Cosmic View
The Bible often deals in metaphor because the life and actions of Jesus were so extraordinary they could only be described in their "likeness" to human experience. (File Photo)
Oboedire | May 2, 2025
As an historical theologian, I have learned that all history is selective and interpretive. No matter how objective it seeks to be, all history comes to us in written forms that are packaged in these two features.
The Bible is no exception, and in the text itself we find both dynamics in play. Today in this post, I focus on the Jesus Story as we find it in the four gospels. As for selectivity, they describe only about ninety days of Jesus’ 12,045 days (33 years) on the earth. My first discovery of this was stunning. We only have .0007% of Jesus’ life in the Bible. This is high-level selectivity.
harper ident 2024
With respect to interpretation, every gospel has a hermeneutical lens for the arrangement of the chosen bits and pieces of Jesus’ life. Matthew wants to show Jesus’ Jewishness (1:1). Mark reveals the human Jesus (6:3). Luke wants his readers to see Jesus’ universality (3:6). And John selects and arranges material so that we will believe in him (20:31). Each gospel is interpretive.
When selectivity and interpretation are combined, a third element enters the picture: the necessity of metaphorical language. It is as if the gospel writers/compilers were saying, “We can only show you a smidgen of Jesus’ life and ministry, so nearly all of the stories you are about to read are larger than themselves — they are small windows through which to look in order to see a larger Jesus.”
The gospel writers had no problem communicating the historical Jesus metaphorically because they recognized that’s what happens when selectivity and interpretation are at work. As John put it, Jesus did so many things that if they were written down, all the libraries in the world could not hold the books (John 21:25). Amazing!
The only language that can hold the Cosmic Christ is metaphor. The gospel writers knew this, and when we read what they wrote, we do well to know it too. The problem is that anything other than literalism is caricatured as myth (mistakenly defined as untruth) and less-than facts, when truth-be-told, metaphorical history is more-than factuality. [1]
Metaphor is the language we use when we want to describe the magnificence of someone or some thing. It is the language used when we want to communicate an experience and ask others to share in it. The gospel writers wanted their stories of Jesus to do both. We accept their invitation to know Jesus when we read their gospels as they intended for them to be. Through metaphor we are drawn into the Story and made partakers of it. [2]
[1] The more accurate understanding of myth is a sacred story that explains something while simultaneously enlarging it, in order to reveal a greater significance to the person or thing being described
[2] Eugene Peterson is the one through whom I saw the importance, even necessity, of metaphor in the biblical text. His book, Eat This Book (Eerdmans 2006) deals with metaphor in the Bible.