Critical Study of the Gospels

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FROM JESUS TO THE GOSPELS

Most readers of this book have at least a rough picture of Jesus of Nazareth—who he was, when he lived, what he did, and so on. Where do we get this information? Our picture comes from a variety of sources. We might have read the New Testament or parts of it, heard sermons in church, or taken classes in Sunday school or a religious school. Even if we have not grown up Christian, chances are we have formed an impression of Jesus from the culture that surrounds us. We have naturally blended and harmonized information we have received without being too conscious of just how we have put our picture together. If we engage in conversation about Jesus, we quickly learn that even among believers, people hold many pictures of him that differ in important ways. Even when we agree on some basic points, there is still much room for disagreement and interpretation. Why such variety? Do we get a single, unified view if we go back far enough in history?

If we give it a moment's thought, we realize that even if we go back to Jesus' contemporaries, we will not find a single, unanimous opinion about him. Those who encountered Jesus during his earthly life reacted to him in a range of ways. Some believed in him, followed him, and became the first members of the early church. Others opposed him, even to the point of executing him. Still others, perhaps the majority, shrugged their shoulders and continued their lives as they had before they met him. But didn't the earliest Christians all agree? We need only read the Apostle Paul's letters, our earliest extant Christian sources, to see that from the beginning there were serious disagreements among Christians on a multiplicity of things, including how to interpret Jesus and his work. But the New Testament does not include writings by Paul's opponents—so doesn't the process of choosing some texts and excluding others yield a collection completely at one with itself? The answer is "no," or at least, "not entirely."

The New Testament contains twenty-seven books, composed at different times and places by different authors. The first four texts are the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That should give us pause. Four Gospels? Why four? Why not just one? Some basic facts help us answer that question. To begin with, none of the four evangelists witnessed the events of Jesus' life and death. Each depended on sources, some oral and some written. No two gospels had exactly the same sources. We must remember also that the ancient world was quite different from our own in many respects. Today we take for granted the widespread use of writing, mass production of books, recording devices such as tape recorders and video cameras, communications media such as radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and even, in recent years, the Internet, with access to a dizzying amount of information. We truly live in the information age. The ancient world was nothing like that. Few were literate. Books were copied manually, and it was next to impossible to control a book's contents once it left the author's hand and began to be copied and distributed. Travel was slow. The postal system existed only for the convenience of the ruling classes. In such a world, the production, reproduction, control of content, and dissemination of texts of any kind was not simple. Further, even if the production and control of Christian documents had been possible, who would control it? Careful study of the New Testament and early Christian literature shows that diversity characterized the churches from the outset. There was no single authority that could speak for all Christians and all churches. Conflict was common, and it involved even central matters such as Jesus' true nature and work.

Central to the Gospels is Jesus of Nazareth. All we hear about him comes from others. He himself left no writings. He was a prophet, as we shall see, and prophets often did not write down their prophecies. It was not uncommon in Israel for others who esteemed a prophet's words to write them down. That is exactly what happened in the case of Jesus. To some degree, he also fit the ancient categories of wise man and philosopher, and it was common for such figures to have their lives recorded by those who lived later and revered them. Again, the same applies to Jesus. So no matter how early our sources, we are always reading a report of what someone else says that Jesus said or did.

There was an interval between Jesus' career and the writing of the Gospels. When anything noteworthy happens in today's world, it is quickly followed by a stream of articles and books about it. Two thousand years ago, things did not automatically get reduced to writing. Excited by the amazing things that had happened among them (the ministry of Jesus, his crucifixion, and his resurrection), and convinced that God had changed the world through Jesus, the earliest Christians launched an intensive effort to convert others to their way of seeing things, to teach one another about Jesus, and to establish institutions to support their beliefs and activity. All of this involved preserving, shaping, adapting, and passing on information about Jesus. So the Jesus tradition was at first transmitted orally in the context of missionary work, liturgy, and teaching.

Some Christians, a small minority, could read and write. As years passed and it became apparent that the great eschatological events (events signaling the turn of the ages and the end of the world as we know it) that Christians expected were not going to happen immediately, they began to record what they knew about Jesus. They may have begun by collecting Jesus' teachings, and perhaps penning accounts of his powerful deeds. Eventually some perceived a need to present Jesus more fully, in a form that would relate his deeds to his words and connect both to his violent death, viewing all in light of his resurrection. The result was the Gospels. The Gospels in the New Testament were written for different local churches at different times. Mark was written first, probably around 70 C.E. Matthew and Luke soon followed, perhaps fifteen years or so later, both using Mark as a source but being unaware of each other's work. John was probably written still later, perhaps in the 90s.

The first three canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are so similar that they are called the Synoptic Gospels. The word synoptic comes from the Greek meaning something like "to see together." Books called gospel parallels arrange these gospels in three parallel columns for easy comparison. John is quite different from the other three gospels. There is no compelling evidence that it depends literarily on the other three. It may, however, be related to them in some other way. One suggestion is that Christians in the Johannine community composed this gospel in reaction to the writing of the Synoptics, but did so on the basis of its own distinctive traditions and manner of conceiving of Jesus.

Comparison of the Gospels shows that each revises material about Jesus to apply it to new situations. The clearest examples are Matthew's and Luke's revisions of Mark. Comparing the Synoptics and John, we see that the latter dramatically transforms Jesus material. Such interpretation and adaptation also happened in earlier stages of writing and oral transmission.

To oversimplify a bit, we have three stages to keep in mind when we study material about Jesus. First, there is the historical Jesus—what he actually said and did, and what happened to him. Second, there is a period of mostly oral transmission of information about Jesus. Finally, there is the composition of the gospel accounts. The second and third stage overlapped for some time, since the writing of the Gospels did not spell an end to oral transmission. One Christian writer of the early second century, Papias, the bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), insisted that oral tradition was more trustworthy than written. Further, the four biblical gospels were not the only ones written. We devote a chapter to other gospels toward the end of this book. Methods that study Jesus material as it evolved over time, including the study of incorporation of preexisting traditions into the Gospels and possible stages of composition of the Gospels, are called diachronic, from the Greek words dia, meaning "through," and chronos, meaning "time." Methods that treat the works as literary wholes and concentrate on their present form are called synchronic, from the Greek syn, meaning "with," and chronos.

The collection of books eventually chosen as authoritative for the church is called the canon. The word comes from the Greek kanon, meaning a measuring rod. The canonical books are a means by which the church measures its belief and practice. The selection of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the only canonical gospels was made in the course of the second century and was widely established by the middle of the third century.

WHO WROTE THE GOSPELS?

This might seem an odd question. Aren't the evangelists' names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? And doesn't ancient tradition tell us something about each of them? Things are not so simple.

The authors of the Gospels are called the evangelists. This comes from the Greek word for gospel, euangelion. Its literal meaning is "good news." At the beginning of the Gospels there are the headings "According to Matthew," "According to Mark," "According to Luke," and "According to John." Ancient books did not customarily begin this way, so individual authors or scribes would not have happened upon this identical formula independently. Clearly these phrases were added to the Gospels when they were gathered together, which did not happen until the second century. The formula assumes a single story of Jesus, told in four versions. We cannot be sure that the names in these formulas tell us anything about authorship. They reflect later church tradition that may or may not be based on solid information. But even if the attributions are accurate, that still does not tell us who the authors were.

The fourth-century church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (on Palestine's Mediterranean coast) quotes Papias, an early second-century bishop, as follows: "Mark became Peter's interpreter and wrote accurately all that he remembered, not, indeed, in order, of the things said or done by the Lord" (Church History 3.39.15). Scholars have pondered these words for years, asking whether or not Eusebius's third-hand account, written two centuries after Papias, can be trusted, and, if so, what Papias means by "interpreter" and "in order." Does "interpreter" mean that Peter's words had to be translated into Greek, or does it mean something broader? And does "in order" refer to chronology? Or is there an element of interpretation implied?

The strongest evidence against seeing Mark as having received his information directly from Peter is the Gospel itself. Its author collected small units of tradition, usually oral but perhaps sometimes written, and pieced them together into a continuous narrative. The same sorts of small units of tradition were available to Matthew, Luke, John, and any other Christian who wanted them. Mark's Gospel shows no sign that its author had access to information other than this generally available tradition.

About Matthew, Papias says that he "collected the oracles in the Hebrew language, and each interpreted them as best he could" (Achtemeier, "Mark," 542). Matthew is more than a collection of oracles (divine pronouncements), and there is no solid evidence that Matthew ever existed in anything but its present Greek. So it is difficult to know what to make of this report. Matthew is the name of the tax collector called by Jesus in Matt 9:9, and he is one of the twelve in Matt 10:3. If this is the Gospel's author, he would be an eyewitness. But Matthew does not read like an eyewitness account. In fact, Matthew bases his work on Mark's Gospel, and we know that Mark was not an eyewitness.

Luke is often thought to be the companion of the Apostle Paul, mentioned in Phlm 24; Col 4:14; and 2 Tim 4:11. The reason for the attribution may be that Acts of the Apostles is by the same author as the Gospel of Luke, and there are sections of Acts that speak in the first person plural, implying that the narrator accompanied Paul on some of his journeys. However, the use of "we" in those passages can be explained otherwise—literary convention aimed at increasing vividness, for example—and Acts's depiction of Paul contradicts what we find in Paul's letters.

The author of the Fourth Gospel is frequently equated with the unnamed beloved disciple mentioned in that gospel. But the Gospel shows signs of having been composed in stages, and it has transformed the Jesus material into something very different from what we find in the Synoptics. Most would judge the portraits in the Synoptics to be closer to the historical Jesus (see ch. 8). This argues against seeing John as an eyewitness.

The best information about the evangelists must come from the Gospels themselves. Unfortunately, that means that we cannot be sure of their names, where and under what circumstances they wrote, and their precise positions in the church. A further caveat is in order as we picture the evangelists. We are probably justified in thinking that there was a specific individual who put each gospel in its final form and who therefore is its author. Nonetheless, ideas of ancient authorship are different from our own. That is clear from the very fact that the Gospels are anonymous texts. It is also clear from the fact that Matthew and Luke took over large portions of Mark, often reproducing it word-for-word. We must also keep in mind that each evangelist makes use of traditional material that itself was chosen, transformed, and passed down by an anonymous, communal process. The Gospels are, to a large extent, community creations.

STUDY OF THE GOSPELS: PRINCIPLES AND METHODS

The Gospels have been read in many different ways over the past two millennia. Our approach to them in this book requires explanation.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual and social movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that celebrated human reason. It valued evidence and scientific method over traditional, and often religious, ideas and dogmas. One of the fruits of the Enlightenment was the launching of academic disciplines in which human reason is applied to evidence in orderly ways. We refer to the application of such methods to the Bible as "critical scholarship." The application of methodologies drawn from the fields of history, philology, literature, archaeology, anthropology, and so on has deepened our understanding of the Bible immeasurably. At various points over the past couple of centuries, many Christians have been alarmed at the application of such "secular" disciplines to their sacred texts, fearing that they would undermine faith. But over time, most "mainline" churches have come to accept critical methods as both helpful and salutary.

New Testament texts were written around two thousand years ago. For the first millennium and a half of the church's existence, it read these documents as if there were little difference between its own world and that displayed in the texts. The Renaissance brought both new attention to the ancient world and a realization that there was a gap between the world of the reader and that of the original writer and readers. This eventually led to the birth of historical criticism. Modern methods take the gap between ancient and present worlds seriously.

Critical study of the Bible has made these influential texts accessible even to non-Christians. An example is cooperation between Jewish and Christian scholars as they investigate ancient Judaism and Christianity. There are Christians who study ancient Judaism, and Jews who study ancient Christianity. The way questions are asked and answered unites such scholars. Debates about method are usually no longer conducted along confessional lines, meaning points of view determined by particular faiths. Historical questions are not resolved by resorting to religious creeds.

Critical scholars do not read the Gospels as simple transcriptions of exactly what happened in the ministry of Jesus. Christians take these texts as the products of inspiration. But inspiration need not mean word-for-word dictation of the text by God to the writer. Nonfundamentalistic churches accept the idea that the authors of the biblical texts were true authors and fully human, part of their historical situations, operating from within worldviews conditioned by their times, and having limited human understanding. Each gospel has its own conception of Jesus and his mission, depending to some degree on each evangelist's viewpoint. We might call these "portraits" to indicate that they are not simple and literal representations of historical realities. The Gospels constitute a variety of portraits of Jesus, not just one. The present book takes full account of the uniqueness of each of these portraits. Good portraits capture something essential about their subject, but they are not simply photographs. They are interpretive. Ultimately, they may contain a good deal of the artist.