In last week’s Life of Jesus class, somebody asked how Jesus disciples could have recorded in the gospels the events and words of Jesus’ temptation in the desert, when they were not present for them. The same question could be asked about Jesus’ prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the disciples had all fallen asleep.
The site bible.org offers a response:
I think we have essentially four options in questions like this:
(1) assume that it is wholly fictitious;
(2) assume that someone besides Jesus told the disciple(s) about the incident;
(3) assume that the Holy Spirit told the disciples later; or
(4) assume that Jesus told the disciple(s) about the incident.
The writer addresses, in turn, each of the first three options, and then…
When we come to view 4, it certainly raises some interesting questions, such as “How did the disciples find out? Did they sit down and interrogate Jesus about these events? Did they function as reporters?” What is interesting to me is that not once do we read anywhere in the Gospels, as far as I am aware, in which an evangelist says, “I got this story from so and so.” That is, nowhere in the Gospels does the evangelist tell us that he used a source for a particular story. Yet Luke’s prologue and John’s epilogue tell us, in broad strokes, that they did this very thing. So it seems to me that the M.O. of the evangelists is not to tell who their sources were, but to indicate that they did use human, eyewitness sources for their narratives and, on many occasions, were the eyewitnesses themselves. All it takes is for us to use a slightly sanctified imagination to envision the disciples sitting around the fire with Jesus, asking him all sorts of questions. We know that they did this with prophecy (see Matt 24); so why couldn’t they do this with history, too?
The four gospels make no claim to represent everything that Jesus ever said and did during his three-year ministry on earth. It is reasonable to conclude that many conversations happened that were never written down or, if they were, did not end up in the gospels we have today.