Reporting speeches

The task is made more difficult in that several disciples were involved. It is possible that when the disciples were in distress in the storm, only one spoke up; the others saw that they had no need to speak because their spokesman had already expressed their thoughts. But surely it is also possible that a number of them spoke with excited ejaculations and pleas of various kinds. In the excitement the various speeches may have overlapped. We cannot possibly reconstruct a chronological sequence of several such speeches. All three Gospels may be summarizing a rather complicated set of pleas. Each summary is trustworthy and gives us what we need to know about the situation. The Gospels do not overwhelm us with detail about each individual speech out of three or five or even more utterances by the disciples.

V. Poythress, "Part Six: Reporting Speeches," Inerrancy and the Gospels (Crossway 2012), 185.

Unbelievers would dismiss this harmonistic explanation as special pleading.

However, I’m reminded of an interview with Orson Welles I read years ago. One reason he became a film director is because he thought that he could do some things better. Improve the genre.

One thing that dissatisfied him with the status quo was the cinematic tradition in which characters in dialogue always spoke in complete sentences. A character would say something. The other character would politely wait until he finished, then respond.

I suppose that’s a throwback to the way plays and novels used to be written. Early screenwriters reproduced that convention. Dialogue written as alternating, self-contained little monologues.

But he didn’t like it because it was artificial. In real life conversations, speakers often interrupt each other. Talk over each other. Two or more people will speak at once. If they agree with what the speaker is saying, they may finish his sentence. Or if they disagree, they may cut him off in mid-sentence. They don’t give him a chance to complete his train of thought before they butt in.

So Welles introduced overlapping dialogue to make it more realistic.

However, that raises another issue. I’m not a film director, but I doubt you can have scripted overlapping dialogue. In theory you could write a screenplay with sentence fragments. But I doubt you could film it. That would simply substitute one artificiality for another. It would lead to stilted timing. It would require one actor to jump in at the exact moment another actor broke off in mid-sentence. And that’s equally unnatural.

So I’m guessing that when Welles wrote a screenplay, he wrote complete lines. And his actors had to memorize complete lines.

Then, when he was actually filming the script and directing the actors, he probably instructed each actor to try to recite his lines in full, then allow another actor interrupt before he finished. Offhand, I imagine that’s the only workable way of doing it.

And I think that example illustrates the complexities of a historical narrator like Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John representing or retelling the spoken word. There’s no one “right” way to do it.