An Introduction to The Gospels

By Mitchell G. Reddish

An Introduction to the Gospels is designed to be a textbook for courses on the Gospels, for use at the college and beginning seminary level. Reflecting the most recent scholarship and written in an accessible style, the volume covers all four of the Gospels, including a survey of "the world of the Gospels".
The book opens with a discussion of the origin, development, and interrelationships of the Four Gospels. After a chapter-length treatment of each canonical Gospel and the non-canonical Gospels, the work concludes with a discussion of the "historical Jesus" debate.
In An Introduction to the Gospels, Mitchell G. Reddish:
- provides a solid, convenient survey of the Gospels in an accessible textbook format
- presents up-to-date scholarship in a field that has been dominated by older texts
- gives a balanced presentation of the content of the Gospels

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781426750083

Mitchell G. Reddish

Mitchell Reddish is an associate professor in the Religion Department of Stetson University, Deland, Florida.

Book preview

Preface

The four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—are usually considered the heart of the New Testament. As someone once commented to me, The Gospels are the most important part. Everything else in the New Testament is just commentary on the Gospels. Although I would not agree with the latter part of this statement, I would concur that the Gospels are central. Repeatedly, Christians and non-Christians have turned to these works to learn more about the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. For some readers, these works contain the old, old story that they have heard from childhood and that continues to shape their lives. Sometimes this familiarity with the Gospel stories is a hindrance rather than a help in clearly hearing the message of the Gospels. Ears have become dulled from overhearing the Gospels. For other readers, the Gospels are uncharted territory, containing stories and sayings with which they are unacquainted. For readers from both groups, assistance is often needed to enable them to read and understand these first-century texts.

This book was written to help provide that assistance. It is designed to provide readers with a solid, reliable introduction to the major issues in Gospel studies as well as to give them a concise guide to the contents of the Gospels. As its title indicates, it is an introduction. That means first of all that it is not intended to serve as a substitute for the Gospels themselves, but to lead the reader into these texts. The reader should carefully read each of the Gospels in conjunction with the appropriate chapters in this book. To call this study an introduction also means that the book assumes that the reader has had little or no previous academic study of the Gospels. Because the work is written for the nonspecialist, I have tried to keep endnotes to a minimum. Obviously, I am much more indebted to the work of other scholars than is indicated by the few notes to each chapter.

This study begins by discussing the origin, development, and interrelationships of the four Gospels. The second chapter acquaints the reader with the social, political, and religious context out of which the Gospels arose. Chapters 3–6 are the heart of this study. These four chapters deal individually with each of the four New Testament Gospels. These chapters explore the basic introductory issues of each Gospel: date and location of writing, the audience to which the work was addressed, literary characteristics of the Gospel, and distinctive themes in the work. Unfortunately, too often Introductions to the Gospels end after discussing these issues and fail to provide sufficient help for a person interested in actually reading the Gospels. This work attempts to alleviate that problem by providing for each Gospel a Reading Guide, a section-by-section discussion of the contents of that particular Gospel. This Reading Guide is intended to focus the readers’ attention on the text of the Gospel and aid them in interpreting the text. Readers are strongly encouraged to read each Gospel in its entirety prior to reading the chapters on each Gospel. In addition, readers should keep a copy of the Gospel open in front of them to read as they work through the Reading Guide.

The final chapter of this study moves beyond the confines of the New Testament canon and examines some of the gospels that are not included in the church’s Bible. Most of these works will likely be unfamiliar to the reader. They are a fascinating assortment of diverse traditions about Jesus that circulated in the early centuries of the Christian church. These works are important windows into the formative years of Christianity and occasionally offer us additional insights about the New Testament Gospels.

The basic methodological approach of this study is a literary inquiry into the Gospels. As scholarship has emphasized in the last few decades, the authors of the Gospels were creative writers, each telling his (or her) own distinctive story about Jesus of Nazareth. I have tried to listen to each of these stories and to enter into the story world of each Gospel. In recent years several new approaches to biblical studies (such as narrative criticism, reader-response criticism, rhetorical criticism, and social-scientific criticism) have contributed to our understanding of the literature of the Bible. This work has benefited from insights from these approaches as well.

Several persons deserve my deepest thanks for their assistance in this project: Clyde Fant, my colleague at Stetson University, who graciously and carefully read this manuscript and made numerous corrections and suggestions; my other colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies at Stetson University, who have encouraged and supported my work; Edgar McKnight and Alan Culpepper, who made helpful suggestions in the initial stages of this project; and especially my family—Barbara, Tim, Beth, and Michael—who have been generous and patient in allowing me the time to work on this manuscript.

Mitchell G. Reddish

Chapter 1

The Formation of the Four Gospels

Since the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—begin the New Testament, readers often assume that these works were the earliest written products of the Christian church. This assumption is often coupled with the beliefs that the authors of the four Gospels were eyewitnesses of the events they narrate and that the composition of the Gospels was a relatively simple process of preserving in writing what they had seen and heard firsthand. Such assumptions about the Gospels, however, are inaccurate. All the letters of Paul in the New Testament were written prior to any of the Gospels being completed. The authors of the Gospels, or at least the persons responsible for the final form of the Gospels, were almost certainly not eyewitnesses; and the Gospels themselves are the end products of traditions that were transmitted and preserved in various forms, both oral and written.

From Oral Traditions to Written Records

Jesus of Nazareth left behind no written records. He was not an author, but a teacher and preacher. His method of communication was exclusively oral. Furthermore, there is no indication that Jesus expected or desired that his message would be preserved in writing and passed along for generations. He was addressing a first-century audience, dealing with their concerns and situations. The reason his stories and sayings are available to modern readers is that some of his followers considered them important enough to remember and pass on.

These Jesus traditions were almost certainly preserved at first only in oral form. This statement may seem surprising, even incredulous, to readers today. We live in a highly literate society in which the printed media are extremely important. Books, newspapers, magazines, and journals are found in almost every household. Computers, a relatively recent communication tool, present visual representations of words on computer monitors. For many of us, even a trip to the grocery store necessitates a written shopping list, lest we forget the items we need to purchase. First-century Palestine, however, was primarily an oral culture. The ability to read and write was a privilege of the upper class of Palestinian society, as was true of the Mediterranean world in general. Jesus and the crowds to whom he spoke were primarily peasants. They were not a part of the educated elite. The Gospels give scant information about Jesus’ education and literacy. The Gospel of Luke contains the story of Jesus as a precocious twelve-year-old engaged in dialogue with the teachers in the Temple. Luke reports, And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers (2:47). If this story is historically accurate, it still tells us nothing about Jesus’ formal education. Likewise, the additional statement that Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor (Luke 2:52) is no evidence for Jesus’ ability to read or write. A person can be wise, yet remain uneducated and illiterate.

Later in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus during his ministry in Galilee is described as reading from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, where he had been brought up (4:16-30). If this passage is historically authentic, then we certainly have here evidence of Jesus’ ability to read. Many scholars, however, have raised questions about the historical reliability of what is described in this passage. Luke 4:16-30 seems to be an expansion of Mark 6:1-6. The Markan text tells of Jesus teaching in the synagogue in his hometown and the ensuing astonishment of his listeners. Mark does not mention, though, that Jesus read in the synagogue. One must, therefore, use the Lukan passage with caution as evidence of Jesus’ literacy.

On the other hand, a passage in the Gospel of John seems to imply that Jesus was educated. In reporting one of Jesus’ teaching episodes during his ministry, the Gospel reports that people were astonished at his teaching, saying, How does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught? (7:15). The phrase translated in the NRSV as have such learning literally means know what is written or know letters. In the context of first-century Judaism, the people’s question concerns Jesus’ familiarity with and knowledge of the Jewish law. They are puzzled about how one could have such a deep understanding of the scripture, yet lack formal scribal training in the law (cf. Mark 1:22).

The only passage in the New Testament that speaks about Jesus writing anything is also in John. The story of the woman who is caught in adultery, John 7:53–8:11 (the passage is textually suspect), states that twice during the confrontation with the religious leaders who brought the woman to Jesus, he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground (8:6, 8). What he wrote is not known. Once again, one cannot draw any certain conclusions from this text about Jesus’ educational or literacy level. Reviewing all the evidence, the safest conclusion about Jesus is that he possibly, perhaps even probably, had rudimentary skills in reading and writing. Any claims beyond that are mere speculation.

The New Testament likewise provides us little information about the educational background of Jesus’ followers. The book of Acts records the amazement of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem at the boldness of the disciples Peter and John in their teaching and preaching. They considered the two to be uneducated and ordinary men (Acts 4:13). Like the description of Jesus in John 7:15, this statement probably means that they lacked formal scribal training in the Jewish scriptures. Aside from this episode, the New Testament provides no information about the educational sophistication of Jesus’ disciples. As will be discussed later, none of the Gospels was likely written by a disciple of Jesus, so these literary documents are no evidence of the disciples’ literary skills. What the Gospels do tell us about the earliest followers of Jesus is that they were almost all working-class persons—fishermen, tax collectors, housewives. In ancient Palestine formal education for children was rare. Shaye Cohen claims that in all likelihood elementary education was the responsibility of the family and generally in the ancient world elementary education did not go beyond paternal instruction in a craft.¹ Thus most people in the ancient world never became skilled at reading and writing, although quite a few probably had rudimentary skills necessary for business transactions.²

The basic oral nature of ancient Mediterranean societies, then, explains why the earliest traditions about Jesus would have been oral traditions. Stories about Jesus and collections of his teachings would have been passed along from one person to the next and from one community to another. These oral traditions would have been used in many different ways in the early Christian communities. When Jesus’ followers were preaching to outsiders, they would have told stories about Jesus. When they were teaching new converts about their faith, they would have recounted Jesus’ sayings and teachings. When controversies arose among the early Christians, someone would have remembered an incident in the life of Jesus or one of his teachings that would help guide the church. In each of these settings, as well as others, the early Christian community preserved, shaped, and passed on events and teachings from the life of Jesus.

Oral traditions are more fluid, that is, less fixed, than written traditions. As stories are told and retold they are intentionally and unintentionally shaped and reshaped by the tellers. Different settings for the tradition require changes in the form and content of the tradition. For example, a student who attends a campus lecture will describe that lecture in an informal conversation with her friends differently from the way that she would report on the lecture to her classmates in a formal setting. If the student were to describe the lecture to another group of friends a week later, the description would be different still. Thus both in new situations and over time, oral traditions change. Such variations in traditions can be seen in the Gospels where different versions of sayings and events occur (for example, compare the different versions of Jesus’ teachings on divorce in Matt 5:31-32; 19:9; Mark 10:11-12; and Luke 16:18). Some of these variations arose during the oral stages of the tradition, while other changes arose during the written stages of the material.

As the traditions about Jesus were passed on, not only did changes in the material occur, but selectivity naturally took place. The sayings and stories with which the immediate hearers identified or which addressed their concerns or needs were the traditions that were preserved. Many of the teachings and activities of Jesus were lost as they fell into disuse and were forgotten. Note the comment of the author of the Gospel of John: But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written (21:25). The book of Acts contains an example of a saying of Jesus that is not found in any Gospel but was remembered by the early Christian community: It is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35).

Eventually, the early Christian community began to preserve in written form some of the Jesus traditions. By the end of the first century, all four Gospels presently in the canon had been written. Other collections of sayings of Jesus were likely in existence as well. These additional collections included such works as the Q document and the Gospel of Thomas, both of which will be discussed later. If at first the church had been content with oral traditions, why did it begin to produce written records?

Several factors seem to have contributed to the move from oral to written traditions. First, the earliest followers of Jesus apparently expected him to return to earth very soon after his death and resurrection to bring to fulfillment the coming reign of God. Even the apostle Paul expected Jesus’ return shortly, likely within his own lifetime. As long as the early Christians operated under that expectation, little need existed for preserving the traditions of Jesus for the long term. Why worry about preserving material for future generations when the end was expected during the current generation? As the years passed and the expected imminent return of Jesus did not occur, the early church realized the need for a more permanent preservation of the traditions.

A second factor contributing to the need for written records was the death of the earliest followers of Jesus. As long as eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus were alive, they served somewhat as a verification of the authenticity of stories about Jesus. If questions arose about what Jesus said or did, someone could ask one of his disciples. When they began to die, however, another authoritative source was needed. Written records helped fill this need.

The missionary needs of the early church was a third factor that likely led to the development of written records about Jesus. As the early Christians moved out beyond Palestine and scattered throughout the Mediterranean world spreading their message about Jesus and making converts to the Christian faith, they needed resources to use to teach the new converts about Christian beliefs and practices. The collected Jesus traditions would have been a valuable educational resource for the church.

The growth of the Christian movement contributed to a fourth reason for the written collections of Jesus traditions. Alternate understandings of Jesus and the Christian faith began to arise and compete with each other. What were the acceptable views about Jesus and his teachings? Which traditions about Jesus or interpretations of Jesus were valid? The four canonical Gospels helped answer these questions, although they did not always provide the same answers. These four Gospels represent four different interpretations of the life of Jesus. They helped shape the early Christians’ view of Jesus and eventually were seen as the orthodox or correct understanding of Jesus.

These factors, along with others, resulted in the formation of written records about Jesus. One should not assume, however, that an orderly progression occurred from oral traditions to written records. On the contrary, even after written Gospels appeared, they struggled for recognition and authority alongside the oral traditions. For example, Papias, an early bishop in the church in Asia Minor (ca. 60–130 CE), is quoted by the fourth-century church historian Eusebius as saying, For I did not suppose that information from books would help me so much as the word of a living and surviving voice.³ Even after the written Gospels appeared, then, some church leaders preferred the oral traditions over the written records about Jesus.

Thus the development of the New Testament Gospels was the result of a long and circuitous process. Initially oral traditions were shaped, altered, passed along, reshaped, and used in a variety of ways and situations. Written collections of sayings and/or stories eventually appeared, competing in some instances with oral traditions, but finally gaining dominance over oral records. In the New Testament, the final form of these Jesus traditions was the Gospels.

What Is a Gospel?

For the person familiar with the New Testament, the answer to the question What is a Gospel? might seem obvious: a Gospel is one of the four writings in the New Testament that describe the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. That answer is true, but it is not sufficient because it does not tell us what kind of writings the Gospels are. Furthermore, it limits the term gospel to the New Testament writings alone. The Greek word euangelion, translated as gospel, means good news. This word was used among the ancient Greeks for the announcement of military victories or other instances of good fortune. Inscriptions from the Roman imperial period apply the word euangelion to the life and activities of the emperor. The Priene inscription of 9 BCE, for example, declares that the birthday of Caesar Augustus was for the world the beginning of his good messages [or ‘good news’].⁴

For the early Christians the story of Jesus was the good news that they proclaimed to the world. In the New Testament, particularly in the writings of Paul, euangelion is used to describe the message about Jesus that was the content of the church’s preaching and teaching. The Gospel of Mark, for example, opens with the statement, "The beginning of the good news (euangelion) of Jesus Christ." When written works describing the life and teachings of Jesus began to appear, the word euangelion was a fitting designation for these works. In this way the word gospel came to be used to describe certain writings that circulated in the Christian communities.

An examination of the various works labeled gospels in the early church reveals that the term was applied to works with widely differing forms and contents. Some gospels, like the four in the New Testament, are primarily narrative works, containing stories about Jesus and his teachings. Other gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas, are collections of sayings attributed to Jesus, with little or no narrative material connecting the sayings. Are all of these works appropriately designated gospels?

On that question scholars disagree. Some scholars argue that the canonical Gospels should define the characteristics of the gospel genre. Those who follow this approach often conclude that gospels are narratives that provide information about the life, teachings, and activities of Jesus of Nazareth. One recent definition of the genre of the canonical Gospels, for instance, states, A Gospel is a narrative, fashioned out of selected traditions, that focuses on the activity and speech of Jesus as a way to reveal his character and develops a dramatic plot that culminates in the stories of his passion and resurrection.⁵ This definition virtually eliminates any of the noncanonical gospels from being considered as authentic gospels. Some are excluded because they are not narratives but collections of sayings or dialogues (such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary); others are excluded because even though they contain narrative materials they focus only on one aspect of the life of Jesus rather than on his entire life and death. Examples of the latter type would be the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Protevangelium of James. In chapter 7 of this book we will raise again the question of the appropriateness of the term gospel for these works that are not a part of the canon and discuss the contents of some of them. Because the focus of our study, however, is the canonical Gospels, we will concentrate on the use of the word gospel as it applies to them.

Precritical reading of the Gospels viewed them as historical writings about Jesus or as biographies of Jesus. Such readers assumed that the material in the Gospels was historically accurate and that the task of the Gospel writers had been to transmit faithfully the historical details about the life and teachings of Jesus. According to this view, the writers exercised very little creative control over the works they produced. With the rise of new approaches to the study of the Gospels in the twentieth century, scholars began to reach new conclusions about the Gospels. Using the approach of source criticism, scholars demonstrated that the Gospels were not created ex nihilo (out of nothing) but were dependent upon earlier source materials. Form criticism revealed that behind the written Gospels stood oral traditions that circulated in set forms or patterns and that became the basis for much of the Gospels. Redaction critics discovered that the Gospel writers were not merely collectors and transmitters of traditions they had received, but were also creative editors (redactors), who arranged, altered, and shaped the traditions in order to present a particular understanding of Jesus and his teachings. In other words, scholars began to recognize that the Gospels were not simply historical accounts, but were a special type of literature.

But to what type of literature do the Gospels belong? If they are not history, at least not in the modern sense of the term, then what are they? During most of this century the dominant answer has been that the Gospels are in a class by themselves; they represent a new literary genre. According to this view, the author of the Gospel of Mark, the first Gospel to be written, produced a new kind of literature, unlike any writing that had been published before. Mark basically expanded and preserved in writing the kerygma, the preaching, of the early church. The core element of the kerygma of the church was the proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Mark took these stories and added to them oral traditions about the life and teachings of Jesus, resulting in a literary genre unparalleled in the ancient world.

Recently more and more scholars have become dissatisfied with this understanding of the Gospel genre. They argue that although the Gospels are not exactly like other writings of the ancient world, they do bear enough resemblances to certain types of ancient literature to call into question the claim that the Gospels are a unique type of literature. What then are the predecessors of the Gospels? What are their literary role models?

Scholars have focused on ancient biographies as the best parallels to the canonical Gospels. Examples of pre-Christian Greco-Roman biographies include Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Isocrates’ Evagoras. Later examples include Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars and Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Charles Talbert, whose research has facilitated the quest for finding the genre of the Gospels, has defined ancient biography as prose narration about a person’s life, presenting supposedly historical facts which are selected to reveal the character or essence of the individual, often with the purpose of affecting the behavior of the reader.⁶ In biographies the activities, accomplishments, and teachings of an individual often were presented to dispel erroneous understandings of the person and to present a model that was to be followed by the readers. David Aune, another proponent of the view that the Gospels are biographies, notes that Greco-Roman biographies are of several types and that the Gospels are not exactly parallel to any of the Greco-Roman biographies. He argues that the Gospels represent an adaptation of ancient Greco-Roman biographies.⁷ The Gospel writers, then, roughly followed a literary convention that would have been familiar to first-century readers. The earliest readers of the Gospels likely would have viewed the works as biographical, as accounts of the life of Jesus.

One must be cautious, however, in too quickly identifying the Gospels as biographies. Modern biographies are different from ancient biographies. Modern biographers are usually interested in portraying the psychological development of an individual and the factors that influenced and shaped a person’s character and development. Such were not concerns of ancient biographers. Furthermore, even though ancient biographers wrote with historical intentions, ancient understandings of history and the methods and sources available to them for determining historical accuracy were different from that of modern writers. A certain amount of fiction and exaggeration was allowed and even expected in ancient biographies. Since ancient biographers and historians had little access to the speeches and sayings of their subjects, an accepted technique was to create speeches that were deemed appropriate to the occasion. For example, Thucydides, a Greek historian of the fifth century BCE, describes how he used speeches. Thucydides was one of the more scrupulous historians according to modern historiographical standards, but even he states that at times he resorted to creating speeches that were suited to the speaker and the situation. Thucydides wrote:

With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.⁸

Other ancient writers were even more prone to use fiction in their works in various ways. What this means for us as modern readers of ancient biographies, including the Gospels, is that we should not expect the same concern for historical reliability and the same standards of historiography to be present in these ancient works as are found in modern scholarly writings. Thus even though the Gospel writers may have written what they supposed to be historically accurate, there is no guarantee that the events or details described by the evangelists are in actuality historically correct. Perhaps an example from one of the Gospels would help clarify this point. In the Gospel of Luke, the author describes the birth of Jesus as occurring in connection with a census that was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria (2:2). Elsewhere Luke implies that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great or, at the latest, within a year after his death.⁹ Herod died in 4 BCE; Quirinius was not governor or legate of Syria until 6 CE Obviously Jesus could not have been born during the reign of Herod (which the Gospel of Matthew explicitly says) and during the rule of Quirinius. Luke presented this information as historical fact. Luke likely supposed that the information was historically accurate. Luke’s intention to present historical information, however, was thwarted by faulty data.

Another characteristic of ancient biographies must be kept in mind when we read the Gospels. Ancient biographies were often written in order to praise or laud an individual. Stories were selected and edited to present a particular view or interpretation of the person, at times for the purpose of presenting a model for others to follow or for correcting erroneous views or misunderstandings about the person. With the Gospels a similar situation occurred. The Gospel writers were not interested in simply writing down all the traditions about Jesus they could find. Rather their task was to present to their readers a specific interpretation of who Jesus was. Their works are not objective historical accounts (no account is ever bias-free), but rather are narratives shaped to reveal particular understandings of Jesus. The Gospels are theological works as much as or more than they are historical works. The evangelists selected from the traditions available to them the stories and teachings of Jesus that were compatible with their understandings of him. They often reshaped and retold these traditions in order to highlight or downplay certain aspects of the life and teachings of Jesus. The Gospels then can best be understood as theologically interpreted history.

The difference between an objective, historical account of the life of Jesus and what one finds in the Gospels has often been described as the difference between a photograph and a painting. Suppose one wanted to capture a likeness of a person. One could use camera and film to take a photograph of that