Greg Daly
Modern oral histories can shed light on the Gospel narratives, writes Greg Daly
Looking back on the Easter Rising 33 years later when interviewed by the Bureau of Military History, Bobby Holland, an apprentice butcher and a member of the Volunteers during the rebellion, seemed slightly indignant.
“I was brought down to kill another beast and I saw that a side of the beast I had previously killed had been used,” he said, referring to how he had been tasked with slaughtering captured cattle so the Marrowbone Lane distillery garrison could be fed. “I have, however, no recollection of getting any meat for my dinner and I asked for some. I was told it was Friday and handed a can of soup and some bread.”
His memories were contradicted by those of Rose McNamara, the Cumann na mBan vice-commandant who headed the garrison’s 25 women. Speaking to the Bureau in 1951, just a couple of years after Mr Holland, she said the events of Easter Week were “fully described” in a memorandum she had written in June 1916, “when the events were still fresh” in her memory.
Dinner
“Three live calves captured,” begins her entry for Thursday, April 27, 1916, “one was killed by a butcher (Bob Holland) for dinner on Friday (God forgive us). […] Heavy sounds of machine guns (or cannons) in the distance all night. We keep on praying.”
Despite her qualms about planning to serve meat on Friday, Ms McNamara went ahead and did so, to judge by her memorandum entry for that day. “Up early for breakfast; we fried veal cutlets and gave the men a good feed,” she began, continuing, “We had a meat dinner, potatoes, etc.”
The accounts similarly disagree about when the garrison was first visited by clergy from the Mount Argus Passionist community, Ms McNamara recording that they came at about 11pm on Tuesday, and Mr Holland recalling them as having indeed arrived about that time but on Wednesday night while he was stationed on the roof – rather than on the previous day, his 19th birthday.
Given how Ms McNamara’s account was originally penned shortly after the Rising, one would typically prefer it to Mr Holland’s later recollections, and indeed her account was supported later when the Bureau interviewed Fr Eugene Nevin. He drew on notes received from the garrison commander Captain Seamus Murphy during the rebellion, the first of which, though “hard to decipher now after the lapse of 40 years”, was dated April 25, 1916: Tuesday, rather than Wednesday.
Corrected on such details by contemporary documents, one might therefore be tempted to discount Bobby Holland’s account altogether, but to do so would be unfair and would impoverish our understanding of the Rising.
In outline his recollection tallies closely with Ms McNamara’s account, some of his memories are clearly uniquely and trustworthily his own and where his memories differ from others’ they often do so in ways that suggest a week of heightened emotions had caused events to fuse together in a fashion that, while not as systematic as later historians might wish, nonetheless testifies to the overpowering drama of that week.
Similarly, when working last year on a special edition of The Irish Catholic to mark the beatification of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero I was struck by how eyewitnesses to dramatic events of decades earlier could recall matters with remarkable detail while still disagreeing with each other.
Two Franciscans with whom I spoke, for instance, detailed how the archbishop’s funeral procession had begun from San Salvador’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart, where the murdered prelate’s body had been lying in repose; the procession, they said, took place without incident, despite the visible presence of soldiers on the rooftops of buildings along the route.
A third source, however, recalled things very differently. By this account, the archbishop’s remains were indeed taken to the basilica after his death, before being brought to the cathedral several days before the funeral. “After three days we went in procession to the cathedral,” said this eyewitness, adding: “we could easily have been shot at.”
The same eyewitness described being part of a group who formed an honour guard for the martyr’s body, and how it was “just incredible” to be there as “people came from all over the country and filed past”.
The core points – or ‘structural facts’ – of the story were not in dispute, but the order of events in the different narratives, however, seemed slightly out of kilter, as did slight details, as though the intense emotion of the week had caused memories to bind together in ways that while not necessarily historically accurate, testified instead to something profoundly important having happened.
Thirty-five years separated Blessed Oscar Romero’s funeral and the recollections of it that were shared with me last year, a gap akin to that between the Easter Rising and the interviews the Bureau of Military History collected over the period 1947 and 1959.
Curiously, this seems comparable with the gap between the original Easter and the Gospel accounts of that first Easter. Scholars argue about the exact dates of both the historical events and the composition of the Gospels, of course, but even those who would date the Gospels relatively late – after the year 70 for Mark, after 80 for Matthew and Luke, and after 90 for John – would concede that the Gospels did not simply fall from the sky but drew from much older oral traditions, including ones hinted at in Paul’s letters, the earliest of which date to about 50.
A strong case can be made, of course, for rather earlier dates for the Gospels, not least because of how the New Testament narrative stops abruptly in Acts with Paul living peacefully in Rome. If the New Testament narratives really were written in the 70s, 80s and 90s, why on earth would they omit the Neronian persecution in which Peter, Paul and many other Christians were martyred, or indeed the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple?
The omission of such key facts in the history of the early Church, on the other hand, would be quite natural if Acts – a continuation of Luke – had been written before they took place.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that in recent years leading scriptural scholars such as Durham’s one-time Anglican bishop N.T. Wright have been inclined to date the New Testament narratives rather earlier than scholarly convention might otherwise dictate.
Indeed, Richard Bauckham, a scholar whose work Dr Wright has praised, has powerfully argued that the Gospels should be regarded not as works of oral tradition, but as directly based on eyewitness accounts.
If Prof. Bauckham is right, there’s a sense, therefore, in which the Gospels should be viewed as somehow similar to the oral histories on which we can draw when studying such events as the funeral of Blessed Oscar Romero or the Easter Rising.
Disagreements
Viewed in this light, then, such disagreements as whether the Last Supper was a Passover meal, as Matthew, Mark, and Luke relate, or took place on the eve of Passover, as per John, look rather trivial, as do questions about whether Mary Magdalene visited the tomb alone or with one, two or several women.
The structural facts of the narrative remain the same, regardless how the story is told. The rest testifies to how the story was remembered – and to what people regarded as important.
