Is the use of literary symmetry in a historical work, such as Luke’s Gospel, consistent with strict historicity?
If it were the duty of a historian to record everything which the subjects of his history did and said on every day of their lives, then doubtless he could not be true to history if he tried to present the facts in symmetrical patterns: life's happenings are too multifarious and unrelated for that. Nobody, however, imagines that a historian or biographer either could or ought to attempt to record everything. He must make a selection, and since selection necessarily involves interpretation, the basic questions to be asked of any historian or biographer are whether the facts he relates are true and his interpretations correct. We should observe, therefore, that the use of symmetrical structure by an ancient historian or biographer is simply his way of achieving interpretation which a modern historian would achieve by different methods. As a method symmetrical structure is not in itself necessarily false to historicity any more than the modern historian's method.
Take an imaginary case of a man who was a famous general and then became a politician and eventually president of his country. An ancient biographer wanting to be fair to the man and to represent his many-sided and versatile personality might well select for record two of his campaigns and two mutinies which he quelled, and arrange them either in close proximity or with intervening material so that they formed a symmetrical structure: one campaign won through the use of lightning strikes, and a succession of massive pitched battles; one mutiny quelled by the use of draconian severity; another mutiny quelled by the use of judicious clemency; another campaign won by deliberate avoidance of pitched battles and the adoption of delaying tactics and intrigue. And the ancient biographer might well leave his selection and symmetrical structure to convey his interpretation without adding much or any comment of his own. The modern biographer in his turn might well wish to give the same interpretation of the general's personality, and he might well illustrate it from the same two battles and the same two mutinies. But he would do it differently. He would probably place the battles and mutinies together in a chapter devoted to the study of his subject as a general; and all the way through he would add his own explicit comments and observations on the general's versatility to bring out and back up his interpretations. The modern reader might feel more comfortable with the modern biographer because he explicitly pointed out that he was adding his interpretation to the historical facts; but it is difficult to see why the ancient biographer's use of symmetrical structure without explicit comment should have necessarily involved him in being false to the historical facts.
Again another historian, ancient or modern, interested in the same man but primarily as a politician might select just one of the campaigns, neglecting the other three stories, and place it in an altogether different sequence of social, economic and political happenings designed to show how his success as a general helped to sweep him to political power. No one would imagine that his selection of only one battle and his placing of it in a different sequence of events was necessarily a distortion of the historical facts.
Now the question whether Luke's selection of material, or his departure from strict chronological order, or his use of symmetrical structure does in fact involve him in a misinterpretation of his sources or a distortion of the historical facts, is a question that can be settled only by a detailed investigation of every individual case, since to prove that in ninety-nine instances it does not, need not prove the same for the hundredth instance. Such an investigation is obviously beyond the scope of this work. What we do wish to claim here, however, is that Luke's construction of symmetries is not by itself necessarily inconsistent with strict historicity.
