When I began writing Doctor Luke’s Assistant, unlearned as I was in the ways of novel writing and of publishing, I decided I would write the type of book I would like to read. That covered such things as style, length, subject matter.

My main goal was to show a way that the gospel of Luke might have been written. No one can be sure, of course, since we haven’t found Luke’s author diary. We don’t know the day he started, where he wrote it, who he interviewed, how he conducted his research, when he finished, how he got it “published.” All we could have in these regards is conjecture, but we can add to that common sense and reasonableness.

So that was my goal. I wasn’t out to tell the story of Augustus, or of Luke. They started out as mere tools, necessary for me to tell the story of the writing. I knew I had to create some interesting situations, something to keep the story moving. So Claudius Aurelius became Luke’s nemesis, while Hermalius became his defender. I decided Augustus needed a love interest, and Keziah joined the cast. I’m not sure when Augustus’s two schoolboy friends re-entered his life. Slowly that cast expanded.

But it was all about the gospel. With every chapter and scene I wasn’t really thinking of the characters. I was thinking of how the gospel was being written. That was front and center. I knew I had already alienated the verbal inspirationists, those who think the gospel writers were merely taking dictation. Since I’m a plenary inspirationist, that didn’t bother me.

Somewhere as I was writing, I came across some helps for writers. I don’t remember if it was a website or a book. It wasn’t a class or a course or a conference, since I didn’t do any of those at that point. In those helps I heard for the first time the wisdom of Alfred Hitchcock: It’s not about the McGuffin. How this term came into being I have no idea. It has a Wikipedia page, but I didn’t find that all that helpful.

The McGuffin is a plot device that moves the story along, but isn’t really what the reader (or movie watcher as was Hitchcock’s concern) will identify with; he/she identifies with the people who are motivated by the McGuffin. A good example is in the movie The Maltese Falcon. The black bird is the McGuffin. Yet we really don’t care about that. We care about Humphrey Bogart and his antagonists and their quest.

I realized that in Doctor Luke’s Assistant‘s case the gospel was the McGuffin. I had Luke coming to Israel to find the witnesses and write, not the gospel that we know, but a massive biography of Jesus, a work that would please and challenge the most learned people in the Hellenistic world. That was his quest. Of course, he didn’t write that massive biography. He wrote his gospel instead. How that happened is a spoiler, so I won’t say much.

I began looking at the book as the story of Luke and Augustus, not the story of writing the gospel. Of course, that’s what they were doing. But the people had to be of first importance. This changed my focus. I went back and added scenes or changed scenes to put more emphasis on people and less on the gospel. I didn’t take the gospel out, of course, for without it there would be no story. But I came to believe the book is the story of the people, not really the story of what they were doing.

So this was worked into the first draft, which, as I said in the last post, was final the first Sunday in January, 2003. In my next post, I’ll speak to the research involved in the writing.