What if Judas didn't do it?

[John 6IX Breezy]

And I'm curious about your take on this. We agree it's not intended as disinterested journalism, but exactly what we should call it remains an interesting question.

Let me start by expanding an earlier proposition—that narrative is how we construct reality. What this means is that narrative is how we humans process events and information. If I were to ask you what you did yesterday, what you will respond with is a narrative. Likewise, what journalists do is construct narratives. Narrative emerges when real people experience real events in the world. In other words, narrative is primarily a cognitive feature not a linguistic one. Literary narratives emerge only in the act of communicating.

As for the Bible, my default position is that when an author begins a narrative with "I saw this," I take it at face value, whether or not they are telling the truth. This is the most parsimonious interpretation—I don't multiply authors beyond necessity. However, some books, like Jeremiah and Luke, do mention using a scribe or compiling stories from others. So, the idea of oral transmission before being written down, or of different authorships, is found in the Bible itself.

I've mentioned that narratives are truthlike, or verisimilitudes. To understand what this means, consider the concept of time. Narratives are laid out across "human time" rather than "clock time." This is time as you experienced it, and as you remember it—an abstraction of the real thing. To quote Jerome Bruner, "It is time whose significance is given by the meaning assigned to events within its compass." This is what I mean when I say the Bible is narrative. It isn't written in expository form, like a textbook or encyclopedia. It is written with a point of view, it is embedded across human time, and often written with self at the center of the narration.