquaintance with my husband—then this weird farmer guy, a star of our
University of Arkansas MFA program who was looking for a wife—I happened to
sneak a glance at the notes he took in class one day and discovered what looked
like the script of a play: names of people in our workshop followed by direct
quotes of what they had said and how others had responded, seemingly word for
word as each person had said it, only clearer and more impressive than I
remembered.
I’m saying here I’m
married to a Matthew or a Thucydides.
When I was in elementary school, I had a friend who was generally considered to be stupid by all whose opinions mattered. Even so, I could pull a card from a stack of baseball cards 2 inches thick, tell him the player, and ask him their batting average or RBIs or whatever for any one of the years they played and he would almost always get it right. I guess it only takes one of those. That would be a cool gift to have. God is awesome and apparently gifts people in any and all of the ways necessary to accomplish his goals.
ReplyDeleteA good memory used to be considered a spiritual necessity. People memorized huge chunks of scripture to prove it. It would have been yet another area of sin for me, had I lived back then.
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