How did the things Jesus said and did when He was alone get recorded in the Gospels?

The answer to my question came with refreshing speed and power. It was, The Spirit of God has come and it is He who supplies the fuel and delights to keep the fire always burning in the heart. I turned first to what the Lord Himself had said of His coming. "But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you" (John 14:26). Those words secure for us in divine and infallible perfectness the Four Gospels, for they were spoken to the apostles, who wrote what they remembered not according to their faulty natural memories, but by the unerring power of the Holy Ghost, that we — yes, you and I — might have the very words and know the very ways of our Lord Jesus as He spoke and acted when He was here on earth. As we hear His words and consider Him, we say to one another, "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us by the way?" and to Him we say with adoration, "Thou hast the words of eternal life." There is inexhaustible fuel for the fire in the Gospels.

Here the great work of the Spirit is to engage us with Christ Himself. There are two ways in which He awakens our affections for Christ. First the Lord tells the Eleven, "He shall teach you all things." The "all things" of verse 26 are in contrast to "these things" of verse 25. The Lord had spoken of certain things, but there were things belonging to the glory of Christ, which were beyond the apprehension of the Eleven at that moment. The Lord was limited in His communications by the limited spiritual capacity of the disciples. With the coming of the Spirit there would be an enlarged spiritual comprehension which would make it possible for the Spirit to communicate "all things" connected with Christ in the glory. Secondly, the Lord can say, "the Spirit will bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said to you." He will not only reveal the new things concerning Christ in His new place — things that carry us far into eternal glory — but He will recall the gracious communications made by Christ in His sojourn on earth. All that is of Christ, past, present and future, is infinitely precious. Nothing that is of Christ shall be lost. How important that those who by their words and writings were going to instruct others, should have the Lord's words recalled to them by a Divine Person. In reporting these words to us they are not left to their own imperfect, and failing, memories. Their report of His words will have all the absolute perfection of One who recalls them without any admixture of human frailty.

A further guarantee is given in the latter part of John 14:26: "He shall … bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you." The Gospels, therefore, are not the products of the unaided memories of their writers. They are the record of what the Holy Spirit brought to their remembrance. And He brought to their remembrance all the things which Jesus had spoken, and which it was the will of God that they should relate.

Having developed this presentation of the Spirit of God, the Lord goes on to add another most important part of His service, when come, "But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you." Coupled with delight in His word, comes the ministry of the Spirit, "He shall teach you all things," and that is why it says in the First Epistle of John, "Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things" (1 John 2:20). Even the youngest Christian has a perfect competency, by the Holy Ghost, to know what is the truth, for the point is, that the Christian has this competency, in every sense, to learn, and know the truth, and to glory in it. "He shall teach you all things." And, further, "bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you." I do not doubt that what the Lord speaks of here in the twenty-sixth verse, we have, first of all, fulfilled in the records of the words of Jesus, in the four gospels, which are not a mere human recital of things that happened in the life of Jesus, but a divinely given, and divinely expressed, communication thereof The Holy Ghost is the power in us of entering into that which is thus laid before us. The expression "shall bring all things to your remembrance" is therefore absolutely fulfilled in the writings of the four evangelists.

279 Mr. N.'s low and disgusting introduction of John as a witness is without sense or force. He puts a question which only shews his ignorance of the matter. The Holy Ghost acted on his memory, "He shall bring to your remembrance." Does he mean to say that God cannot call to a man's memory what He thinks fit? Such a notion is ridiculous — a man can do it. But He puts the memory into activity, and recalls to it the images of what had passed before it. How many scenes and thoughts has the sight of a person called back to our minds! How well does the sinner know that when God acts convertingly on his conscience all his sins come up fresh into his memory! Could God not do as much as to the life of His blessed Son, and control the memory in its activity so as to give what He wished, if He purposed to give a revelation by eye-witnesses? This is what Jesus said the Holy Ghost should do. Hence it is not a "romance," but a history — a real history by eye-witnesses, and a real history by God Himself through their instrumentality. It is much more incredible that He should have sent and given His Son, and not given such a history of Him, but left it unknown, or only traditionally guessed at in after ages.

For the disciples it was indeed blessed to be assured that the Holy Spirit would bring to their remembrance what the Lord had spoken to them; and how valuable for us has been this service of the Spirit of God, as He has inspired the writings of the four Gospels, and in them brought to the remembrance of the disciples of Jesus the precious words He spoke to them while with them on earth. We can also count on the Holy Spirit bringing to our remembrance the things we have learned of Christ. In dependence on Him we learn of the things He teaches, and when they are needed He will bring them into our minds again.

In turning to the Gospels, we find them written by four servants of the Lord, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But we must dismiss from our minds at once the thought, that they were written by men who recorded what they had known as facts, each one according as his memory served him. This is how men generally write biographies; but it is quite certain that the writers of the gospels often omitted to mention facts with which they were most conversant, and recorded at length other circumstances of which they had no personal knowledge. Let us turn to a few examples. In the raising of the daughter of Jairus from the dead, we are distinctly told that no one was present with the Lord but Peter, James, and John; and yet, most striking as the fact is, and most important too in the history of our Lord's ways, neither of them refer to it; but Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who were not present, all name it, and enter into particulars of it.

There is another point which I have only glanced at, and which I desire to put forward a little more plainly. Many circumstances testify, that the narratives of the evangelists were written not merely by man, but by the Holy Ghost. For instance, John was one of the three apostles who were with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, an attendant upon the scene of His agony. He says nothing about it. Nothing could be more affecting and more solemn. John most certainly had not forgotten it, for he relates many other of the circumstances which are not to be found in the other Gospels; for instance, that those who came to take Jesus "went backward and fell to the ground," and yet respecting the Saviour's agony he makes not the slightest mention. John accompanied Jesus also to the cross; yet he says not a word of His having been forsaken of God, although he relates a multitude of other circumstances, which prove that the Saviour was as calm there as when he describes Him to us in the garden. A man who had written the history of the sufferings of the Saviour would not have failed to relate things so deeply interesting, and of which he had himself been an eye-witness. Matthew also would have related the remarkable incident which occurred in the garden of Gethsemane, of which he was an eye-witness, namely, that they all fell to the ground; but he does not mention it, whilst he gives an account of the agony of Jesus and His prayer, although he was not one of three who accompanied Him at that time.

But an intelligent and thoughtful reader would remark the striking absence of that wondrous scene where even those who loved the Lord — yea, Peter, James, and John — could not watch with Him one hour. For His soul was exceeding sorrowful even unto death, and though He asked them to tarry and watch whilst He went a little farther to pray, He found them sleeping for sorrow, and this repeatedly. It is notorious that some left out of their copies of Luke (Luke 22:43 f.) the verses which record the angel which appeared from heaven strengthening Him, and the conflict such that His sweat became as great drops of blood falling down on the earth; as if the Lord were lowered by such an expression of real humanity and unspeakable grief, instead of seeing how characteristic the facts are of that evangelist, and of adoring Himself Who could so love and suffer as there portrayed. Yet John, who alone of all four writers of the Gospels was near the Lord, nearer than Matthew — John is the only one who does not describe that conflict at all: and this, not because it was not infinitely precious to his spirit nor because the others had given it to us, but because what he gave, as they also, was by inspiration, and in no way a question of human judgment or feeling. John records, no less than Matthew and Mark and Luke, the miracle of the five barley loaves; and this because it was as essential to the work given him to do as for the others in theirs. For the same reason he, led by the Holy Spirit, does not give the agony in the garden, as not falling within his assigned province. He knew it, of course, and must have often dwelt on it in his spirit deeply meditative beyond all the others, yet he is silent.325

A difficulty is sometimes raised about no one having witnessed this scene. There is none, however, in supposing that the Lord communicated it to His disciples, if not during the Ministry (Garvie suggests, at Caesarea Philippi), at least during the forty days before His Ascension.