Memories And Stories Are Often Expanded

Memories And Stories Are Often Expanded

Brett A. Todd

Memories and stories are often expanded. They get bigger and bigger, longer and longer.

There is a joke going around you have probably heard.  A widow with her son is sitting in the church listening to the preacher’s homily about her deceased husband, who wasn’t a very nice man.  The preacher’s accolades were beautiful, but quite a stretch of the real man’s character.  So, the widow turned to her little boy and said, “Get up and look into the casket and see if that’s your dad in there.”  Yes, funeral homilies can be inflated and get bigger and bigger, longer and longer.

This is also true of Bible stories whether these memory stories are historical accounts, parables, or legends, they all tend to grow.  It is kind of like the fish you caught when you were a young boy or girl.  The fish gets bigger and bigger each time you tell the story.  

To illustrate this, you must first keep in mind that Mark was the first gospel written and that Matthew and Luke copied Mark and added to Mark’s story. With this in mind, note the following word count of each gospel.  Mark has close to 15,000 English words, whereas Matthew has 23,000 plus words, and Luke has 25,500 words.  The fish gets bigger and bigger.  Both Matthew and Luke have several thousand more words than the Gospel of Mark.  Now, there are several reasons, which we will discuss later, why both Matthew and Luke are longer than Mark, but my point here is that these memories and stories often grow and get bigger and longer.

Let me give you an example of how these stories get longer.  In the familiar story of “The Temptation of Jesus” in Matthew and Mark (Matthew 4:1-11 and Mark 1:12-13), Mark uses about 30 words while Matthew uses around 300 words.  Mark simply says, “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.”  Matthew, on the other hand,  adding to Mark’s story has much more to say.  He lists in detail the clash between Jesus and Satan. With each temptation, Jesus gains an upper hand by countering Satan with authoritative words from the Hebrew Scriptures.  Once again, memories and stories are often expanded.  They get bigger and bigger, longer and longer.

“The Resurrection Story of Jesus” is another story that gets bigger and bigger, longer and longer (Mark 16:1-8).  Here, a scribe tacked on more verses at the end of Mark’s resurrection story.  Your Bible may even have a note saying something like this, “Earliest manuscripts do not have Mark 16:9-20”.  Most Bible scholars believe these verses were added to the Gospel of Mark because some ancient scribe didn’t like the way Mark ended his story: “...and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). So the scribe added eleven more verses to Mark to make it end on a more positive note.

Just as stories and letters in the Bible can get bigger and bigger, longer and longer, so can they be shortened or even removed?  In our next study, we will talk about these memories, stories, and Bible letters that have been shortened, removed and sometimes lost forever.