Reading the Gospels Together Points of Contact among the storylines – Part 2 If we think about our own lives we know that this is true for us as well. We experience lots of things and many of those events simply vanish from our memory, or at least they are only partially there. We may remember that we had a special birthday, but was it when we were ten years old or when we were nine? If we were to tell the story of our lives we may well recount events but have little certainty about their order. And the order really doesn’t matter much of the time. So, the conclusion that I have come to is that the storyline of each gospel reflects the actual order of things only remotely and that the storyline itself is important as a tool of the writer. In other words Mark has created his storyline, not to reflect the actual order of events, but to help him proclaim his gospel. The same is true for the others. Thinking in this way opens up a whole new range of ideas and possibilities for hearing the gospels. The questions that it drives us to ask are “Why did this gospel writer arrange things in the way that he did?” and, “Why did another gospel writer change the order or say things in another way?” In fact, it is this very premise that leads us to “read the gospels together.” It is in reading them together that we do two things. First of all we note the differences and secondly we note the points of contact among the four gospels. Our task in this chapter will be to note the points of contact among the four gospels. We can then go on to study each of these points of contacts asking why each gospel writer did what they did with the event. So let’s see if we can identify at least the major points of contact. For the most part I am going to use Mark’s storyline as the basis for my ordering of these points of contact. That is somewhat of an arbitrary decision and is not meant to say that Mark is more accurate than the others, but we need to have some sort of base line upon which to work. We will go on in future chapters to talk in more detail about these points of contact. The emphasis will be on the points of contact between John and the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke).