Introduction
We modern readers tend to read the gospel books as pure history. But the authors typically explicitly tell their immediate readers the goal for writing, and this goal often is not about writing a history of Jesus and his deeds. Except for Luke, which claims to provide an “orderly account” (Luke 1:3) of the life and acts of Jesus, no other gospel book comes close to laying claim to being primarily an exercise in history-writing. John says that Jesus did other things which he did not include in his gospel account for reasons he did not tell us, but then adds that the portions he included were chosen so that his First-Century readers may “believe that Jesus is the messiah” (John 20:30-31). Thus, it would seem like John was more interested in doing apologetics than merely retelling the deeds of Jesus. Precisely because these authors were often not merely interested in history-writing, they often took the liberty to transpose units of stories as they saw fit for their literary goals. For instance, an attentive reader would be quick to recognize some minor variations in the withered fig tree story as told by Matthew and Mark (John and Luke do not mention the story). I should add, this literary practice was not unique to the Gospel writers. This was a common and acceptable practice of the time.
