Fortress Introduction to the Gospels

By Mark Allan Powell

With clarity and verve, Mark Allen Powell introduces the beginning student to the contents and structure of the Gospels, their distinctive characteristics, and their major themes. An introductory chapter surveys the political, religious, and social world of the Gospels, methods of approaching early Christian texts, the genre of the Gospels, and the religious character of these writings. This second edition has been updated to take fuller account of different theories regarding the Gospels, with new chapters on the historical Jesus and on gospel literature not included in our New Testament, and with a pleasing new format. Special features include illustrations and more than two dozen special topics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781506460505

Mark Allan Powell

Leatherman Professor of New Testament, Trinity Lutheran Seminary. Author of Jesus as a Figure in History (WJK, 1998); A Fortress Introduction to the Gospels (Fortress, 1998); God With Us: Toward a Pastoral Theology of Matthew's Gospel (Fortress, 1995); What Is Narrative Criticism? (Fortress, 1990).

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Fortress Introduction to the Gospels

Second Edition

Mark Allan Powell

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

FORTRESS INTRODUCTION TO THE GOSPELS

Second Edition

Copyright © 2019 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN  55440-1209.

First edition published 1998.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA and used by permission. All rights reserved.

The symbolic drawings of the four evangelists drawn by Rudolph Koch (1878-1934) are from Christian Symbols, translated by Kevin Ahern and published by Arion Press. These images are considered to be in the public domain.

Cover image: Peace, Be Still by He Qi. Used by permission

Cover design: Alisha Lofgren

Print ISBN: 978-1-4514-8525-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-6050-5

For Michael and Sharon Powell

Contents

Dedication

Figures

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction: Four Stories of Jesus

1. From Jesus to Us

2. The Gospel of Mark

3. The Gospel of Matthew

4. The Gospel of Luke (and the Book of Acts)

5. The Gospel of John

6. The Other Gospels

Notes

List of Abbreviations

Glossary

Bibliography

Index of Biblical and Other Ancient Writings

Index of Modern Authors

Palestine in the Time of Jesus

Figures

Four Pictures of Jesus

From Jesus to Us: Six Stages in the Transmission of the Gospel Tradition

Modern Biographies of Jesus

Suggested Solutions to the Synoptic Puzzle

Contents of Q: Material in Luke and Matthew but Not in Mark

Typical Forms of Material in the Gospels

An Exorcism Story (Mark 1:21–28)

Mark 1:1–8 from the Printed Greek New Testament

Some Well-Known English Bible Translations

Reception: Evaluating Four Different Responses

Possible Sources for Mark’s Gospel

Material Unique to Mark’s Gospel

The Passion of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark

The Story of the Epileptic Child (Mark 9:14–29)

Intercalation in the Gospel of Mark: A Few Examples

The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus

The Way of the Cross in the Gospel of Mark

When Will Jesus Return (according to the Gospel of Mark)?

Material Unique to Matthew’s Gospel

Passages from Mark Omitted by Matthew

Matthew’s Use of Mark

The Structure of Matthew’s Gospel: Two Views

The Bias against Gentiles in the Gospel of Matthew

The Presence of God in the Gospel of Matthew

Worship in the Gospel of Matthew

A Passage from the Talmud

Disciples of Jesus as People of Little Faith in the Gospel of

Matthew

Passages from Mark Omitted by Luke

Material Unique to Luke’s Gospel

The Journey Motif in Luke

Two Christmas Stories: Similarities and Differences

Parallels between Luke’s Gospel and Acts

Luke’s Use of Mark

The Centrality of Jerusalem in Luke and Acts

Worship in the Gospel of Luke

Male/Female Parallels in the Gospel of Luke

Salvation Happens Now

Salvation in Luke and Acts

Luke 2:14—Peace on Earth for Whom?

John and the Synoptic Gospels

Possible Sources for John’s Gospel

A Gospel Composed in Stages

The Christological Moment

The Beloved Disciple in John’s Gospel

The Expression I Am in the Gospel of John

A Nazified Version of John’s Gospel

Three Persons Named John?

Preface to the Second Edition

The first edition of this volume is now more than twenty years old and still being used as a standard text by many professors and institutions. I’m glad it has served well, but it seemed I should update numerous sections to be more representative of current scholarship. I did that—and then decided to do much more.

The current volume is quite a bit longer than the first edition, and about one-third of the material is completely new. I am grateful to Fortress Press for allowing me to expand the volume in ways that will make it significantly better. Two major additions may be immediately obvious: (1) the chapter on the Gospel of Luke is now on Luke and Acts, and (2) what was a brief appendix on the noncanonical gospels has now been expanded into a full chapter. Thus, while the title stays the same, this book is now effectively an introduction to the four New Testament Gospels, the book of Acts, and the most significant noncanonical gospels.

Each of the main chapters also contains major new sections on themes or motifs that were not treated previously—the twelve major themes treated in the first edition have grown to twenty-five in this volume. In some cases, these make up for lapses in the first edition or represent advances in scholarly interest since that time (see, for example, the new sections on Stages of History and The Role of Women in Church and Society in the chapter on Luke and Acts). In other cases, they represent contributions from my own work on the Gospels (sections on Women and Revelation in the chapter on Mark and Critique of Power in the chapter on Matthew). I realize now that I viewed the first edition as a survey of significant scholarship and was shy about including my own work in such a category. For better or worse, I’ve overcome that timidity.

Feedback from the first edition indicated that professors and students especially appreciated the figures, or text boxes, scattered throughout the book, so we have added many more of those (forty-seven now, compared to twenty-six before).

I think this is a much better book than the first edition, and I hope it will prove useful for any who want a guide to understanding the first half of the New Testament. For a course that covers more than that, it would pair nicely with Paul: Apostle to the Nations by Walter F. Taylor Jr. (also published by Fortress Press).

Mark Allan Powell

Introduction: Four Stories of Jesus

Introduction

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: these are the names given to the first four books included in the second part of the Christian Bible, which is known as the New Testament. They are commonly called the four Gospels. All four relate the career of Jesus, the central figure of the Christian faith. The New Testament actually contains twenty-seven books, all of which reflect upon the significance of Jesus, but only these four describe his life and ministry.

The names given to these books were added at a later time. The books themselves are anonymous but were written in Greek by Christians who lived in the Roman Empire during the last half of the first century. Jesus himself was born at the beginning of the first century—that, of course, is why it is called the first century in cultures influenced by Christianity. Thus, these four Gospels were written a generation or so after the time of Jesus himself but, nevertheless, before Christianity had become the developed, institutionalized religion it is today.

The World of the Gospels

Since the Gospels were written in a place and time other than our own, we sometimes need help understanding the stories they tell. They relate tales concerning centurions, Samaritans, Sadducees, and magi—people we are not likely to encounter in our world today. We also hear about tax collectors and lawyers, who are still with us, but in the world of the Bible these professions evoked different associations than they do today. Tax collectors were viewed as traitors to their country since they collected taxes on behalf of a conquering power. Lawyers did not sue people but were experts at interpreting the Scriptures (the law of God). If we read the Gospel stories without realizing these things, we are likely to miss the point.

Figure 1: Four Pictures of Jesus

The world of the Gospels can be a strange environment to the uninitiated. People beat their breasts (Luke 18:13; 23:48), tear their clothing (Mark 14:63), and wash each other’s feet (John 13:3–15). Jesus criticizes a group of people called the Pharisees for making their phylacteries broad and their fringes long (Matt 23:5). He criticizes another Pharisee for neglecting to kiss him when he came to visit (Luke 7:45). Fortunately, a wealth of information is available to us regarding the world of the Gospels. For example, detailed descriptions of many places, people, and events are offered by the Jewish historian Josephus¹ (37 BCE–100 CE²). For students, numerous resources exist to provide the information needed. Bible dictionaries are available in both single-volume and multi-volume editions to offer brief or in-depth explanations of manners, customs, and concepts that are no longer immediately understandable.³ Similarly, Bible atlases offer maps, photographs, time lines, and other useful aids.

Scholarship and the World of the Gospels

Our knowledge of the world of the Gospels has been aided over the years through a variety of academic fields of research.

Archaeology

Archaeologists excavate ancient cities and other sites important to the New Testament world, and they have uncovered an enormous amount of physical evidence that supplies background information for interpreting these texts.⁴ For example, a few years ago a first-century CE fishing boat was found submerged in the Sea of Galilee. Gospel scholars do not suppose that this is the boat actually used by Jesus and his disciples, but they are interested in the artifact nevertheless. The eight-by-twenty-six-foot boat was rather poorly crafted: it was constructed from varied materials and had undergone numerous repairs. Thus, it may represent a vessel typical of what would have been used by ordinary fishermen of the day. It had a narrower draft than anyone would have supposed and would have sat much lower in the water than we might have guessed would be advisable. Presumably, this lack of depth was intentional to facilitate the hauling of nets filled with fish into the vessel. But this also meant that the boat could be easily swamped by waves and may have been somewhat vulnerable to sinking in a storm.⁵

Archaeological research has also wielded a wealth of literary evidence for the world of the New Testament, such as the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947.⁶ These scrolls offer a collection of over eight hundred documents dating from the New Testament era or slightly before. In addition to a wealth of liturgical materials, they include manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (including parts of every Old Testament book except Esther and Nehemiah); numerous biblical commentaries; community documents (the Community Rule and the Damascus Document) that spell out regulations for a monastic Jewish sect (probably the Essenes); a Temple Scroll, which interprets laws from the Pentateuch in a manner analogous to the much later Jewish Talmud (and possibly similar to the Pharisees’ tradition of the elders referenced in Matt 15:2); an apocalyptic War Scroll that provides a blueprint for an imminent end-time conflict; and the Messianic Rule, a handbook for the future that details life in a postwar righteous community ruled by two messiahs, one a king and the other a priest. Just as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls may be the volumes from a fourth-century Christian library at Nag Hammadi, Egypt.⁷ Discovered in 1945, the Nag Hammadi collection comprises fifty-three mostly gnostic writings, including several noncanonical Gospels (see chapter 6 of this book).

Some of the most useful results of archaeology, however, have not concerned individual artifacts or manuscripts; frequently, the field assists Gospel research through what it reveals about the social, political, and cultural climate in which Jesus lived. Jonathan Reed has studied the demographics of Galilee at the time of Jesus, estimating the population of such villages as Capernaum (between 600 and 1,500) and Nazareth (about 400), as well as that of the bigger cities, Sepphoris and Tiberias (both around 12,000).⁸ Sean Freyne has analyzed the ecology of Galilee at the time of Jesus: the area was lush with plant and animal life in a way that might have influenced the development of a creation theology that viewed the blessings of the earth as a guarantee of God’s continued favor (this in contrast with the harsher theology of impending wrath espoused by John the Baptist in the less fertile wilderness).⁹ Marianne Sawicki has studied the ways in which Roman occupation of Galilee affected various economic and social systems; for example, the building of roads increased trade, making exotic cultural and material goods available to those who could afford them, but also depleting local resources through the export of agricultural goods.¹⁰ David Fiensy has surmised from the study of fecal matter in first-century latrines that an extraordinary number of whipworms, roundworms, and tapeworms indicate a likelihood that many (perhaps most) persons featured in the New Testament Gospels went through life never knowing what it felt like to be healthy.¹¹

Archaeology is often invoked with regard to one of the most significant questions for studies of the historical Jesus: the relative Hellenization of Galilee and Judea at the time of Jesus. The word Hellenization refers to the influence of Greco-Roman culture on areas that had become a part of the Roman Empire. If the area in which Jesus lived was thoroughly Hellenized, then Jesus himself may have been influenced by Greek philosophy, Roman values, and other aspects of the gentile world: this could explain some of the tensions he experienced with certain Jewish leaders, who perhaps identified faithfulness with resistance to Hellenization. But if such influences were not prominent in Jesus’s world, then it might be better to understand him in more exclusively Jewish categories (e.g., by placing him within the stream of apocalyptic Judaism, or by viewing him as heir to the Jewish wisdom tradition or as a politically motivated prophet of social justice). At present, the data is inconclusive on this point, being read with opposite tendencies by various interpreters.¹²

Sociology and the Social Sciences

In recent years, Bible scholars have found another major ally in coming to understand the world of the Gospels: fields of study associated with the social sciences.¹³ These entail a variety of approaches and disciplines, some of which are still being defined. New Testament scholars will draw on the general field of sociology to understand various phenomena that characterized the social world of the Roman Empire: the phenomenon of the so-called Pax Romana (the period during which the Roman Empire exercised such dominance within its geographical area that warfare with other nations was limited); the military occupation of the area that would come to be called Palestine; and the creation of a patronage system, according to which a few people with social and economic power were expected to serve as benefactors to the vast majority of those who lacked such power.¹⁴

A specific field of study called social history involves the interpretation of events in light of the social impact that historical transitions have on communities. For example, one result of the Jewish homeland becoming part of the Roman Empire was an exchange of populations. Business opportunities and other factors prompted non-Jewish people to move into Galilee, Samaria, and Judea in unprecedented numbers, while also prompting Jewish people to move out of their homeland and settle throughout the empire. Social historians would seek to define the effects that such migrations have on group identity and then to examine the Gospels to determine whether those issues are addressed in the stories they tell. The process is analogous to asking "the place of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac in preindustrial America or the relation of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to the Great Depression."¹⁵

A related field, sociology of knowledge, tries to understand what people in a given culture take for granted about the world and how this relates to their patterns of social organization.¹⁶ Examples might be beliefs about the extent to which life (or the future) is predetermined, and ideas concerning what constitutes wisdom (knowing right from wrong or understanding how things work). Especially significant is the investigation of what happens when competing sociologies collide, or when people convert from one way of knowing to another. John’s Gospel, for instance, represents faith as coming to know what his community calls the truth (8:32). Sociologists would say this means more than just adding new religious propositions to a prior list of convictions. Rather, John’s Gospel calls for its readers to abandon their preconceived notions about life and to entertain an entirely different vision of reality.

Also derived from the social sciences, cultural anthropology employs models for understanding key phenomena that often occur within cultures. The goal is to understand what happens in a particular culture within a broader framework.¹⁷ For example, almost all cultures designate certain days as special (holidays), but it is revealing to note whether the special days within a given culture mark events of primary significance to the individual (birthdays, Mother’s Day), the nation (Independence Day, Veterans Day), or a prominent social subgroup (Christmas, Hanukkah). Similarly, cultural anthropologists study such matters as kinship relations, power structures, gender roles, economic systems, and  strategies  for  education.  The  method  of  study  always  involves cross-cultural comparisons, asking, for instance, what purpose a phenomenon in one culture is expected to fulfill based on what we know from the study of other cultures. With regard to the Gospels, cultural anthropology has emphasized the significance of honor and shame within the Mediterranean world, explained the social dimensions of purity codes that label people clean or unclean, and clarified the socioeconomic dynamics of peasant culture in which, without a middle class, most persons experience both the hardships and the solidarity of poverty.

Basic Dynamics of the Biblical World

Orienting ourselves to the world of the Gospels involves recognition of religious, political, and social dynamics.

Religious Dynamics

The religious world of the Gospels is primarily that of the Jewish people, though we should not rashly assume that the beliefs or values of Jewish people in that era were identical with those of Jewish people today.¹⁸ The phrase Second Temple Judaism is often used for the period of Jewish history extending from 515 BCE to 70 CE, and the somewhat anachronistic term first-century Judaism is used for the narrower period during which Jesus and the earliest Christians lived. Both terms, however, may be misleading, insofar as they imply a uniform religion that simply did not exist. One of the most outstanding characteristics of Jewish religion at the time of Jesus was the diversity of belief and practice. Recent discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls have confirmed the presence of many different groups of Jewish people with conflicting religious ideas. The two Jewish groups that figure most prominently in the Gospels are the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Sadducees tend to be priests associated with the temple in Jerusalem, where sacrifices were offered to God under their auspices. The Pharisees tend to be teachers (rabbis or lawyers) associated mainly with synagogues, where they interpreted the Scriptures at regular Sabbath services. These Scriptures included the books that Christians now call the Old Testament, and familiarity with them is assumed throughout the Gospels. Another group of Semitic people, the Samaritans, claimed to be the true descendants of Abraham (the ancestor of the Jewish people) and the true followers of Moses (their lawgiver). They had their own temple at Gerizim in Samaria and their own copies of Scripture, but they were viewed as heretics and foreigners by most Jewish people.

Political Dynamics

The political world of the Gospels is that of an occupied land.¹⁹ In 64 BCE the Roman general Pompey conquered Jerusalem. The areas where Jesus would later live and work (Galilee, Samaria, Judea) were all brought under the control of the Roman Empire. There were benefits to such colonialism: the Romans cleared the sea of pirates, built aqueducts and roads, kept crime to a minimum, and generally maintained an almost unprecedented stability with regard to administration and governmental affairs; trade flowed more freely, and both travel and communication became easier. Still, such benefits came at a very high price. The tax burden was incredibly oppressive, forcing most people into poverty and keeping them there. Somewhere between one-fourth and one-third of all inhabitants of the Roman Empire were slaves. Things were worst in the provinces, including Galilee, Samaria, and Judea, the principal settings for our Gospels. In these areas, Roman rule typically involved the imposition of a king, governor, or other such figure appointed by Caesar, while preserving certain institutions of native rule. According to the Gospels, a council of Jewish leaders called the Sanhedrin had authority in Jerusalem on some matters, but the Roman governor Pontius Pilate had the final say. The power struggles between these Jewish and Roman authorities (Who’s really in charge?) form a backdrop to the Gospels’ stories of the trial and execution of Jesus and remain fuel for controversy even today in discussions of who was to blame for his crucifixion.²⁰

Social Dynamics

The social world of the Gospels must be understood as an intersection of cultures, a world in which Jewish traditions and values came to be influenced or challenged by those of other cultures.²¹ For example, the Jewish people portrayed in the Gospels often understand sickness to be the result of possession by an evil spirit and healing to involve exorcism. These ideas do not derive from their Scriptures (there are no exorcisms in the Old Testament) but apparently were acquired from Persia or some other Eastern culture with which the Jewish people had contact. Even more significant, however, is the degree of influence on these people from the Greek and Roman cultures, the influence associated with what we have already called "Hellenism." Hellenistic thought tended to focus on the individual and to emphasize acquisition of knowledge and wisdom (including knowledge of the self). It also tended to be dualistic—that is, to make distinctions (good or evil, matter or spirit) that facilitated the organization of knowledge. These tendencies were not altogether absent from the Jewish tradition, but in general, the latter had emphasized the community over the individual, stressed obedience over knowledge, and preferred paradox to precision. In short, the social world of the Gospels facilitated the development and integration of ideas from a variety of backgrounds. Two examples of such development within both Jewish and early Christian tradition are (1) apocalyptic thought, which saw the world as a battleground between God and Satan,²² and (2) Gnosticism, which taught that people’s spirits could be saved from the evil material world through the acquisition of secret knowledge.²³

Philosophical Dynamics

Scholars debate the extent to which Hellenism affected the Jewish world of Jesus (and Jesus himself), but there is no question that the Roman world in which the Gospels were composed had been deeply saturated with Hellenistic modes of thought by the time of Jesus. These included various philosophical orientations, including the following: (1) Cynicism, which emphasized radical authenticity, repudiation of shame, simplicity of lifestyle, and a desire to possess only what is obtained naturally and freely; (2) Epicureanism, which emphasized free will, questioned fate, and encouraged the attainment of true pleasure through avoidance of anxiety, concentration on the present, and enjoyment of all things in moderation; (3) Platonism, which emphasized the reality of a transcendent world of ideals that stand behind everything that is physical or earthly; (4) Pythagoreanism, which emphasized the value of intelligent reasoning, memory, and radical honesty, all in service of a quest to attain harmony of ideas, and of body and soul; and (5) Stoicism, which emphasized the attainment of virtue through acceptance of fate, based on the notion that all things are predetermined and that there is logic to all that transpires in the universe. Neither the Gospel authors nor their audiences may have identified themselves as followers of one or another of these particular schools of thought, but these philosophies represent the kind of thinking that was in the air at the time, and most people sought to orient themselves more with one perspective than another. Of course, people then (as now) could be eclectic and inconsistent, holding simultaneously to notions that the philosophers themselves may have considered incompatible.

Genre

What is a Gospel anyway? Most modern readers are familiar with many different genres of literature (biography, poetry, science fiction, romance, and so forth), and they usually find it easy to identify the category to which a particular work belongs. But no one writes Gospels anymore. When we first approach these books, we may find they are unlike anything else we have ever read.

Scholars sometimes compare the New Testament Gospels to historical fiction: they depict real people and real events, but the stories they re-count are told with a flair more closely associated with novels than with historical reporting. The authors of these books knew the art of storytelling, and their narratives develop in ways intended to be rhetorically effective. They employ such literary devices as irony, symbolism, and foreshadowing. They solicit our empathy so that, as the stories unfold, we may feel drawn into the drama.

The organization of the Gospels also begs comparison to modern fictionalizations of history. None of the authors seems particularly concerned with recording the order in which events actually happened. This explains why, when the four Gospels are set side by side, their chronology of events is often inconsistent. For example, the account of Jesus overturning tables in the Jerusalem temple is found near the beginning of John’s Gospel (2:13–17), but in the Gospel of Mark this event occurs during the last week of Jesus’s life (11:15–17). In both cases, the placement of the episode seems determined more by literary considerations than by historical ones.

All four of the Gospels can be studied with methods similar to those employed by literary critics in their analysis of contemporary novels or short stories. New Testament scholars often talk about the plot of a particular Gospel, or they may discuss a Gospel writer’s distinctive approach to characterization or conflict development. Still, the analogy between these works and modern historical fiction is primarily stylistic. Most Christians today would be offended by the notion that the Gospels are fiction, and rightly so. The authors of these books did not intend them to be read simply as literature, but clearly hoped their readers would accept the stories as accurate accounts of events that had actually occurred. Comparisons to historical novels are helpful up to a point, but if taken too literally, they become anachronistic, imposing modern categories on ancient documents.

How would the Gospels have been viewed by their original readers? The Greco-Roman world, like our own, knew many types of stories: comedies and tragedies; fables, myths, and legends; heroic epics, historical monographs, and (in the Jewish milieu) apocalyptic reports of heavenly visions. Against such a background, the Gospels are probably most similar to ancient biographies.²⁴ Each of the four Gospels looks and feels more like a Bios (a Greco-Roman biography) than it does like any other type of literature known to us from this context.

But  one  cannot  say  this  without  caveats.  First,  the  Gospels  (es-pecially the Synoptics) have definitely been more influenced by Jewish literature than by any Greco-Roman Bios. Many of the stories of Jesus are recounted in a manner reminiscent of tales of Abraham, Moses, or Elijah in the Hebrew Scriptures embraced by the church as the Old Testament.  Further,  all  four  of  the  Gospels  are  compilations  of  multiple genres of literature: genealogies, hymns, parables, miracle stories, speeches, pronouncement stories, and so on. Most important, if we identify the Gospels as ancient biographies, we must acknowledge that they are not very much like modern biographies. They make no pretense of offering an objective or balanced perspective on Jesus’s life. They do not reveal their sources or offer any way for readers to check the reliability of what they report (no footnotes!). They employ an anecdotal style of narration with almost no concern for chronology. And their treatment of the main character is far from comprehensive: they offer little insight into Jesus’s personality or motivation (How did he come to think the way he did?), provide almost no information about his early life (Did he have formal education? Was he ever married?), and do not even bother to describe his physical appearance (Was he short or tall? Fat or thin?). Such matters, however, were not expected to be addressed in biographies of this period. Biographies of philosophers, for example, tended to focus on selected anecdotes that preserved a person’s teaching for the benefit of those who considered themselves his followers. Such biographies were almost worshipful in tone, and like our Gospels, they sometimes provided extended accounts of the hero’s death, which was thought to reveal his character most fully. The main goal of an ancient biography was to provide potential emulators of a significant person with instances from that individual’s life and examples of his philosophy deemed worthy of emulation.

So, a librarian in the Roman Empire would probably have placed our Gospels on a shelf beside Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius or Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus. Still, the communities in which these Gospels were produced did not view Jesus primarily as a philosopher, nor did they think of themselves as schools. To believe in Jesus or to follow him no doubt implied emulation (accepting his teaching and practicing his way of life), but it meant something else as well. It might have meant believing that he was the Son of the living God (Matt 16:16) or the Savior of the world (John 4:42). It might have meant identifying him as the Jewish Messiah who fulfilled God’s ancient promises to Israel (Luke 24:25–27) or regarding him as a cosmic figure who would soon return from heaven to judge all people and determine their destiny (Mark 13:26–27). It might even have meant concluding that Jesus was God—that is, the physical embodiment of the one who created all things (John 1:1–3, 14). Though some ancient biographies did present the philosopher-hero as a divine figure, no parallel exists for the multitude of categories or levels of exaltation applied to Jesus in the Gospels.

The distinctiveness of the Gospels also becomes apparent when we consider the perspective they offer on Jesus’s death. In every case, the story of Jesus’s crucifixion provides an opportunity for the Gospel writer to present Jesus facing this ultimate crisis in a way that demonstrates his integrity and commitment. But there is more. The Gospels present Jesus’s death as the climax of history. When he was crucified, something happened—something that altered forever the very nature of human existence in a way that ultimately would affect the life of every person. The Gospels struggle for language to describe what happened, referring to Jesus’s death as a ransom (Mark 10:45) or as the institution of a new covenant (Luke 22:20). They liken him to a sacrificial animal who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). They dramatize the significance of this event through reference to a ritual meal in which bread may be described as Jesus’s flesh given for the life of the world (John 6:51) and wine identified as his blood poured out for the forgiveness of sins (Matt 26:28). In short, the Gospel authors believe that the death and resurrection of Jesus have consequences for every human being on the planet, whether those people believe in him or not. The superlative nature of these claims may be trivialized by identification of the Gospels as simply biographies.

Still, most scholars admit that to persons in the ancient world, these books probably looked more like biographies than like anything else. Some are content to leave the matter at that; others prefer to say that the Gospels draw upon the genre of ancient biography but transcend or expand that genre in important ways.

Sermons in Story Form

The word gospel (Greek, euangelion) means good news, and in the first century it appears to have passed rather quickly through four stages of application.

First, the term was used to describe the content of Jesus’s preaching. As one Gospel writer puts it, "Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news (euangelion) of God" (Mark 1:14). We will examine what is meant by this in more detail in chapter 2, but for now we should simply note that what Jesus said about God was thought to be gospel, or good news.

Second, the word was used to describe the content of early Christian preaching regarding the death and resurrection of Christ. When the apostle Paul says that he proclaimed the gospel of God (Rom 1:15), he does not mean that he repeated what Jesus had said about God but that he told people what had happened when Jesus died and rose from the dead (see also 1 Cor 15:1–8). This also was thought to be good news.

Third, as a combination of the above, the term gospel came to refer to preaching that summarized the ministry of Jesus in a way that included both what Jesus said was the good news about God and what Christians said was the good news about Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. A summary of such a sermon is found in Acts 10:34–43. And when Mark 14:9 says that an incident involving a woman anointing Jesus will be recounted wherever the good news is proclaimed, we may conclude that what is meant by gospel now includes reports of events from Jesus’s life, not just summaries of his essential message or announcements of his death and resurrection.

Finally, the word came to be used for books that offer in written form what had previously been proclaimed orally. The first such book was probably the one we call the Gospel of Mark, and it uses this term in its very first verse: "The beginning of the good news [euangelion] of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."

What this brief survey illustrates is that our written Gospels are only a short step removed from preaching, which may explain some of the difficulty in ascribing them to a genre of written literature. The Gospels are sometimes described as sermons in story form.²⁵ They may have looked like biographies to ancient readers, and they may look like historical fiction to modern readers, but buried within these outer forms are sermons trying to be heard.

The technical term scholars use for the authors of these books is evangelists. Today, that term may summon images of zealous religious figures who exhort people to change their ways. If we can set aside the caricatures of such a role that derive from association with celebrity figures (television evangelists), we may realize that this image is actually not too far off the mark. The Gospel writers do want to effect definitive changes in the ways their readers think and live.

Recognition of the essentially religious character of these works raises questions for how they are best approached within an academic setting. On the one hand, such a setting demands that the Gospels be studied like any other books, with rigorous objectivity that does not exempt them from critical scrutiny. On the other hand, to ignore the religious dimension would represent a failure to engage the writings on their own terms. Reading the Gospels merely as literature or as ancient historical documents allows interpreters to adopt a detached perspective that avoids consideration of the very factors that caused these books to be written and preserved in the first place. An objective, dispassionate reception is the last thing the Gospel writers would have wanted their books to receive. We are free to accept or reject, belittle or embrace, but whatever our response, we ought to understand what these books intend to do: they intend to convert us.

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From Jesus to Us

Jesus lived in the northern portion of what came to be called Palestine, in the region known as Galilee. He was a Jewish peasant who lived a relatively simple life. He wrote no books and traveled less than fifty miles from his hometown. Much controversy surrounds the significance and meaning of his life, yet even today, the time when Jesus lived is called the first century because of him.

The incredible influence of Jesus on Western civilization owes much to the religion that arose after his death. The Christian faith has found diverse forms of expression, but all traditional Christians have this in common: They believe that this Jewish peasant Jesus is living still, glorified in heaven, where he rules the cosmos and hears their prayers. They believe he is the Son of God, and the things he said and did on earth are remembered as the words and acts of God.

About half of the people living in the United States identify themselves as Christians, and on weekends many of them go to their respective houses of worship. At a climactic point in the service, the worship leader opens a Bible and reads familiar words regarding something Jesus said or did, words taken from one of the four New Testament Gospels. But what Christian congregations experience on these occasions is different from what they would have witnessed if they had actually been present with Jesus in Galilee. For one thing, they hear the words of Jesus proclaimed in English rather than in Aramaic, the ancient Semitic dialect that Jesus actually spoke, or in Greek, the language in which all four of the Gospels were written.

New Testament scholars are interested in the process of development that leads from the historical time of Jesus to the impact that his words and deeds as reported in the Gospels have on people today. Six stages of transmission may be discerned (see figure 2), and each of these becomes the subject of particular types of research. Most scholars recognize that the Gospel tradition undergoes development as it passes through these stages of transmission. In other words, changes occur, and these changes may be evaluated either positively or negatively by people with different theological interests or religious commitments.

Figure 2: From Jesus to Us: Six Stages in the Transmission of

the Gospel Tradition

The Historical Jesus

Even though the Gospels cannot be read as modern biographies, they are often used by historians as resources for gathering biographical information. The person Jesus did exist, and he did say and do things that were deemed remarkable by his contemporaries. The task of separating historical facts about Jesus from faith claims and religious interpretations concerning him has been tagged the quest of the historical Jesus.¹

To put the matter simply, historians are interested in studying the earthly Jesus in the same manner they would study any other figure from antiquity (such as Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great), and they use the New Testament writings the same way they would use other writings as sources for such historical inquiry. As such, the Gospels are regarded as religious propaganda, books that were not intended to serve the interests of historians but rather were written to promote the Christian faith. But this is nothing new: historians are accustomed to analyzing biased documents from the ancient world, works that report what the author wants people to believe regardless of whether it could ever have been substantiated by anything that now counts as historical evidence. Thus, historical-Jesus scholars approach the Gospels with a fair degree of skepticism: The Gospels of Matthew and Luke report that Jesus (who was usually said to be from Nazareth) was actually born in Bethlehem. But isn’t that something Christians would have wanted to believe, since a birth in Bethlehem might help to boost the Nazarene’s messianic credentials (see Matt 2:4–6; cf. Mic 5:2)? Historians are cautious about accepting such a report as historical fact.

Scholars have developed a number of criteria to help them determine which information concerning Jesus is to be regarded as historically authentic.² They are not content simply to sift through the Gospels in the form that we now have them. Rather, they rely on the work of source critics and form critics (discussed later in this chapter) to determine the origins of the materials that have been incorporated into each of these books. Material that is believed to derive from an early source is likely to be considered more credible than that which comes from a later period. In addition, facts concerning Jesus are best attested when they can be confirmed by more than one source. For example, no historian would doubt that Jesus did in fact tell parables, since numerous parables (albeit different ones) are attributed to him in many different sources.

Historical scholars inspect the Gospel materials for anachronistic references that reflect the later interests of Christians rather than what can be reasonably attributed to Jesus himself. For instance, when Jesus explains the meaning of his parable of the sower for Galilean Jewish peasants, he uses language derived from the early church (the word) and compares what happens to the seed to the effects of Christian preaching (Mark 4:13–20). Likewise, in Matthew 18:17, Jesus tells his Jewish disciples to bring problems to the church for resolution. By contrast, descriptions of Jesus in the Gospels may be accorded authenticity precisely because they are dissimilar to what would have served the interests of the developing Christian religion. Depictions of Jesus as a person who socializes with such social outcasts as tax collectors (Mark 2:15) strike many as a tradition the church would have been more likely to suppress than to invent. Hence, this detail about Jesus’s life is usually accepted and allowed to serve as one piece of solid biographical data.

A number of recent scholars have attempted to provide the modern world with what the Gospels do not offer: reliable historical biographies of Jesus (see figure 3). Although there are points of overlap, controversy arises over such questions as the level of continuity or discontinuity Jesus shared with his Jewish contemporaries, whether he self-consciously identified himself as the Messiah, and whether he was primarily oriented toward the present or the future. Among the works surveyed in figure 3, Crossan sees Jesus as an unconventional Jew and Meier labels him a marginal one. Sanders and Wright place him in the tradition of Israel’s prophets, while Witherington sees him as more of a sage and Borg and Vermes consider him exemplary of a mystical variety of Judaism. Borg, Crossan, and Horsley emphasize Jesus’s this-worldly orientation as a politically conscious social reformer. Meier and especially Sanders focus on his vision of a future in which God will transform what lies beyond the capacity of humans to effect. Wright thinks Jesus believed that he himself was bringing about that transformation. Meier, Sanders, and Wright insist that Jesus believed he was the long-awaited Messiah of Israel; Fiorenza and Witherington think he saw himself as an embodiment of divine wisdom; Fredriksen supposes that he himself had no messianic pretensions but was purported to be the Messiah by others (in ways that proved to be his undoing).

Figure 3: Modern Biographies of Jesus