Topic:  How might have the personal stories in the Bible been passed on?

Source of this posting: Moderator response

Date originally posted: July 17, 2004

Moderator who originally posted this source: Father Phillip

Question:   How did St. Luke obtain the personal information about the Holy Family especially the private information experienced only by Mary?

Answer: 

Thanks for a really excellent question!

Of course, the answer is that we don't know how Saint Luke got the personal information that only the Blessed Mother would have known.

Scholars have speculated a great deal about how this transmission may have occured but nobody knows for sure.

We are fairly certain that virtually all of the material in the Bible was passed-on verbally. The Scriptures took the form that we recognize as the Bible today over a very long period of time, and the cultures in which that transmission took place were verbal ones. That is to say, in the years between about 3500 B.C. and A.D. 150 paper, pen, carbon paper, and xerox machines were simply not known. Therefore, people had to rely on word-of-mouth to make sure that the stories and information from previous generations were passed-on to those who came afterwards. For that reason these civilizations tended to be extremely "accurate" in their attention to learning and transmitting stories from their tribe, family, or group. Eventually, somebody would have begun the laborious process of putting these highly valued stories into writing. And these written sources -- usually on scrolls -- would have been precious to the community whose stories they contained.

In the case of the stories about the Lord which we know from Saint Luke's Gospel, we can speculate in the following way. The Christian community in the earliest days was extremely small; the followers of Jesus were not huge in number. From the first chapter of Acts (which was the companion volume to Luke's Gospel written by the same human author), we read that Mary was a familiar figure in that tiny first generation of Christians for she joined the Apostles in prayer. As the Mother of Jesus, she surely had an honored place in the community. And we can easily understand that the members of that earliest Church would have frequently and eagerly turned to her for stories about Jesus' birth and childhood: "Tell us, dearest Mother, about how you came to know that God was calling you to become the Mother of His Son!"

As with any Mother, Mary would have patiently and lovingly recounted the story of the Archangel's Annunciation, her visit to Elizabeth her kinswoman, the Presentation in the Temple of her newborn Son, the finding of the Child when He was 12 and perhaps other stories as well. And we don't have a hard time understanding that Mary would have been willing to share with those devoted earliest followers of her Risen Son how she felt and what she thought about in conjunction with those events.

Moreoever, since those earliest Christians were part of an orally-based culture, as suggested above, they would have carefully committed to memory every detail related to them by Mary. And when Luke finally got around to putting these stories into writing, I am sure that he would have recorded them with all the care and devotion that his love for Mary and faith in Jesus would have demanded.

Does what I have written answer your question in a technical sense? Not really...but I believe that this suggests a general outline that is plausible and credible. Hope it helps some.

Blessings!