What are the Gospels?

As we have done many times before, imagine that you are living during the mid-first century. You have just been converted to this new religion some are calling Christianity. You came to believe in Jesus because of the testimony of Christians living in your town. They recount how they heard the stories of Jesus from the likes of Peter, Paul, and others who actually met Jesus. They do their best to repeat the stories they have heard, trying not to forget any detail. Still, as they admit, there is nothing quite like hearing the story of Jesus from someone who was there.

As you go about your life trying to tell others about Jesus, you realize that people are asking questions you genuinely don't know the answer to. After all you only heard about Jesus from some one who heard it from an eye witness. You search the couple of letters your congregation has from Paul and James, and while those provide some answers they are more concerned with how to live the Christian life than relaying facts about Jesus' life.

This is a growing situation in the early church. While the church continued to grow due to the powerful witness of changed lives, people were in desperate need to know about Jesus. The apostles and other witnesses were being killed off or imprisoned in greater numbers. Soon there wouldn't be any eyewitnesses left. While telling the story of Jesus was good, it becomes less credible when the information comes from hearing it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from Peter or Paul. When a story is passed around like that, changes inevitably slip in. This is where the four Gospels come in.

What are the Gospels?

Now this is very important; the Gospels are not biographies, at least not in the way we think of biographies. Nowadays a biography is a (supposedly) unbiased look at a person's life that simply relays facts about what they did and said. Often times that's what we say the four Gospels are; biographies in the modern sense of the word. If that were true, why are there four of them that tell four different stories which, when judged by the modern definition of the word biography, are wildly contradictory?

The problem with calling the four Gospels a biography in the modern sense is that the genre didn't exist in the first century. In fact it didn't really exist until the 1600's or maybe even later. Ancient biographies did not attempt to be unbiased works of history. What they did was take the actual sayings and events of a person's life and present them with a purpose beyond simply presenting facts. The Gospels are no different. 

This makes us uncomfortable. We like our history to be straightforward with no agendas or ulterior motives involved. When we hear that the Gospels aren't biographies in the way we think of biographies, we often assume that this means the events and teachings never happened. This is simply not the case.

The four Gospel writers clearly believed that what they were writing really happened. Unlike us, however, the order in which things happened wasn't so important to them. This is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke Jesus clears out the temple at the end of his public ministry, but in John he does it at the beginning. Another example is the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew puts a huge amount of teaching in one spot, but Luke has it scattered across the whole book. Mark and John don't even have most of that sermon in their books!

The reason for the differences is that they aren't trying to record a straightforward history of Jesus. Matthew is writing to Jewish Christians, which is why he organizes his account in a very Jewish way and pays special attention to how Jesus fulfilled prophecy. His goal is to challenge his readers to follow Christ more completely as the long awaited Messiah and King. Mark is writing to Roman Christians, which is why it is so action oriented and doesn't spend a lot of time on long speeches. His goal is to challenge his readers to be active disciples in an Empire that is both powerful and evil.

Luke is writing to Theophilus, most likely a Greek man. His goal is to provide certainty to his reader about what he has heard. John is nearly thirty years after the other three during a time when heretics were emerging challenging both the divinity and humanity of Jesus. His goal is to show in no uncertain terms that Jesus is both truly man and truly God.

Conclusion

The Gospels are foundational books in the Christian Bible. They tell us the story of Jesus from eyewitnesses who knew him. When we stop treating them as simple history books we both understand them a lot better and also grow more in our faith. They were meant to be challenging stories about a man who claims to be God and calls all of us into obedience. They were designed to be shocking narratives about the God who was willing to take on the fullness of humanity in order to save us from drowning in our own sin. They were meant to be offensive, encouraging, and mind boggling.

I thought it was important to address the genre of the Gospels before jumping into one. Next week is the Gospel of Mark.