Friday, June 15, 2007

The Gospels as Photography.

My daughter came up with an interesting analogy the other day: comparing the gospel writers and their "differences" to our family when we go out somewhere. My husband and I are both keen digital photographers, but notoriously "different" in our approaches: he takes the classic shots, knows all the technical stuff, I go for whatever beautiful or quirky thing catches my eye. When we've been on a holiday, say, you can look at our photos and there'll be enough common ground to figure out we've been to the same place, but we "took" many different things, and even when it was the same thing, we rarely saw it the same way. Isn't it the same with these four "portraits" of the life and ministry of Jesus? Each of them (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) have taken their set of snapshots (under the direction of the Holy Spirit, but that's a different issue)and present us with their unique slideshow. Certain principles hold true of family photographers, and I suspect they hold true of the Gospel writers too:
*The most important things, everybody will photograph
*Individuals have different ideas of what's important/beautiful
*we "frame" our shots differently
*we take them from different angles (apart from artistic considerations, no two of us are occupying the same bit of ground at the same time)
* we don't always take our photos at the same time

Any other thoughts?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Lynn, excellent analogy! And so common sense! No need for all kinds of lapidarian scholastic arguments (which I can never regurgitate anyway, LOL!).