Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] The New Testament Gospels in a Nutshell Written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Teutsch Before I can talk about the Gospels individually, I need to say something about them as a group. How would you summarize the most important things to say about the Gospels in a single sentence? Try it. See how you do.
[00:00:23] There are roughly 34 million ways to put it. Here's one of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John the four Gospels of the New Testament are our earliest surviving accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God, sent for the salvation of the world.
[00:00:42] And now to unpack that in a single post.
[00:00:46] The term Gospel translates a Greek word, evangelion, from which we get the word evangelist that literally means good news. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are gospels because they narrate Jesus life not only to provide information about what he said and did, but also to proclaim the author's faith that he was the Messiah sent from God to bring salvation to those who accept his message. Scholars have long realized these books are not merely descriptive histories of what, according to the authors, actually happened, but are also statements of faith, making theological claims about the importance of Jesus.
[00:01:28] In many ways, the Gospels are similar to Greek and Roman biographies of famous men, which are meant not only to provide historical details about their lives, but also to encourage their readers to follow their fine examples. These ancient biographies differ in many ways from those produced in the modern world. For one thing, their authors could not undertake the kinds of sustained research of their subject that are now possible, but only since the invention of printing, the multiplication of written sources, modern databases, and electronic retrieval systems. These ancient accounts of ancient lives were as a result, concerned not only with documented facticity, but also at least as much with showing how an important person's life could influence the lives of others. The Gospels are like that, but obviously with a profoundly Christian twist. They are meant both to teach readers how to live and to promote faith in Jesus as the unique Son of God whose death and resurrection were part of God's plan to redeem the world. They cannot therefore be treated like heavily researched, fact based biographies available to us today.
[00:02:44] The four Gospels come at the beginning of the New Testament not because they were the first books to be written Paul's letters were earlier, but because the life, death and resurrection of Jesus are the foundation for the Christian faith and so provide the appropriate introduction to all the other books of the Christian scripture in Gospel author's own day. As Luke 1:1:4 explicitly indicates, other written accounts of Jesus had been written either of just his teachings or of his miracles and death and resurrection as well, but these no longer survive. All the accounts were ultimately based on stories in circulation among Jesus followers in the years and decades after his death. Moreover, after these four accounts were produced, many more were written over the centuries. None of these, however, came to be accepted as authoritative by the majority of early Christians, and none of them provides as much historical information about Jesus as the canonical four, even though these later accounts are indeed highly important for showing how Jesus came to be understood and revered in later Christian circles. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, unlike most of the other surviving gospels, share a similar narrative structure. In broad terms, they provide accounts of Jesus public ministry in Galilee, the northern part of Israel, starting with his association with John the Baptist and focusing on his relationships with his 12 disciples, his many miraculous deeds, his authoritative teachings, and his confrontations with other Jewish leaders. In all four gospels, Jesus travels to Jerusalem in the southern region of Judea, the last week of his life, in order to celebrate the annual Passover feast and proclaim his message to the crowds gathered there. But he incurs the opposition of the Jewish leader, who decides to have him arrested and turned over to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, on charges of insurrection for calling himself the King of the Jews. Pilate finds him guilty of the charge and orders him crucified. But on the third day after his death, his tomb is found empty and and he is declared to be raised from the dead.
[00:05:03] All four gospels portray these events as foreordained by God and proclaimed by the prophets of Scripture as part of God's plan to bring salvation to the world.
[00:05:15] Despite these broad similarities, there are many differences among the Gospels. Not only does each have stories found in none of the others, but also they often tell the stories they share in different, sometimes contradictory ways. Most striking are the differences between the fourth Gospel, John, and the other three, which are so much alike. Scholars call them the Synoptic Gospels. Synoptic comes from a Greek phrase that means to be seen together.
[00:05:46] Matthew, Mark, and Luke can easily be placed in parallel columns, seen together to compare their stories carefully. John's accounts of Jesus's teachings and miracles are usually quite different. Most of the overlaps between John and the others come in their passion narratives, that is, the stories leading up to and through his execution and resurrection. But in these places of overlap, the tales differ in many ways. The many similarities among the Gospels, especially the Synoptics, have led scholars to realize their authors utilized the same written sources. The many differences, especially the contradictions, show that the accounts cannot be entirely historically accurate.
[00:06:30] Given these similarities and differences. The Gospels are best read in two different but sometimes complementary literary and historical. Since they are stories told about Jesus, words, deeds, and experiences, they can be analyzed like other narratives, their key themes and emphases, to see what each author is trying to say in his own unique way about the importance of Jesus and what he said and did. When doing so, it is important to read each one for its own message and not assume that the message of one is the same as the message of another, just as no one would read two authors today and assume they necessarily have the same perspective.
[00:07:13] In addition to being literary accounts trying to convey important religious lessons, the Gospels can also be read for historical information about what Jesus actually taught, did, and experienced. Their authors are, after all, passing along stories they have heard about Jesus life. Like every other ancient historical source, the Gospels present problems for differentiating between historical reality and literary embellishment. The first step toward understanding the historical value of each account is to establish what we can know about its author, when he was writing, and in what historical context.
[00:07:52] In this thread, I will discuss each Gospel individually and in each case begin by providing two initial one to explain the book's literary thematic emphases in a nutshell the others to address the historical questions of who, when, and where that is what can be known about the author, the probable date of his composition, and the historical situation within which he appears to be producing his work. In the next post, I start with Matthew.
