READING THE GOSPELS

France noted in NBC:

What is a gospel?
A new type of book?

    ‘Gospel’ means simply ‘good news’. ‘The gospel’ is the good news about Jesus which is preached, heard and believed.

    Why then do we talk about the first four books of the NT as ‘the gospels’? There is no record of any book being known by this title before then. By the early second century, however, Christians could talk about ‘the gospel’ in reference to a book, and distinguished one such ‘gospel’ from another. Before the end of the second century Irenaeus took it for granted that there cannot be more or less than four ‘gospels’, just as there are four regions of the earth and four winds!
    It was probably Mark who, unknowingly, coined this new term. He began his account of Jesus with the words, ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’. No doubt by ‘good news’ he meant the subject–matter of his book, not its literary type; but it formed a convenient label, and as other such books came to be written the label was transferred, and each came to be known as ‘the good news according to x’.
    Mark’s is probably the earliest such account of Jesus which has survived. But it may not have been the first to be written, since Lk. 1:1 mentions ‘many’ who have already attempted the same task which he is now undertaking (though he does not use the term ‘gospel’ to describe either their work or his own). At first, no doubt, Jesus’ followers shared their memories of his life and teaching mainly by word of mouth, whether in conversation or in more formal teaching, but before long written records began to be compiled and kept. These early records, which were probably shorter and more limited than the gospels we know, would naturally fall into disuse when longer texts became available, and so did not survive.
    Once the pattern had become established through the four gospels we have in our NT, further ‘gospels’ continued to be written. But since these later gospels did not become part of the canon of Scripture, many of them also failed to survive. Some are known to us only by name, where early Christian writers mention them and occasionally quote from them. Others have come to light quite recently, as old copies have been discovered in the sands of Egypt. The early second–century Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus which range from single sentences to quite lengthy parables. Also from the second century comes a section of a Gospel of Peter, giving a more detailed account of Jesus’ death and resurrection than we find in the canonical gospels. From the same period comes the ‘Proto–gospel’ of James, an imaginative record of the birth and life of Mary, and of the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus. Other writings which are called ‘gospels’ (e.g. the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Truth) turn out in fact to be not stories about Jesus at all, but religious or philosophical treatises which bear no resemblance to the canonical gospels.
    Most of these second–century ‘gospels’ clearly derive from circles in which gnostic (exclusive and mystical) thinking was displacing the theology of the NT writers, and were designed to propagate such ideas. While they were widely used in gnostic circles, it is clear from mainstream Christian writings of the second century that they were never treated as on a par with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Before the middle of the century there was virtually universal agreement that these four gospels, and only these, preserved the true apostolic witness to Jesus. While discussion continued for some time over some other books, the place of the four gospels was so firmly established as the foundation of Christian faith and teaching that soon after the middle of the second century Tatian felt the need to compile his famous Diatessaron, an attempted harmony of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. For him, as for the majority of Christians, by that time the category of ‘gospel’ was clearly defined, and it consisted of only four members.

What sort of book?
    It is often stated that the gospels are not biographies. They are certainly not like most modern biographies. The gospels offer little information on Jesus’ family background, up–bringing and education; nor do they make much effort to set his story in the context of contemporary history. They do not unravel his psychological development, or discuss his motives and ambitions. They do not even tell us what he looked like. They pass over most of his life–story in silence, and focus on a few years at [p. 896] the end of his short life. They devote what seems a disproportionate amount of space to the events leading up to and following his death.

    Much space is devoted to recording Jesus’ teaching, sometimes in quite long ‘sermons’. And even where the authors are telling stories about Jesus, you often have the impression that the story is itself a sermon. They are not just recording; they are preaching. They expect a verdict, a commitment to follow Jesus.

    Modern biographies are not usually like this, but in the ancient world the style would have been more familiar. Lives of philosophers, poets, political and military leaders were written not so much to satisfy historical curiosity, but to offer their subjects as models for imitation, or perhaps to win public support for their teaching and ideals.

    It was not the style of the gospels which would have been surprising, but the nature of their subject. For to the gospel writers Jesus is not just a great teacher and a noble example in the past, but a risen, living person, in whom salvation is to be found, and who is to be worshipped as Lord. No other ancient biography could have been described as John describes the purpose of his gospel: ‘that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name’ (Jn. 20:31).

    A book written with such a purpose will not be a mere ‘objective’ record of events. The gospels were written by believers, leading figures in the new religious movement which Jesus began, and their aim was either to win new converts or to encourage and direct those already committed to the church into more effective discipleship.

    So their material was selected and presented with this end in view, rather than to satisfy the academic historian. In particular, they were not concerned with constructing a detailed chronological account of the events of Jesus’ ministry (let alone of his whole life). Each writer has his own distinctive way of arranging the material. There is a basic development from the early preaching in Galilee to the final climax in Jerusalem, but within this framework the individual incidents and teaching are collected more in the manner of an anthology than of a consecutive diary.

    The events of the final days in Jerusalem are recalled in considerable detail, and it may be possible to discern some turning–points in the earlier development of Jesus’ ministry (especially the feeding of the 5,000, Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi, and the entry to Jerusalem). But the gospels do not offer us the sort of record we would need to write a chronological ‘Life of Jesus’ in detail. What they offer is a portrait, or rather four portraits, of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, in word and deed, and a call to follow him in the way of salvation.

The gospels as history

    Some have concluded that if the gospels are not presenting us with ‘objective history’, they cannot be trusted to give us history at all. That is really an extraordinary conclusion.

    The ‘objective’ historian, who records bare facts for their own sake with no sense of their value and no effort to interpret them to the reader, is a poor historian—if indeed he or she exists at all! History is studied and recorded because we have something to learn from it, and this is particularly clearly so in the case of biography: you don’t write a biography unless you think the person concerned is important, and you want the reader to learn from them. The greatest and most influential histories and biographies have been written from a position of commitment, ‘with an axe to grind’. But they are not therefore assumed to be factually unreliable. You may not agree with the author’s viewpoint, but you do not for that reason refuse to recognize the reliability of his or her research.

    Similarly with the gospel writers: the fact that they were committed to Jesus does not mean that they must have invented or misrepresented the events and teaching they record. Indeed, Luke makes it very clear that his aim was to offer an accurate, carefully researched account of the facts on which his faith was founded (Lk. 1:1-4). When someone offers his work to the public on such a basis (and there is no reason to think that the other gospel writers would have disagreed with Luke’s aim), it is reasonable to take the claim at face value unless the evidence is against it. And a Christian commitment and an evangelistic purpose are not in themselves evidence of historical incompetence or misrepresentation!

    This is not the place to record the complex debates in modern scholarship over the historical value of the gospels. A readable but quite detailed account and assessment of the debate is available in C. L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (IVP, 1987). Through a patient and well–informed discussion of the various causes of scholarly scepticism, Blomberg shows how a respect for the gospels as factual accounts of Jesus and his teaching may be justified by the normal canons of historical study, not merely asserted on the basis of unquestioning faith.

    The gospels were written within one or two generations of Jesus’ lifetime. They were based partly on written records (see above) and partly on traditions preserved in the teaching of the churches, together with the personal reminiscences of their authors and their informants. [p. 897] While the process of handing on the material allowed for variation in the way events and teaching were recorded, as the gospels clearly show, it took place within the life of a Christian community which was committed to preserving the truth about Jesus, and within which there was still the continuity of living memory of those who had been there at the time.

    It is worth remembering too that oral tradition was generally regarded in the ancient world (as in non–literary or semi–literary cultures today) as a reliable means of preserving information and teaching. This was particularly true in the Jewish world. Rabbinic scholars developed a sophisticated system of memorization, which they valued more highly than written records, and which was capable of passing on vast bodies of material unchanged from one generation to another. While the NT church was not a rabbinic academy, there is no reason to doubt that the traditions about Jesus which Christians continued to share and to study together could be carefully preserved and controlled.

    This is not to say, of course, that no verbal variation would occur. The gospels provide plenty of evidence of such variation, both in narrative and in the recorded sayings of Jesus. We must also remember that Jesus probably spoke normally in Aramaic, so that his sayings were translated at some stage before they found their way into our Greek gospels—and any translator knows that there is no such thing as an exactly equivalent translation into another language.

    But to recognize an appropriate variety in the ways in which Jesus’ words and deeds were recorded is not at all to cast doubt on their historical origin, or on the ‘accuracy’ which Luke claimed for his work. The gospels, for all their literary and theological sensitivity, are historical documents.