8

Gospels

Paul refers to no details of the life of Jesus beyond that he was born,
instituted the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23–6), died by
crucifixion, and rose again from the dead (Galatians 4:4; 1
Corinthians 15:3–4). Only very occasionally does he quote sayings of
Jesus. The principal example is his citation of Jesus’ words at the
Last Supper:
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the
night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he
broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In
the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant
in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as
you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

In outline this corresponds with the traditions in the Gospels of

Matthew, Mark and Luke, though it is nearest to Luke.1 Paul’s
teaching about divorce and remarriage he also traces back to Jesus (1
Corinthians 7:1–11), though it is not clear there whether he is
referring to sayings of Jesus during his lifetime, or to teaching Paul
believed had been revealed to him by the risen Lord. But at all events
we can fairly say that Paul hardly ever quotes Jesus, surprising as
this must seem.
Yet it is inconceivable that Paul can have evangelized so many
people without having passed on to them at least some account of
who Jesus had been, and this is inseparable from what he had
taught. The converts must have learned enough about Jesus to feel
that his resurrection was good news: the restoration to life of, for
example, Pontius Pilate would not have struck any of them as a
matter for celebration. So we must assume that the early Christian
churches received some outline, however rudimentary, of Jesus’ life
and work and teaching. (This is implied in the speeches in the Acts of
the Apostles, such as Acts 2:14–36, where Peter describes Jesus as ‘a
man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and
signs’.) This means that Christian evangelists such as Paul must have
transmitted both sayings and narratives, based on the accounts of
eyewitnesses, and it is hard to imagine that these were radically
different from the basic accounts we have in the Gospels; hence the
foundations of the Gospels must go back into the earliest Christian
movement.
None of this means that the Gospels are themselves eyewitness
accounts. The Gospels are often thought to rest on the memories of
four separate eyewitnesses, and that this explains why they differ
from each other. But only two of them (Matthew and John) are even
ascribed to members of the twelve apostles, and even here the
attribution is much later than the Gospels themselves: the titles
(‘according to Matthew’, ‘according to Mark’, and so on – not
including the word ‘Gospel’) are not an integral part of the text, but
were added later during the copying of the manuscripts – we do not
know exactly when. In subsequent tradition, Mark was taken to be
the ‘John Mark’ referred to in Acts 15:37, and Luke ‘Luke, the
beloved physician’ of Colossians 4:14; but even if this is true, neither
would have been anything like eyewitnesses of the events they
record. This has always been acknowledged. We can see it from the
attempt to connect Mark, at least, with a real eyewitness in a saying
of Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis2 in Asia Minor (70–163 CE): in his
Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord Papias is said to have reported
that, according to ‘John the Elder’, Mark acted as Peter’s interpreter
and wrote his Gospel on the basis of Peter’s reminiscences.3 Even if
this were true, it would still put Mark at some distance from the
events he narrates. Luke, by his own account (Luke 1:1–4), consulted
widely to find out the truth about Jesus:
Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have
been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the
beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after
 investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for
you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things
about which you have been instructed.

This implies not only that he belonged to a later generation than the
apostles themselves, but also that by his day a number of different
written accounts were already circulating.
The question of the origins of the Gospels, and in particular the
interrelation among them, is the most intricate in biblical studies,
even more perplexing than the origin of the Pentateuch. How did the
stories about Jesus and his sayings come to be recorded and ordered
in such different ways, and why did the four different versions
acquire a status such that they are all part of the Church’s Scriptures,
even though they are often incompatible with each other in so many
points of detail?

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

The first thing to notice is that the Gospels are not four independent
works, but fall into two groups: Matthew, Mark and Luke on the one
hand, and John on the other. The first three Gospels are alike in
significant ways, presenting a Jesus who teaches mainly in short,
pithy sayings about how people should live, and proclaims the
imminence of the ‘kingdom of God’; whereas John’s Jesus teaches in
long discourses, and talks mainly about his own status as God’s son.
There are also major differences in the narrative. In John, Jesus
works in both Galilee and Jerusalem throughout his career, whereas
in the other three Jesus goes to Jerusalem only once as an adult, at
the end of his life. The date of Jesus’ death in relation to Passover is
different in John as against the other Gospels,4 and one crucial
incident, the ‘cleansing of the Temple’, when Jesus kicked out the
moneychangers and sellers of animals, is quite differently dated: in
Matthew, Mark and Luke it is part of the run-up to Jesus’ arrest and
is possibly thought of as the last straw that turned the Jewish
authorities against him5 (Matthew 21:12–13, Mark 11:15–18, Luke
19:45), whereas in John it comes early in his career (John 2:13–22).
A recognition of these differences is registered in the traditional
description of the first three Gospels as ‘Synoptic’, meaning that they
have a similar perspective on the life of Jesus, as distinct from John,
the Fourth Gospel. There is near-unanimity among New Testament
specialists that the Fourth Gospel was also written later than the
others, probably towards the end of the first century or beginning of
the second century CE, though the original reason for this dating was
the theory that it depended upon them, which is not now universally
granted: if John is independent of the Synoptics, it could be no later
than Matthew and Luke, or even Mark.
Even the Synoptics, however, are products at the earliest of the
second generation of Christians. Paul shows no awareness of them,
and they all represent an individual way of ordering the raw material
about Jesus, which evidently must have been transmitted by word of
mouth. In the mid twentieth century there was intensive study of
how this might have occurred.6 Form critics examined the individual
stories and sayings in the Synoptic Gospels to determine what role
they may have played in the teaching and preaching of the gospel
message during the years before there were any written Gospels. By
and large, the yield was fairly meagre. Classifying stories produced
the insight that different types had different conventions: for
example, a miracle story would typically end with a reference to the
astonishment of the crowd (e.g. Mark 5:35–42), and other types of
tale might culminate in a memorable saying (e.g. Matthew 12:46–
50). This tended if anything to undermine the historical reliability of
the accounts, since they ‘had to be’ told in this particular way
whether they were true or not. But form criticism did have the virtue
of showing the contexts in which stories and sayings might plausibly
have been transmitted, in preaching and teaching, and we can easily
imagine that each individual short section into which the Synoptics
can be broken down had its own history of transmission before it
reached the evangelists. Thus we can get behind the finished Gospels
to the separate reminiscences on which they rest. Form critics tended
to see the Gospel writers as mere collectors of these fragmentary bits
and pieces, very few of which, they believed, actually went back to
Jesus himself. They were evidence for the teaching of the early
Church rather than for Jesus’ own life and work.
More recently it has come to be thought that the Gospel writers
exercised some narrative skill in joining the fragments together, and
did not simply write them down in a random way. Each of the
Synoptics has its own profile, so that a reader familiar with them all
can usually tell which Gospel a passage is from by its style or
theological concerns.
Yet to say that the Gospel writers exercised skill also implies that
the narratives are not simply an accurate account of the life of Jesus,
but are written with a degree of artifice. This is apparent as soon as
we begin to notice not just that the Synoptic Gospels are so similar
that they form a cluster, but also that in significant ways they differ
from each other, not just in detail but in broad outline – not as
glaringly as they do from John, but still enough to be noticeable.
Mark, now almost universally agreed to be the earliest (as it is also
the shortest), lacks any nativity story at the beginning; while
Matthew and Luke each have one, but they are incompatible with
each other. Popular expressions of Christianity such as carol services
and nativity plays mix them up, so that the baby Jesus is adored both
by shepherds (only in Luke 2:8–20) and by wise men from the East
(only in Matthew 2:1–12). In Matthew the impression is given that
Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem, where they have a house, and
only later move to Nazareth, whereas in Luke they live in Nazareth
and travel to Bethlehem for the census (see Matthew 2:22–3, where
Joseph’s intention, after being in Egypt, is to go back to Judaea, but
he is diverted to Galilee; and Luke 1:26, where Mary lives in
Nazareth all along and travels to Judaea in 2:4–5). There are also
major discrepancies in the accounts of the trial of Jesus, with Luke
including a trial before Herod, which is lacking in Matthew and Mark
(Luke 23:6–12 – no parallels in the other Gospels).
In finer detail also there are discrepancies. Compare, for example,
these two accounts:
Then they came, bringing to him a paralysed man, carried by four. And when they
could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him;
and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay.
 (Mark 2:3–4)
Just then some men came, carrying a paralysed man on a bed. They were trying to
bring him in and lay him before Jesus; but finding no way to bring him in because of
the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down with his bed through the tiles
into the middle of the crowd in front of Jesus.
(Luke 5:18–19)

Obviously this is the same story; but Mark’s version is in a rather

Semitized Greek, beginning with a vague ‘they’ and only spelling out
the ‘four’ later (I have adjusted NRSV here better to reflect the
Greek), whereas Luke’s is in a purer Greek. And whereas Mark
speaks of a roof that can be ‘dug through’, Luke’s roof is tiled,
perhaps reflecting the rather better houses he was used to.
Or consider the following parallel accounts in Mark and Matthew:
As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him,
‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you
call me good? No one is good but God alone.’
(Mark 10:17–18)
Then someone came to him and said, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do to have
eternal life?’ And he said to him, ‘Why do you ask me about what is good? There is
only one who is good.’
(Matthew 19:16–17)

The discrepancy in Jesus’ response when he is addressed as ‘Good

Teacher’: ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone’;
(‘Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is
good’ probably represents Matthew’s toning-down of a saying which
originally implied that Jesus was not to be identified with God). The
early Church would have been uneasy about Mark’s wording, since
Jesus’ divine status had come to be widely accepted among
Christians. Mark would thus preserve an older version of the saying,
perhaps the original one: no one in the early Church would have
altered Matthew’s blander statement into it, thereby casting doubt
on Jesus’ divinity. We do not know that any of the sayings attributed
to Jesus in the Gospels are genuinely original, that is, that he actually
uttered them. But one such as this, in its Marcan version, is highly
unlikely to have been made up in the early Church.7
On an even larger scale, the Gospels order their material in
different ways. In Matthew, for example, there are five collections of
sayings, starting with the Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5–7,
interspersed with blocks of stories about Jesus’ miracles and other
acts. The breakdown is as follows:
5–7: Sermon on the Mount
10: Instructions to the disciples
13: Parables of the kingdom
18: Directions for life in the Church
22–25: Parables, controversies and predictions of the end-time
One attractive theory is that Matthew’s Gospel is structured to be a
kind of Christian Pentateuch, with its five divisions,8 and this may be
supported by the fact that for the first block of teaching Jesus, like
Moses, goes up a mountain (Matthew 5:1). The deliberate ordering of
the material makes it unlikely that Jesus really delivered his teaching
in exactly this order, or that the Sermon on the Mount, for example,
was literally a sermon uttered all at the same time. Rather, it
represents a sample of what he taught at various times and places,
which Matthew has brought together into a single whole. The
subsequent collections of sayings are similarly ordered thematically,
as the descriptions above indicate. Even Christians who are
committed to the authenticity and authority of the Gospels usually
have little problem in accepting this degree of ordering by the
evangelists. Neither of the other Synoptics reproduces Matthew’s
scheme. In Luke, in particular, the narrative sequence is quite loose,
with anecdotes about Jesus that are not set in any particular
narrative context: for example, 8:22, ‘One day he got into a boat with
his disciples’. Mark and Matthew imply a consecutive story (Mark in
particular often connects events with ‘and immediately’), but Luke
does not.

THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM

Yet, for all their differences, the Synoptics manifestly tell the same
story, and from ancient times readers have wondered how they are