After more than three decades in newsrooms, I have learned one enduring truth: No story ever contains everything. You can interview ten witnesses to the same event and come away with ten versions.
One remembers the colour of the car. Another remembers the scream. A third insists the suspect ran left; another swears he ran right. And occasionally, one remembers something so dramatic that you wonder if he even was present at the same event.
As a reporter, you listen, cross-check, trim, verify, and finally — select. Selection is not deception but thoughtful curation.
That lesson has stayed with me, especially when people say, sometimes with great triumph, “The Bible is full of contradictions.” I usually smile. Not dismissively but knowingly, as I have spent my life working with narratives.
Judas, Eyewitnesses, and Framing
Take Judas Iscariot.
Matthew writes that Judas, overcome with remorse, returned the thirty pieces of silver and “went and hanged himself.” Acts tells us he fell headlong, his body bursting open in a field later called the “Field of Blood.” Critics say: contradiction.
The seasoned reporter in me says: perspective.
If I had covered that story, one source might have said, “He hanged himself.” Another might have described how the body was later found in the field. My job would not have been to be alarmed but to discern: what happened, and what angle serves this account?
Matthew emphasises remorse and fulfilment. Luke, in Acts, emphasises consequence and public memory. Different framing but same tragic end.
In the newsroom, we do this all the time. One paper leads with emotion. Another with legal implications. A third with political fallout. Were any of these writers lying? No.Were their stories identical? Also no.
Uniformity, in fact, sometimes raises more suspicion than variation.
Two Creation Stories, One Big Canvas
Then there are the opening pages of Genesis. Genesis 1 gives us six orderly days of creation, humanity, male and female together, made on the sixth day. The tone is majestic, structured, and almost liturgical. God is referred to as Elohim.
Genesis 2 slows down. A man is formed from dust. A garden is planted. Animals are paraded past him. A woman is fashioned from his side. The divine name becomes more personal: Yahweh Elohim.
Different sequence and different tone. The vocabulary is also different.
Is this a contradiction? Or viewing it from two different lenses? One wide-angle. One close-up.
I have written pieces like this myself, first the national overview, then the human-interest focus. Same event but different camera settings.
Ancient writers were not unaware of what they were doing. They were storytellers and all the more theological scribes.
Saul, David, and the Complicated Archive
Let us now consider the missing Eighteen Silent Years in the life of Jesus (Luke 2:52).
We are told about his birth. We see him at twelve, astonishing teachers in the Temple.
Then, silence. Until about age thirty. Speculation, as you might expect, has had a field day.
No, there is no credible evidence that Jesus secretly travelled to India to learn meditation from yogis — though that theory makes for excellent late-night documentaries.
A Chinese Taoist friend once told me, quite earnestly and with a convincing sparkle in his eye, that Jesus must have gone to the Far East to learn qigong-styled healing methods from the Shaolin temples, and returned just in time to commence his teaching and healing ministry.
Whether true or not, it reminds me of how every culture seeks to fill the silent spaces with imagination, meaning, and humour.
Luke gives us one sentence: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man while still staying with Joseph and Mary.”
That is 18 years summarised in one line.
As a writer, I understand compression. I have done that before. I have reduced 2,000-word interviews into 600-word features without losing their essence. I have taken sprawling political speeches and distilled them into three paragraphs that carry the core message.
What was left out is not necessarily unimportant. It was simply not central to the story being told.
Read the Bible, Yes, But Also Study it
After all these years, I have come to believe this: the Bible must not just be read. It must be studied, with guidebooks, exegesis, and hermeneutics close at hand, just as a journalist does not rely on a single source or a single eyewitness.
You would not read one witness statement and conclude a whole court case. You cross-reference. You consult experts. You examine context. You interview lawyers and witnesses.
So why treat Scripture with less intensity?
Some tensions remain complex. Some passages require historical understanding, linguistic nuance, and cultural awareness.
Tension and variation are part of the story, not its undoing.
Essential Truth, Not Exhaustive Detail
The Bible is not a stenographic transcript from heaven. It is a library of testimony, poetry, law, prophecy, lament, genealogy, narrative, shaped by human hands wrestling with divine encounter, and of course inspired by God’s breath.
After decades in journalism, I have learned to respect layered truth. Memory is selective. Narrative is purposeful. Framing is inevitable.
When I read about Judas, or Saul, or the two creation stories, or David’s census, or even those silent years in Nazareth, I do not feel daunted by variation. I feel invited to read more carefully, to sit with the pauses, the tensions, the spaces between the lines, the very spaces where reflection lives.
In the newsroom, we used to say: “Get the story right, but remember, no story is ever the whole story.” The Gospel of John concludes with a similar reflection (John 21:25), noting that Jesus did many other things, and if every one of them were written down, the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
It is a hyperbolic testimony, a reminder that even the most careful reporting, in Scripture or in newsrooms, can only capture a portion of the full story.
It is all less about exhaustive detail and more about essential truth. It is about the whisper in the margin, the hint behind the narrative, the human hand guiding a divine story. And sometimes, as every reporter, every reader eventually learns, what is essential is not everything we can catalogue, but everything we allow to touch us.
The Bible is not just to be read but to be diligently researched.
It is to be lived in conversation, questioned in wonder, savoured with patience, humour, and humility, like a slow bowl of chicken soup for the soul - nourishing the mind, warming the heart, and reminding us that faith, like good storytelling, grows richer the more carefully we pay attention to it.
