AS A KID, one of my least favorite subjects in school was history. To me, it seemed that it was all about memorizing the names of people and places to whom I had no connection, about being able to put the dates of events in their proper order on a test. Looking back now, I think my distaste for history was largely due to two things. The first was my youthful naivete and self-centeredness, the attitude that said, “Who cares about a bunch of dead people?”

But the second was that I didn’t have teachers who knew how to tell a good story.

History necessarily relies on facts: the who, what, when, and where of events. But to teach or write history well requires searching out the why of events—the motivations and purposes that drive the story of who did what, and when and where they did it.

Think about biography and memoir, which at one level recount the surface history of a life. Would anyone want to read a memoir that recited a bare chronology of events? If all we were told was “I did this, then I did this, then I did this,” our brains would be screaming impatiently for the why: Why did you do this? Why did this happen? Why did you respond that way?

Historians, similarly, don’t just recite facts—or if they did, no one but their mothers would ever read what they wrote (and maybe not even then). They interpret the facts. They make connections. They discern the meaning of behaviors, the motives behind them. And they bring it all together into one continuous and compelling narrative.

In other words, they try to tell a good story.

It’s in this sense that we might call Luke a historian. Yes, as the New International Version translates it, he has “carefully investigated everything from the beginning” (Luke 1:3). His wording in the Greek suggests painstaking research. In all likelihood, he not only drew upon existing documents but interviewed many people. I can tell you from experience that it takes time and diligent, sustained effort to do such detailed research and writing, and that work in itself doesn’t put food on the table. It makes sense to envision Theophilus as the patron who made it all possible through his encouragement and tangible support.

But in the end, Luke doesn’t just list his carefully researched facts in chronological order. He tells a story: a story first of all of the words and deeds of Jesus, but also of the larger narrative of God’s purposes in which that story is embedded. That larger, grander narrative is important to Luke’s goals. His history is not simply about a dead person Theophilus has never met, but how that person lives on in his followers, in fulfillment of a story that began long, long ago.

. . .

WHEN I FIRST became a Christian in college, I was quickly introduced to what’s known as a “harmony” of the gospels, an attempt to take the historical details of all four accounts and merge them into a single, chronologically ordered narrative. After all, there are differences between the accounts that are difficult to reconcile. These differences lead to such puzzling questions as: Did Jesus cleanse the temple once, or twice? Did Peter deny Jesus three times or six times? Was Jesus crucified on or before the day of Passover? Those who try to harmonize the gospels are looking to eliminate such apparent contradictions.

The problem, however, isn’t that these differences mean that one or the other writer got some detail wrong, an idea that seems to threaten the trustworthiness of the gospels. Rather, the problem is with our expectations of what it means for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to give us a legitimately historical account. Yes, there must be a basic chronology, and no, they can’t simply invent stories about things that never happened.

But for them, a historical account of Jesus can’t be mere reportage; it’s a good story with an evangelistic and pastoral purpose. They have the freedom to decide which stories to tell and which to leave out. Their source material was oral tradition, stories passed on from one person to the next; there had to be variations in how those stories were told, even when they recounted the same event. And the gospel writers would have drawn on such traditions in various ways that suited their own authorial purposes.

Think for a moment about how you tell someone else a story of something that happened to you recently. You don’t say everything that could be said. Instead, you pick and choose the details that fit the way you want to tell the story, the impact you want the story to have. Nobody wrote down what was said, so you recount any conversations that took place from your perspective.

Every story is told from someone’s perspective, even when two or more people are telling stories of the same event. Thus, all four gospels tell a story about what Jesus said and did, about things that really happened. But they tell those stories from their own perspective, to their own anticipated audiences, and for their own reasons.

When Luke tells Theophilus in verse 3 of chapter 1 that he “decided to write an orderly account” for him, therefore, he’s not saying that his main concern was an accurate chronology, as if correcting the factual errors of previous accounts. What counts as “orderly” is not merely chronological; it’s a way of telling the story that edifies Theophilus, that helps him “know the certainty of the things [he had] been taught” (vs. 4).

So…did Jesus cleanse the temple once or twice? The question arises because John puts the story at the beginning of his gospel, while Matthew, Mark, and Luke put it near the end. Again, many fear that if we don’t say that Jesus cleansed the temple twice, the trustworthiness of the gospels falls to the ground.

I don’t agree. Maybe there was one cleansing; maybe there were two. Truly, I have no idea. But I trust that the authors of Scripture were inspired by God in a way that makes the stories they tell useful for our training and spiritual growth (2 Tim 3:16-17). I hope you trust the same. Let’s begin, then, with the unique way Luke narrates the birth of Jesus.