December 24 – eyewitness accounts

eyewitness accounts
angels, shepherds, a stable?
read it for yourself

Let me get past the big question first.

I accept the Bible as fact.

Maybe not without errors but I am confident that any errors are errors in transcription or translation.

With that out of the way, look at the Christmas story in the book of Luke.

Luke starts out his book with “I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account…”

Tradition has it the Luke was a Doctor.

Probably a Ph.d and not an MD.

But I think that at this point, he is a doctoral candidate or just a grad student.

Luke has this ‘account of things’ and he is going to investigate and talk to people who were there so that his readers ‘may know the certainty of the things.’

I feel that in this short thesis statement, Luke is say that he wants to get to the bottom of this ‘Messiah’ story and like a good investigative reporter, down deep, he wants to blow the lid off the story and expose it as a fraud.

Okay, remember this is just me talking.

I think that Luke went and conducted oral history interviews with who ever he could find who might have information on this ‘Messiah’ thing.

I wanted to be a history teacher.

I studied the art of the Oral History Interview.

I studied the practice of weaving the information from an interview into my narrative.

Often you can study another’s narrative and make a very good guess at who supplied the information in the narrative.

Let’s examine the book of Luke.

Luke describes the meeting between Mary and the angel, Mary and Elizabeth, Mary’s song, the trip to Bethlehem, the birth in the manger, the trip to the temple and other events in the life of Jesus.

Who did Luke talk to?

Who is the common thread in all this, besides Jesus?

Mary.

In my mind, Luke tracked down Mary.

History is of the opinion that Luke wrote his book some 60 years or so after the birth of Jesus.

History is also of the opinion that Mary was about 14 or so when Jesus was born.

In her 70’s Mary would have, might have been living in the home the Apostle John in Ephesus.

I think Luke tracked her down.

I think Luke tracked her down and went to interview her with every intention of disproving her story.

Then he met her.

Then Luke met Mary.

Like all those scenes of realization in movies.

Luke met Mary and realized something.

Luke realized.

Luke knew.

The stories were all true.

The stable, the song of glorification, the words of Simeon.

The stories.

The story.

The story as told to Luke, by Mary.

Luke writes, “But his mother treasured all these things in her heart .”

When you read the book of Luke, it is not the words of Luke you are reading, but the words of, the memories of Mary.

A first person account.

An eyewitness account.

You can read for yourself.