Reading the Gospels Together Some Observations, Some Questions, and Some Convictions Anyone who reads and studies the four gospels at any degree of depth soon discovers that there are many differences among them. Many of these differences are of little importance. Whether Jesus healed Bartimeaus on his way out of Jericho (Mark 10:46), or as he entered Jericho (Luke 18:35), or even if perhaps there were two blind men healed at Jericho (Matthew 20:29) probably doesn’t matter. But, whether Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples on the night he was betrayed before he was crucified on the next day (Mark 14:12-25, Matthew 26:17-30, Luke 22:7-23) or Jesus was crucified at noon on the Day of Preparation for Passover when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered before he had an opportunity to celebrate Passover with his disciples (John 13:1; 18:28, 19:14) makes a huge difference, especially in our participation in the Lord’s Supper. Was the meal in the upper room a Passover Meal transformed by Jesus into what we have come to know as the Lord’s Supper, or was it a meal and gathering of some other sort? It is interesting the John does not tell the story of the taking and breaking and blessing of the bread and the wine at that last meal. Did Jesus die with a cry of despair on his lips, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:33-28 and Matthew 27:45-50), or did he die in a kind of trusting resignation as the righteous one who places himself in God’s hands, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” (Luke 23:44-46), or did he die with a word of triumph on his lips, “It is finished!” (John 19:28-30)? These among many others are glaring differences that demand of any serious reader of the four gospels to pause and ask what is going on here. Discovering all these differences is not what we expect when we begin to read the four gospels. What we expect is one consistent story that hangs together perfectly. That’s especially true if we believe that the Bible is the Word of God inspired by the Holy Spirit. Why would the Holy Spirit inspire different things in different authors? Can’t they keep it all straight? What does it mean to say that the Bible is the Word of God? What does it mean to believe in the inspiration of the Bible? All of these are questions that are raised as one begins to read the four gospels. Discovering all these differences likely is troubling to any reader of the four gospels. I know that discovering these differences was troubling to me – in fact it was a crisis of faith as I have shared elsewhere. My first encounter with the differences was when I first carefully read the accounts of the resurrection of Jesus. None of the accounts agrees with any other account. And that bothered me. If the writers of the Bible can’t get that most important event right can they be trusted about anything else? So, what are we to make of all the differences that we find among the four gospel writers? This is the large question that challenges any serious student of the gospels. This study is driven by the desire to make sense out of this question. One of the central conviction from which I want to address this question is that we need to take the words of each gospel literally. We need to let the gospels say what they say and not attempt somehow to manipulate them so that the differences disappear. That is a real temptation and has been practiced by some who simply will not allow the gospels to say different things. I do not find such “harmonization” convincing and in the end I believe that such attempts do damage to the message and proclamation of the Bible. I care very deeply about the Bible. The Bible is an incredibly important book. It is my conviction that the Bible is the Word of God and that God speaks through the Bible to create and sustain faith in those of us who are hearers. It is my conviction that the Bible is the inspired Word of God – God’s Spirit working in the lives of its authors and also working in our lives as we seek to hear and understand and be shaped by this Word. The Bible is God’s book. I think God is delighted with the Bible as we have it. God would not have it any other way. And the Bible as the Word of God works to do what God wants it to do. But to let God’s Word do its work we need to take it seriously and literally. We need to try as best we can to not let our preconceived notions influence what we read. That is not an easy thing for anyone to do. That is what I hope to do in this investigation. Let the chips fall where they will. As I have worked with the gospels for a number of years now I have come to believe that it is precisely the differences that we find within them that are the keys to understanding more fully the message each gospel writer is attempting to proclaim. So one of the premises of this study is to embrace the differences we encounter. The differences are not a problem but a blessing that opens up the proclamation the Bible hopes to speak to those of us who hear. So the focus of this study will be to identify the differences and then use them as interpretive tools to understand the message of each gospel writer more fully. In order to get at these differences an important exercise for us to do is to attempt to identify the “storyline” of each gospel writer. It is to ask the questions, “How did they tell the story? How did they order the events?” And, when we begin to compare these four “storylines” it is to ask the most important question of all, “Why did each gospel writer give this particular order to the events and how does the way in which later authors changed their sources speak to a new vision and proclamation they were hoping to make?” So we will begin the first four weeks of this study by looking at the “storyline” of each gospel. Then we will lay these four storylines next to one another to look for places in which they intersect with one another. While the focus in on the differences, it needs to be said that there is a great deal in common among all four gospels. They are all clearly reflecting upon the very same historical events – they are four versions of the same story. As we note the intersecting cluster of events we can begin to investigate how each writer viewed those events through a different lens and why there are all the differences we have noted above. The end result will hopefully be a fuller appreciation of the proclamation of each of the four gospel writers and perhaps even a clear understanding of the events as they happened. Before we begin it is important for me to share with you some assumptions that I bring to this study. I stated above that it is important that we do not let our preconceived notions influence what we read. Perhaps these are my own preconceived notions; however, I believe they are based on a strong foundation and do reflect my conviction to take the words of each gospel writer literally and seriously. They grow out of the work of many Biblical scholars over the past several centuries and are generally agreed to by most scholars. Reading the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke leads to what is nearly an irrefutable conclusion that there is a literary dependency among these three gospels. The very same words are used by all three gospel writers or at least by two writers with a high degree of frequency. Well over 90% of Mark is found in either Matthew or Luke. And besides that there are large sections of material that Matthew and Luke share together (again often using the same words) that are not found in Mark. How is this dependency to be explained? It is almost unanimous among Biblical scholars that Mark is the earliest gospel to be written and that both Matthew and Luke depended literally on Mark in the writing of their gospels. Both Matthew and Luke had a copy of Mark available to them as the major source of their own gospel. I agree with that assumption. It is also almost unanimously agreed among Biblical scholars that Matthew and Luke shared a document that has been unfortunately lost which contained the material they share together that is not found in Mark’s gospel. I agree with that assumption as well. Since Matthew and Luke order their material basically following Mark’s “storyline” but they also order the material that share together in this lost document in vastly different ways and in a vastly different order the nearly unanimous conclusion of Biblical scholars is that Matthew and Luke were unaware of each other and write independently of one another. I agree with this assumption as well. There is Biblical warrant for coming to a conclusion like this since Luke tells his readers in the very beginning of his gospel that he has followed the writings of others who have written an account of the events surrounding Jesus’ life and now he is setting forth his own rendering (Luke 1:1-4). Finally, the question of how the gospel of John is to be related to the other gospels needs to be addressed. The relationship between John and the other three gospels is not as firmly settled among Biblical scholars as the relationship among Matthew, Mark, and Luke; however, the consensus likely is that John wrote independently of all three and was not aware of any of them. This is the assumption that I subscribe to. However, there is one caveat that I think warrants some consideration and that is that John was aware of some of the traditions that lie behind Mark, Matthew, and Luke and may be dependent on some of those same traditions. While not literally dependent upon Mark, Matthew, or Luke there are likely a number of common traditions that underlie all four gospels. It may also be true that Luke and maybe Matthew were aware of some of the material in the earliest versions of John. So the picture that emerges is something like this: Following the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus there existed a wealth of stories and traditions about those events. Most of these traditions were passed on orally for some time but likely some were written down as time passed. Eventually Mark was the first writer who gathered these traditions together into what we have come to know as a gospel. Using Mark, Matthew and Luke added material to construct their own gospels to meet the changing needs of their communities. The story behind John’s gospel is likely more complex since the final version of the gospel of John as we have it today reflects a process of editing so it is likely that John was built up over time using the wealth of traditions available. One more factor likely rests in the background of John and that is the presence of an eyewitness in the early versions of John’s gospel – the beloved disciple spoken of in the book of John. One more assumption that I bring to this investigation is that all four of the gospels were written by anonymous writers. None of the gospels contains the name of its author. The gospel of John does make the claim that it is somehow based on the eyewitness testimony of the “beloved disciple” which I accept as being accurate but even this beloved disciple remains unnamed and the present form in which we have the gospel of John almost certainly does not come directly from the hand of this beloved disciple. We can be nearly certain that the author of Mark’s gospel is not the Mark who was a companion of Paul and the disciple of Peter. We can also be nearly certain the author of Matthew’s gospel was not the disciple, Matthew in the gospel story. We can be nearly certain that the author of the book of Luke was not the physician mentioned in the book of Acts and a companion of Paul. And we can be nearly certain that the beloved disciple mention in the book of John was not John the son of Zebedee. It is my conviction that we simply do not know the names of any of the authors of the four gospels. For the sake of convention and simplicity I will continue to speak of the writers by their traditional names. We are now ready to begin to construct the “storyline” of each gospel. We will begin with Mark since it is likely that Mark was the first to write a gospel and because two of the other gospels were based on Mark. After we have developed Mark’s storyline we will move on to examine Matthew and then Luke noting the changes that they have made to Mark’s storyline along the way. Finally, we will develop the storyline of John’s gospel. Once we have these four storylines in place we will be ready to place them alongside of one another and consider what we have learned from this investigation.