Gospel

Canonical gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

Contents

The four canonical gospels share the same basic outline of the life of Jesus: he begins his public ministry in conjunction with that of John the Baptist, calls disciples, teaches and heals and confronts the Pharisees, dies on the cross, and is raised from the dead. Each has its own distinctive understanding of him and his divine role and modern scholars recognize their differences over attempts at harmonization. The patterns of parallels and differences found in the gospels are typical of ancient biographies about actual people and history, and are thus unproblematic if not read anachronistically. According to the manuscript evidence and citation frequency by the early Church Fathers, Matthew and John were the most popular gospels while Luke and Mark were less popular in the early centuries of the Church.

The gospels according to Matthew, Mark and Luke are termed the "synoptic gospels" (from Ancient Greek: σύνοψις, romanized: synopsis, "seeing all together") because they present very similar accounts of the life of Jesus. Mark begins with the baptism of the adult Jesus and the heavenly declaration that he is the son of God; he gathers followers and begins his ministry, and tells his disciples that he must die in Jerusalem but that he will rise from the dead; in Jerusalem, he is at first acclaimed but then rejected, betrayed, and crucified, and when the women who have followed him come to his tomb, they find it empty. Whilst not as overt as John's Gospel (the fourth and non-synoptic gospel) scholars have found that the synoptic gospels portray Jesus as divine in various ways. Mark apparently believes that he had a normal human parentage and birth, and makes no attempt to trace his ancestry back to King David or Adam; it originally ended at Mark 16:8 and had no post-resurrection appearances, although Mark 16:7, in which the young man discovered in the tomb instructs the women to tell "the disciples and Peter" that Jesus will see them again in Galilee, hints that the author knew of the tradition.

The authors of Matthew and Luke added different infancy and resurrection narratives to the story they found in Mark. Luke forms a two-volume work with its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles. Barker suggests that Luke supplemented Matthew's nativity by adding Mary's perspective to Matthew's Joseph. Recent scholarship focuses on explaining the gospels' relationship in terms of ancient compositional practices and comparisons with other ancient historical biographers. Each also makes subtle theological changes to Mark, though James Barker argues this is exaggerated, with ancient rhetorical practices explaining many differences in the gospels instead. The Markan miracle stories, for example, confirm Jesus' status as an emissary of God (which was Mark's understanding of the Messiah), but in Matthew they demonstrate his divinity, and the "young man" who appears at Jesus' tomb in Mark becomes a radiant angel in Matthew. Luke is not especially critical of the content of Mark but mainly corrects his source's grammatical syntax, lection, and style instead.

John, the most overtly theological, is the first to make Christological judgements outside the context of the narrative of Jesus's life. He presents a significantly different picture of Jesus's career, omitting any mention of his early life, baptism, and temptation. John knows and presupposes synoptic stories and thusly emphasizes other narratives rather than recounting every passage. The chronology is also different, describing the passage of three years in Jesus's ministry in contrast to the single year of the synoptics, placing the cleansing of the Temple at the beginning, and the Last Supper on the day before Passover. However, there are also verses such as Mark 14:49 and Matthew 23:37 viewed as hints of a longer ministry in the synoptic gospels. Ancient writing practices involved such chronological displacement and changes, with even reliable biographers including Plutarch displaying them. According to Delbert Burkett, the Gospel of John is the only gospel to call Jesus God, though other scholars including Larry Hurtado and Michael Barber view a possible divine Christology in the synoptics. In contrast to Mark, where Jesus hides his identity as messiah, in John he openly proclaims it.

Composition

Like the rest of the New Testament, the four canonical gospels were written in Koine Greek. The Gospel of Mark probably dates from around AD 70, Matthew and Luke around AD 80–90, and John AD 90–100, which puts their composition likely within the lifetimes of various eyewitnesses, including Jesus's own family. Despite the traditional ascriptions, all four are anonymous, as was common for bios of the time; biographies by Plutarch and Suetonius were also originally anonymous as well. They are generally agreed not to represent eyewitness accounts, though this may partly be the result of dubious form-critical assumptions. Most scholars view the author of Luke–Acts as an eyewitness to Paul. However, Paul never met Jesus, he was still a contemporary of Jesus and personally knew eyewitnesses of Jesus such as his closest disciples (Peter and John) and brother James since the mid 30s AD, within a few years of the crucifixion (c. 30–33 AD). He had knowledge of the life of Jesus and his teachings. Before the gospels were written, he claimed to have had a vision of Jesus after his death, and later met his brother James. The form-critics largely viewed the gospels as compilers of transmitted traditions, but the gospels are now seen as biographers engaging in literarily creative and imaginative form of art (which did involve claiming consulting eyewitnesses). Though the texts are anonymous, many scholars such as Simon J. Gathercole have defended the attributions to Luke and John, though many others have abandoned this view, though even they continue to maintain the beloved disciple in the last supper as the source of much of John's content

The form critics of the 20th century viewed the gospels as compilers of tradition analogous to other collections of folktales by primitive communities steeped in eschatology, but today scholars recognize the gospels as Greco-Roman biographies by conscious authors with their own theological agendas. Burkett argues the emergence of the gospels can be summarized by oral traditions passed on as unordered units, written collections of miracle stories and sayings, and proto-gospels preceding and serving as sources for the gospels, which combined proto-gospels, written collections, and oral tradition. The dedicatory preface of Luke testifies to the existence of previous accounts of the life of Jesus. According to Chris Keith, there is no incontrovertible evidence the gospel traditions circulated as written narratives, testimonia, or notes prior to Mark.

Mark is generally agreed to be the first gospel. Source criticism has largely fallen out of favor in recent gospels scholarship, though some elements remain. Although most scholars believe Matthew and Luke independently used Mark and a hypothesized Q source, alternative hypotheses that posit the direct use of Matthew by Luke or vice versa without Q are increasing in popularity within scholarship. Modern scholarship emphasizes the evangelists' authorial activity over positing hypothetical sources. Honore offers a statistical classification of the number of words in the single, double, and triple traditions. The synoptic gospels adapt their sources more conservatively than other ancient historians, though the parallels and variations of the Synoptic gospels are typical of ancient historical biographies. The canonical gospels represent a Jesus tradition and were enveloped by oral storytelling and performances during the early years of Christianity, rather than being redactions or literary responses to each other. Mark, Matthew, and Luke are called the "synoptic gospels" because of their close similarities of content, arrangement, and language. Alan Kirk praises Matthew in particular for his "scribal memory competence" and "his high esteem for and careful handling of both Mark and Q", which makes claims the latter two works are significantly theologically or historically different dubious. Scholars in the 21st century increasingly favor the author of John’s knowledge and usage of the Synoptic gospels. The increase in support for or the view that the author of the Gospel of John knew the synoptic gospels is correlated with the decline of the signs source hypothesis, and there is currently considerable debate over the gospel's social, religious and historical context.

All four also use the Jewish scriptures, by quoting or referencing passages, interpreting texts, or alluding to or echoing biblical themes. Such use can be extensive: Mark's description of the Parousia (second coming) is made up almost entirely of quotations from scripture. Matthew is full of quotations and allusions, and although John uses scripture in a far less explicit manner, its influence is still pervasive. According to Wesley Allen, their source was the Greek version of the scriptures, called the Septuagint and they do not seem familiar with the original Hebrew, though other scholars point out that Matthew in particular has quotations closer to the Masoretic and could understand Hebrew.

Genre and historical reliability

Richard Burridge's comparison of the Gospels with writings from the Graeco-Roman world has led to a broad scholarly consensus that the Gospels are a subset of the genre of ancient biography (bios), changing how researchers view their literary form and historical intent. Ancient biographies were typically written shortly after the subject's death and included substantial historical material. Burridge demonstrated this through detailed comparison that the Gospels share features, such as focus on one central person, anecdotes, and accounts of deeds and death, which made them recognizable as serious life narratives to people in the first and second centuries. Ancient biographies were concerned with providing examples for readers to emulate while preserving and promoting the subject's reputation and memory; the gospels were propaganda and preaching meant to convince that Jesus was a miracle-working holy man. As such, they present the Christian message of the second half of the first century, and biblical scholars are cautious of relying on the gospels uncritically as historical documents, though they provide a good idea of the career of Jesus. Bond states that many chreia found in the gospels are literary creations rather than reservoirs of oral tradition; while many are rooted in actual history, they have been reshaped to emphasize aspects of Jesus.

There is a scholarly consensus that the Historical Jesus was viewed as a miracle-worker during his lifetime.

Scholars since the 19th century have viewed the gospel of John as less reliable than the Synoptic gospels. Since the third quest, however, John's gospel is seen as having more reliability than previously thought or sometimes even more reliable than the synoptics. The John, Jesus, and History Seminar has contributed to the overthrow of the previous consensus that John was of no historical value, and many scholars now see it as a source for the Historical Jesus. While there are numerous variants present in Biblical manuscripts and changes by scribes, there is a "macrolevel stability", and scholars study the relations between the gospels with the view that the texts published in the late first and second centuries did not significantly differ from 21st century reconstructions. Some of these are considered significant, an example being Matthew 1:18, altered to imply the pre-existence of Jesus. For these reasons, modern scholars are cautious of relying on the gospels uncritically, and critical study can attempt to distinguish the original ideas of Jesus from those of later authors.

Scholars generally agree that John has historical value. Mark Allan Powell has observed that scholars now recognize primitive material in the Gospel of John that can contribute authentic historical information alongside the Synoptic Gospels, thereby supporting the overall reliability of the canonical Gospel accounts. John provides additional support for various facts about the Historical Jesus also found in the Synoptics, such as his association with John the Baptist, choosing of twelve disciples, conflicts with religious authorities, emphasis on love, a high self-conception, and usage of aphoristic formulations. John's claims that Jesus visited Bethany and Ephraim, had a follower named Nathaniel, and that Peter was from Bethsaida may also be historical. The narrator is presented as a witness in 1:14, and the gospel gradually identifies its narrator as the beloved disciple, notably in chapter 19. Commentators debate whether the beloved disciple is presented as the author or an authority behind the gospel. Scholars tend to reject the attribution to John the Apostle, though they view the beloved disciple as the source of much of John's content. The Synoptic Gospels are the primary sources for Christ's ministry.

Assessments of the reliability of the Gospels involve not just the texts but also the long oral and written transmission behind them, using methods such as memory studies and form criticism, with scholars reaching different conclusions. There have been different views on the transmission of material that led to the Synoptic Gospels, with various scholars arguing that memory and/or orality reliably preserved traditions ultimately traceable to the historical Jesus. Other scholars have been more skeptical and see more changes in the traditions prior to the written Gospels. Jeffrey Tripp observes a scholarly trend advocating for the reliability of memory and the oral gospel traditions.

James Dunn believed:

the earliest tradents within the Christian churches [were] preservers more than innovators [...] seeking to transmit, retell, explain, interpret, elaborate, but not create de novo [...] Through the main body of the Synoptic tradition [...] we have in most cases direct access to the teaching and ministry of Jesus as it was remembered from the beginning of the transmission process [...] and so fairly direct access to the ministry and teaching of Jesus through the eyes and ears of those who went about with him.

Anthony Le Donne, a leading memory researcher in Jesus studies, elaborated on Dunn's thesis, basing "his historiography squarely on Dunn's thesis that the historical Jesus is the memory of Jesus recalled by the earliest disciples." According to Le Donne, as explained by his reviewer, Benjamin Simpson, memories are fractured and not exact recalls of the past. Le Donne further argues that the remembrance of events is facilitated by relating them to a common story, or "type." This means the Jesus-tradition is not a theological invention of the early Church, but rather a tradition shaped and refracted through such memory "type." Le Donne too supports a conservative view on typology compared to some other scholars, transmissions involving eyewitnesses, and ultimately a stable tradition resulting in little invention in the Gospels. Le Donne expressed himself thusly vis-à-vis more skeptical scholars,

He (Dale Allison) does not read the gospels as fiction, but even if these early stories derive from memory, memory can be frail and often misleading. While I do not share Allison's point of departure (i.e. I am more optimistic), I am compelled by the method that came from it."

Dale Allison emphasizes the weakness of human memory, noting its 'many sins' and how it frequently misleads people. He expresses skepticism at other scholars' endeavors to identify authentic sayings of Jesus. Instead of isolating and authenticating individual pericopae, Allison advocates for a methodology focused on identifying patterns and finding what he calls 'recurrent attestation'. Allison argues that the general impressions left by the Gospels should be trusted, though he is more skeptical on the details; if they are broadly unreliable, then our sources almost certainly cannot have preserved any of the particulars. Opposing the preceding approaches, which treat the Gospels as historically questionable and require rigorous sifting by competent scholars for nuggets of information, Allison argues that the Gospels are generally accurate and often 'got Jesus right'. Dale Allison finds apocalypticism to be recurrently attested, among various other themes. Reviewing his work, Rafael Rodriguez largely agrees with Allison's methodology and conclusions while arguing that Allison's discussion on memory is too one-sided, noting that memory "is nevertheless sufficiently stable to authentically bring the past to bear on the present" and that people are beholden to memory's successes in everyday life.

Craig S. Keener, drawing on previous studies by Dunn, Alan Kirk, Kenneth E. Bailey, and Robert McIver, among many others, uses memory theory and oral tradition to argue that the Gospels are, in many ways, historically accurate. His work has been endorsed by Markus Bockmuehl, James H. Charlesworth, and David Aune, among others. According to Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans,

[T]he Judaism of the period treated such traditions very carefully, and the New Testament writers in numerous passages applied to apostolic traditions the same technical terminology found elsewhere in Judaism [...] In this way they both identified their traditions as 'holy word' and showed their concern for a careful and ordered transmission of it."

N. T. Wright also argued for a stable oral tradition:

Communities that live in an oral culture tend to be story-telling communities [...] Such stories [...] acquire a fairly fixed form, down to precise phraseology [...] they retain that form, and phraseology, as long as they are told [...] The storyteller in such a culture has no license to invent or adapt at will. The less important the story, the more the entire community, in a process that is informal but very effective, will keep a close watch on the precise form and wording with which the story is told.

Other scholars are less sanguine about oral tradition, and Valantasis, Bleyle, and Hough argue that the early traditions were fluid and subject to alteration, sometimes transmitted by those who had known Jesus personally, but more often by wandering prophets and teachers like the Paul the Apostle, who did not know him personally. Ehrman explains how the tradition developed as it was transmitted:

You are probably familiar with the old birthday party game "telephone." A group of kids sits in a circle, the first tells a brief story to the one sitting next to her, who tells it to the next, and to the next, and so on, until it comes back full circle to the one who started it. Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh. Imagine this same activity taking place, not in a solitary living room with ten kids on one afternoon, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire (some 2,500 miles across), with thousands of participants—from different backgrounds, with different concerns, and in different contexts—some of whom have to translate the stories into different languages.

While multiple quests have been undertaken to reconstruct the historical Jesus, since the late 1990s, concerns have been growing about the possibility of reconstructing a historical Jesus from the Gospel texts. According to Dunn,

What we actually have in the earliest retellings of what is now the Synoptic tradition...are the memories of the first disciples-not Jesus himself, but the remembered Jesus. The idea that we can get back to an objective historical reality, which we can wholly separate and disentangle from the disciples' memories...is simply unrealistic."

These memories can contradict one another and are not always historically accurate, as the Gospels show. Chris Keith argues that the Historical Jesus was the one who could create these memories, both true or not. For instance, Mark and Luke disagree on how Jesus came back to the synagogue, with the likely more accurate Mark arguing he was rejected for being an artisan, while Luke portrays Jesus as literate and his refusal to heal in Nazareth as the cause of his dismissal. Keith does not view Luke's account as a fabrication since different eyewitnesses would have perceived and remembered differently. According to Chris Keith, a historical Jesus is "ultimately unattainable, but can be hypothesized on the basis of the interpretations of the early Christians, and as part of a larger process of accounting for how and why early Christians came to view Jesus in the ways that they did." According to Keith, "these two models are methodologically and epistemologically incompatible," calling into question the methods and aim of the first model. Keith argues that criticism of the criteria of authenticity does not mean scholars cannot research the Historical Jesus, but rather that scholarship should seek to understand the Gospels rather than trying to sift through them for nuggets of history. Regardless of the methodological challenges historical Jesus studies have flourished in recent years; Dale Allison laments, "The publication of academic books about the historical Jesus continues apace, so much so that no one can any longer keep up; we are all overwhelmed."

Robert H. Stein has written that the correct approach to Gospel traditions is to treat them as reliable until proven otherwise, because multiple lines of evidence (such as eyewitness presence, careful community transmission, and the preservation of difficult sayings) support their overall authenticity.

Textual history and canonisation

The oldest known gospel text is 𝔓⁵², a fragment of John dating to the first half of the second century. The creation of a Christian canon was probably a response to the career of the heretic Marcion of Sinope (c. 85–160), who established a canon of his own with just one gospel, the Gospel of Marcion, similar to the Gospel of Luke. The Muratorian fragment, the earliest surviving list of books considered (by its own author at least) to form Christian scripture, included Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Irenaeus went further, stating that there must be four gospels and only four because there were four corners of the world and thus the Church should have four pillars. He referred to the four collectively as the "fourfold gospel" (euangelion tetramorphon).

Non-canonical (apocryphal) gospels

The many apocryphal gospels arose from the first century onward, frequently under assumed names to enhance their credibility and authority, and often from within branches of Christianity that were eventually branded heretical. They can be broadly organised into the following categories:

• Infancy gospels: arose in the second century, including the Gospel of James, also called the Protoevangelium, which was the first to introduce the concept of the perpetual virginity of Mary, and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (not to be confused with the unrelated Coptic Gospel of Thomas), both of which related many miraculous incidents from the life of Mary and the childhood of Jesus that are not included in the canonical gospels.
• Ministry gospels
• 'Sayings gospels' and agrapha
• Passion, resurrection and post-resurrection gospels
• Gospel harmonies: in which the four canonical gospels are combined into a single narrative, either to present a consistent text or to produce a more accessible account of Jesus' life.

The apocryphal gospels can also be seen in terms of the communities which produced them:

• The Jewish Christian gospels are the products of Christians who had not given up a Jewish identity: they regarded Jesus as the messiah of scripture, but did not agree that he was God, an idea which, although central to Christianity as it eventually developed, is contrary to Jewish belief.
• Gnostic gospels uphold the idea that the universe is the product of a hierarchy of gods, of whom the Jewish god is a rather low-ranking member. Gnosticism holds that Jesus was entirely "spirit", and that his earthly life and death were therefore only an appearance, not a reality. Many Gnostic texts deal not in concepts of sin and repentance, but with illusion and divine illumination.

Paul N. Anderson has shown that the four canonical Gospels draw on independent historical traditions rooted in eyewitness memories, in contrast to later non-canonical writings, making the canonical accounts especially valuable for the historical study of Jesus.

In Islam

In Islam, the Injil (Arabic: الإنجيل) is considered one of the four major divine scriptures revealed by God, alongside the Tawrat (Torah), Zabur (Psalms), and the Quran. The term Injīl is derived from the Syriac ܐܘܢܓܠܝܘܢ (awongelion), ultimately from the Greek εὐαγγέλιον (euangelion; lit. good news or glad tidings).

According to the Quran, the Injil was a divine revelation given to ʿĪsā (Jesus), whom Islam regards as a prophet and messenger, not the Son of God. It is described as containing guidance and light for the Children of Israel and as confirming the scriptures that came before it.

Mainstream Islamic belief holds that the original Injil has been lost or altered (taḥrīf) over time, and that the four canonical Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—do not represent this original text, although they may contain elements of Jesus's authentic teachings. Some classical and contemporary scholars argue that the Injil was primarily an oral revelation given to Jesus, similar to the Qur'an revealed to Muhammad, rather than a written text authored by him.

Criticism

Some scholars and Christian apologists have criticized the Islamic view of the Injil as historically and textually problematic, arguing that there is no manuscript evidence for a distinct, lost Gospel that matches the Qur'anic description. Others contend that the charge of tahrif ('[Biblical] corruption') is a later theological development rather than a contemporaneous claim from the time of Jesus.

According to Professor Ilka Lindstedt of the University of Helsinki, nowhere is the corruption of the Jewish or Christian scriptures stated in the Qu'ran, but only its misinterpretation. Mehdy Shaddel writes that the Qur'an is 'decidedly non-supercessionist. In none of the proclamations addressed to Jews and Christians in the text does it assert that their belief systems, scriptures, or way of life are misguided or have been abrogated.'; the Quran confirms what the Jews and Christians already possess (Q 2:89), and it confirms the continued relevance of the Torah and Gospel held by Jews and Christians of the time as a binding source of law. Abdullah Saeed writes :

Even if there is textual corruption associated with interpretation, the actual scriptures can still be relied upon and considered "Books of God." For the Qur'än, the concept of the "Book of God" was appropriately used to the scriptures of Jews and Christians even though these may not be from the Muslim point of view "exactly as they were" during the time of Moses or Jesus and are, in some cases, translated from the original languages to other languages or narrated by a person other than the Prophet who received the revelation. Since the "authorized" scriptures of Jews and Christians remain very much today as they existed at the time of the Prophet, it is difficult to argue that the Qur'anic references to Tawrat and Injil were only to the "pure" Tawrat and Injil as existed at the time of Moses and Jesus, respectively. If the texts have remained more or less as they were in the seventh century CE, the reverence the Qur'än has shown them at the time should be retained even today.

Muslim scholars generally defend by responding that the Qur'an does not require the original Injil to survive in full form, only that its essential message was revealed to Jesus and has since been superseded by the Qur'an.