Introducing the New Testament: Chapter 4

For the Life and Teachings of Jesus class tomorrow, I had to read chapter four in our "Introducing the new Testament" textbook. This chapter deals with the gospels. And as I read this, something inside me settled, because I felt like I was getting questions answered that had been lingering for years.

The beginning of the chapter discusses how each individual gospel is not just a neutral book written for 21st century American Christians. The books define the gospels as "'literary artworks.' Each Gospel presents a portrait of Jesus that is distinctive from those of the other three." Also, the chapter talks about how most people have a conglomerated picture of Jesus from all four of the Gospels, so that they cannot tell what is distinct about each individual gospel. I fall under that category. There are so many things that I had no idea about but assumed I did. For example, I didn't know that Matthew and Luke contain numerous stories that Mark leaves out. A theory about this is that Mark wrote his gospel first, and Matthew and Luke had a copy of it when they created their more in depth books. I had no idea!

The theory also contends that Matthew and Luke had a separate document called simply, Q (I had known about the existence of that document thanks to Odyssey. Thanks Whit for getting into trouble in the middle east! How I do is nothing great.). They assume that this document was mostly things that Jesus said. Scholars theorize that Matthew and Luke had both the book of Mark and the Q document when they constructed their pictures of Jesus.

So, theories go, Mark came first, then Matthew, then Luke, and I assume then John, however our book didn't talk about the last gospel. That was a question I had had but forgotten for a long time, what was the order of the authorship of the books?

This question leads into the deeper question of the Synoptic Puzzle, or "how these three Gospels" (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) "should be related to each other." I haven't thought about that puzzle very much, so I don't really have anything to say about it. Only that I know it exists.

With reading this chapter, I feel like the class is going to be extraordinarily helpful in my attempt to sort out the questions about the Bible, even the ones I don't remember that I have.