Canonical Gospels

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Jane Sorensen Monday, August 8, 2005

Word count: 3966

Pagans, Jews, and Christians: the Canonical Gospels

This essay attempts to explain the sources, dates, and motivations behind the writing

and inclusion of materials that now comprise the four Canonical Gospels of the New

Testament. Many were excluded, they cannot be covered in this essay. However, some

materials that are not Gospel will be discussed, as they were concurrent or perhaps

primary materials for the four Canonical Gospels.

there were many accounts of Jesus but only four that the early church fathers

considered authentic, those ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; that

most scholars thought Mark was written first; that Matthew, the one we were

discussing that day, was written between 70 and 85 A.D. for a community ofChristian believers in Jerusalem and the surrounding area; that the text was

derived from thirty or forty years of oral tradition of narrative about Jesus and

also from a hypothetical written complication of that oral material that scholars

called Q (Denby 172)

After the crucifixion of Jesus, people did a lot of talking. They collected the sayings of

Jesus, and this oral tradition fueled the later composition of the gospels.

The canonical gospels were not by any means the only accounts of Jesus life and

teaching during the years following his death, stories about him and his disciples

were told and retold, not only in Palestine, but throughout Asia Minor, Greece,Egypt, Africa, Gaul, and Spain. (Pagels 65)

The book of Q (quelle is German for source) is a lost gospel (Mack 71) not an

actual found document, even though many documents from the period, including Gospels

according to other apostles, were found (e.g. 1950s in Nag Hammadi, Egypt). Qs

existence was imagined for 150 years before it was deduced and reconstructed by

analyzing the gospels. After its reconstruction, its existence was also further proven by

the extent the reconstruction matched the evidence unearthed at Nag Hammadi.

(Mack 60)

The sayings can be grouped into three categories, deduced to have been created at

different times and then interwoven into the original material. These were then the basis

of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The first and earliest category of Q showed Jesus as


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the wisdom teacher, prescribing a new way to behave. The second category (Q2) had to

do with the rejection and apocalyptic pronouncements against those who would not

hear the teachings. The third category (Q3) had to deal with the wait for the world to

come. (Mack 49) The Q period (or Q

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), where the community surrounding the teachingsof Jesus was being formed and disseminated, was pre-war and active during the time of

Paul. The polemic period came about at the time of the Jewish-Roman war, which Paul

did not live to see. So for now, lets turn to Paul.

The Gospels are not the creation of Paul, but they grew up in the controversial milieu

which Paul had done more than anyone else to ferment. (Wilson 257) Paul initiated the

writings about Jesus, and though he concentrated on the spiritual meaning of Jesus death

and the foundation of a new faith, his proselytizing kicked off and informed the

biographies that became the Gospels.

Some twenty years after Jesus crucifixionthere were as yet no written gospels.

According to Paul, the gospel consisted of what he preached, which he

summarized as follows: that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures;

that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day (1 Cor. 15:3-4).

Paul wrote Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 and possibly (authenticity is

unconfirmed) 2 Thessalonians as early as the 50 56 AD (Vermes 71), although thereseems to be some debate about this still as Frederiksen claims he wrote two to three

decades after Jesus and that Romans was his last letter (Frederiksen 59). He was traveling

amongst many cities in the Roman empire during their composition, to spread the word

and found congregations. These Pauline congregations were meeting to worship a risen

Christ (Mack 49) the only Jesus Paul knew. He was concerned only with Jesus

message of a new way of life, and his vision of Jesus held sway over others. He may have

felt that the facts just got in the way and considering that Christianity has stood for two

millennia, he has been proven right (the facts are only recently being inquired into andelucidated.)

Paul mentions little that concerns Jesus biography, repeating only a few sayings

of the Lord (Acts 20:35). What fascinated Paul about Jesus death was not the

crucifixion as an actual event, but what he saw as its profound religious meaning

that, as he says, Christ died for our sins (1 Cor. 15:3), that he became an


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atonement sacrifice, which, Paul believed, transformed the relationship between

Israels God and the whole human race. (Pagels 8)

The Gospels were written after Paul, and do not mention him, except for Acts, which

was written by the author of Luke as the second volume of his Gospel. But that doesnt

mean he didnt have an effect:

In the case of the Eucharist[Pauls] source is said to be Jesus, implying that it

was directly revealedto him. I received from the Lordwhat I also delivered to

you (I Cor. 11:23). If I am correct in interpreting this passage, it would mean

that Pauls account stands apart from the tradition recorded some fifteen to forty-

five years later in the Synoptic Gospels, since the first Epistle to the Corinthians

was written c. AD 55. Consequently Pauls working may have been the primary

source for the New Testament formulation of the establishment of the Eucharist.

In other words, there is a good chance that the Eucharistic interpretation of the

communal meal of the church was due to Paul, and that the editors of Mark,

Matthew and especially Luke, who follows Paul most closely, introduced it into

their respective accounts in the Synoptic Gospels. (Vermes 69)

As for the historical context of Pauls times, they were pre-Roman war and relatively

peaceful (Pagels 8, Frend 56). Whatever upheavals there were (that he didnt cause

himself he was difficult to get along with, and it has been said that the conflicts of Jesus

are really the conflicts of Paul (Wilson 258)), Paul believed were a signal of the end of

the old world and the beginning of the Kingdom of God. Paul was also certain that Jesus

return was imminent, and people who followed him generally acted with anticipation,

without changing their persons or their diets or civil status, or removing themselves

wholly from society like the Essenes. (Vermes 73)

The letters that Paul wrote came from him (we know which ones did not), and they

comprise several books of the New Testament. They are the most authentic sources we

have as to the Christian life at that time and place. (Frederiksen 53) The consequences of

Pauls inclusion and influence on the Gospels is the whole of Christianity. He set in place

the concept, structure, and doctrine of the Church, he showed which rules and laws wereinconsequential and which could be waived for the strong of faith, perhaps twisting

Jesus own message (Vermes 71). However, it is claimed that Paul respected truth and

freedom of thought. If this is his legacy, then inquiry is the only thing that will save

Christianity for the future.


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66 C.E. (or, alternatively, A. D.) was beginning of the Jewish-Roman war, and Mark

was writing in response to it. Jesus was its first martyr. Marks gospel worried about

what it meant to be the follower of a martyr (Mack 48)

What we do know is that the author of Marks gospel was well aware of the war

and took sides in the conflicts it aroused, both among Jewish groups and between

Jews and Romans.

Mark was writing, after all, about a charismatic Jewish teacher, Jesus of

Nazareth, who thirty-five years before had been executed by Pontius Pilate, the

Roman governor of Judea, apparently on charges of sedition against Rome.

(Pagels 6)

Marks Gospel was also conscious of the schism between the Jews and the Romans,

the Gentiles, and the survivorship of the Christian faith. The Jews were already aware of

Jesus, and they had either accepted or rejected him. Though Jesus created his followingas a Jew, addressing Jewish ethics and problems, Gentiles who were attracted to

Christianity would obviously be the base of the faith if they could be persuaded to

convert. In the aftermath of the war, Christianity had to pick sides.

Members of a group loyal to a condemned seditionist were at risk, and Mark

probably hoped to persuade those outsiders who might read his account that

neither Jesus nor his followers offered any threat to Roman order. But within

Marks account, the Romans, even the few portrayed with some sympathy,

remain essentially outsiders. Mark tells the story of Jesus in the context that

matters to him mostwithin the Jewish community. (Pagels 15)

Mark was the creator of Superman Son of Man Jesus. The gospel is short and

replete with his miraculous acts, set up in pairs that parallel the miraculous history of

Israel (Mack 66). The immediate, temporal connection between Parousia (the return of

Christ) and the Kingdom of God is explicit in 8:28-9:1, 13:26, and 14:62 (Frederiksen 44)

was felt to be in their current situation:

Jesus followers believed that there was no point in fighting the Romans because

the catastrophic events that followed his crucifixion were signs of the endsignsthat the whole world was to be shattered and transformed (Mark 13:4-29). Some

insisted that what they had seenthe horrors of the waractually vindicated his

call Repent, for the Kingdom of God is near (Mark 1:15). Mark shares the

conviction, widespread among Jesus followers, that Jesus himself had predicted

these world-shattering eventsthe destruction of the Temple and its

desecration(Pagels 9)


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There are two versions of the trial before the Sanhedrin in his gospel. (The second one

concords with Lukes; the first version was probably written to emphasize that the verdict

of sedition came from the Jews, and Pontius Pilate merely ratified it, although the

tendency to blame [Jewish leaders for the crucifixion] had already begun before Markstime (Pagels 27)) But in portraying the lengthy trial of Jesus, the first instance in

which Jesus himself declares to be the Son of Man, Mark also provides ethical instruction

to believers, as it:

mirror[s] the precarious situation in which he and his fellow believers now

stand in relation to leaders of the Jewish communities during and after the war. In

this account of Jesus courage before his judges, Mark offers Jesus followers a

model of how to act when they too are put on trial. (Pagels 27-28).

As an unprovable aside, one real-world result of this behaviour could be the parole of

prisoners: if an officer was captured by the opposing side in a war, for instance, he could

give hisparole (word) that he would not try to escape if he were given relative freedom.

This is part of sentencing today, if a convicted prisoner behaves accordingly.

Mark and his colleagues combined a biographical form with themes of

supernatural conflict borrowed from Jewish apocalyptic literature to create a new

kind of narrative. These gospels carry their writers powerful conviction that

Jesus execution, which had seemed to signal the victory of the forces of evil,

actually heralds their ultimate annihilation and ensures Gods final victory.

(Pagels 13)

And this supernatural conflict and apocolypticism informs much of religion today, so

that it makes it difficult to imagine a supernatural world without opposing forces and an

end of time. The remaining consequences of Marks gospel lie in Matthew and Luke, so

that these three gospels form synopses of each other, with the variances being between

Matthew and Luke.

Matthew was long thought to be the first gospel written: Of the four canonized

gospels, Matthew, which presents the fullest exposition of Jesus teachings (including the

Sermon on the Mount), was the one that most closely and consciously presented itself as


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a successor to the Old Testament. (Denby 172) But it is clear that it was written based

on earlier work:

Matthew and Luke had used a collection of the sayings of Jesus as one of the

sources for their gospels, the other being the Gospel of Mark. [Q] sustaineda Jesus movement for half a century before Matthew and Luke ever thought to

merge it with Marks story of Jesus. (Mack 47-48)

Matthews gospel over-relies on previous Biblical prophesies, in order to try to prove

that Jesus was the foretold Messiah.

Matthew uses the scriptures to generate a theologically sophisticated

definition and characterization of Jesus of Nazareth as the long-awaited messiah

of prophetic hope. Matthew chooses innumerable passages and verses that in

their original context had nothing to do with a messiah, and by applying them toJesus makes them seem to.

Further, by viewing scripture primarily as a collection of prophecies awaiting

fulfilment, Matthew could implicitly expose the incompleteness of Judaism. Only

Jesus fulfilled these prophecies and therefore only Christianity could complete

Judaism. Hence Matthew builds his Jewish scriptures that seem to speak to

Christianity. Hence Matthew builds his story largely around selected quotations

from Isaiah, Jeremiah, the minor prophets, and Psalms, books whose texts are

monuments of metaphor and ambiguity.

Such a task of theological appropriation is by its very nature polemical. This is a

combative gospel. (Frederiksen 37-38)

However, at first it is unclear why he is making this effort the initial Jesus

communities drew their members from Jews and Gentiles alike. Marks gospel already

showed the Romans that rather than carrying a grudge like the Jews, they had cause for a

grudge against the Jews. Why? It seems the Jewish well of supporters was tapped out:

By the time he wrote, circa 90 C.E., at least one generation after the Roman destruction

of the Temple and at least two since the execution of Jesus, the general nonresponse of

Israel to the Christian message was a pervasive fact. (Frederiksen 39) But more

importantly:

As we know from the evidence of Paul, whose letters predate Mark by some

fifteen years, early Christians sought to interpret their recent past through an

appeal to scripture (e.g., 1 Cor 15:3b; Rom 1:2; etc.). But the argument that

Jesus life and death conformed to a revealed design only heightened the problem

of early and continuing Jewish nonresponse: why did those best placed both to

know the scriptures and to see how Jesus had fulfilled them that is, Jesus


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Jewish contemporaries in Palestineremain indifferent? Matthew solved this

problem by claiming that the Jews reaction was also predicted in scripture: in

rejecting Jesus, the Jews thus actually confirmed his status, responding to Gods

Son and messiah as scripture had said they would. (Frederiksen 49)

You would think, then, that the Christian response would be an amicable parting ofways, but it alienated the Jews, and made Christians bitter and hate them.

The author of Luke wrote his gospel from 10 to 20 years after Mark did. (Pagels 7)

His history is different than Matthews. Indeed, [When it comes to citing Q,] Luke is

preferred over Matthew because, in the majority of cases, Luke did not alter the

terminology and sequence of the sayings as much as Matthew did. (Mack 48) Lukewrote in a sophisticated Greek, which explains his focus on individual morality. Being an

educated Gentile (the only Gentile of the Canonical authors, according to Pagels (89)),

Luke still heeds the context of Jesus place and time: he begins and ends the gospel in

Jerusalem, and it is from Jerusalem that his second volume, Acts, shows the spread of the

faith. (New Jerusalem Bible, 1205)

Luke, conscious of standing in an extended tradition, writes like a historian: he

has carefully considered the many other narratives written about Jesus, and he

now intends to supersede them with his own more reliable report, a history in twovolumes. Jesus is the focus of Part I, the gospel; the career of the apostolic

church, and especially Paul, of Part 2, the Book of Acts. Luke in fact presents a

history not of Jesus career itself but of salvation, of how the Holy Spirit came

into human history definitively through Jesus, and thence passed from the Risen

Christ to his (and Lukes) largely Gentile church. (Frederiksen 27)

However, this doesnt stop Luke from building a pre-career history for Jesus (He

creates miraculous conceptions of both Jesus and John the Baptist), including parallels

taken from many older parts of the Bible.

Lukes specific references to secular historical eventsserve to anchor his

story. Even if inaccurate, however, these allusions to the public past help

concretize Lukes tale. It is as if he were saying, These things really happened,

and not so very long ago, when all these other things that everyone knows about

also occurred. Luke also grounds his story in sacred biblical time, linking the

life and ministry of Jesus to the history of all Israel. (Frederiksen 31-32)


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Lukes stance on the imminent arrival of Parousia is more skeptical and less urgent

than Pauls, so he internalizes Christian morality, demanding social change. [His] gospel

is very warm and human, concentrating on Jesus mercy and forgiveness, his call

especially to the poor and underprivileged, inviting both Jew and gentile to salvation.(New Jersualem Bible, 1205) For example:

Nowhere does Jesus shine more as a moral exemplar that in the final stages of his

ministry, as he suffers abuse in silence and prays for his tormentors Knowing that

humiliation and death await him in Jerusalem, Jesus nonetheless weeps for thecity that refuses to let him nurture it, and mourns its impending destruction, the

consequence of rejecting him (19:41-44; cf. 13:34). Driving out those who sell in

the Temple courtyard, he nonetheless teaches there daily, still trying go turn the

people to himself (19:45-48; 20:1; 21:37-38) Knowing that Peter will deny him,

Jesus prays for him; later, his gaze after the denial helps Peter to repent (22:32,

62-63). He fears the ordeal before him but submits to Gods will (22:39-44).Refusing to allow his disciples to defend him with arms (No more of this), he

heals an enemy whom his followers had wounded (22:51). Later, from the cross,

he entreats Gods forgiveness for his executioners (23:34). (Frederiksen 30)

After the fall of the Temple, Judaism fundamentally changed, with a final dispersion

and transformation into the religion of the Talmud. The Jewish-Christian community (the

Jerusalem Church) also was dispersed, and the centre of Christian gravity gradually

shifted to Rome. Pauls Christ had not been part of the Jerusalem Church, so Luke, in his

gospel and Acts, tied the two factions together by giving the decapitated trunk of the

Jerusalem Jesus a Pauline head. (Johnson 42).

Meanwhile or, 30 years after Marks account, in 100 A. D. Johns Gospel marks

the triumph of Pauline theology. (Johnson 42) It is the spiritual gospel of the cosmic

Jesus. It places Jesus outside of time, and thus makes Jesus relevant for all time. It also

makes cosmic the struggle between good and evil, turning them into spiritual forces in

direct and eternal conflict. Satan has his greatest presence in this gospel. This Jesus is

equally as mythological as that of Paul, made human when Jesus charged John with

looking after his mother Mary (and subsequently taking her to Ephesus to live). However,

in its cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, the Devil, rather than God, is

responsible for Jesus death and all the opposition that Christians encounter:


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Jesus does come from above, but the Jews know nothing of the upper world since

their father, the Devil, is the ruler of this one (8:44). This radical divorce from

Judaismits people, its history, and in a more complicated way, its

scriptureliberates the evangelist stylistically and theologically from composing

his gospel around biblical testimonia. The Johannine Christ is not heralded in

Jew history: he is an utterly untraditional messiah. (Frederiksen 25)

While Matthew appealed both to Christians and to what Jews were not offended by

their responsibility for Jesus death (willed by God or otherwise), John wanted nothing to

do with Jews (let the record show, however, that Jews felt the same way (Johnson 43)).

This gospel, in other worlds, is written by someone who consciously placed

himself outside, if not against, Judaism. This fact does not necessarily mean the

author was not Jewish. Some scholars have argued that the very intensity of his

hostility, and his references to Christians being excluded from synagogue service

(9:22; 12:42; 16:2), suggest that he and his community were expelled from the

synagogue and that they incorporated their bitter experience of rejection into

their story about Jesus. This document, then, would have been primarily for

internal consumption, a sort of identity-confirming tract for the excluded group.

Against this argument, however, it must be said that the gospel neither assumesnor evinces any great familiarity with Judaism.Johns Jews seem curiously

unacquainted with their own traditions. (Frederiksen 25-26)

But not only was a solidification of anti-Semitism a result of the gospel of John, so

too was an exclusion of any other spiritual interpretation of Jesus teachings, meaning,

and occurrence in time. John pre-empted the spiritual accounts of Thomas, Philip, Mary,

and any one else whose message conflicted with his own. (Johnson 42-43) This account

is how, according to Pagels, Christian heresy and Christianitys own children could

become children of the Devil. Sadly, many Christians followed in Christs footsteps

without saving the world.

All of the New Testament gospels, with considerable variation, depict Jesus

execution as the culmination of the struggle between good and evilbetween God and

Satanthat began at his baptism. (Pagels 12)

In their final form the gospels are works reflecting the faith and attitudes of

Christian communities some two generations after the crucifixion. Their writers

were concerned with the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God (Mark 1:1) and


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not with historical biography. The story they tell, however, can hardly related to a

situation other than Palestine in the first half of the first century (Frend 55)

although it also relates to the Hellenistic context (Frederiksen 18) of the times and

the mix of people where the gospel according to whomever was taken. When these works

were made Canonical, it ended debate on their authenticity and much interpretation for a

long time to come. Not until Henry VII, the Renaissance and, even then, until the Second

Vatican Council, did a devout Christian question the foundation of the faith especially

when the losing accounts, those to have escaped destruction, were unearthed. But those

and these are wholly different periods of time, and the initial brew was complicated

enough.


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Bibliography

The New Jerusalem Bible Readers Edition. 1990. New York: Darton, Longman &

Todd Ltd., Doubleday.

Denby, David. 1997. Great Books: My Adventure with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and

Other Indestructibel Writers of the Western World. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Frend, W.H.C. 1984. The Rise of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Frederiksen, Paula. 2nd

edition, 1988. From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New

Testament Images of Christ. New Haven and London: Yale Nota Bene, Yale University

Press.

Johnson, Paul. 1977. A History of Christianity. New York: Atheneum.

Mack, Burton L. 1995. Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian

Myth. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

Mack, Burton L. 1993. The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins. San

Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

Pagels, Elaine. 1995. The Origin of Satan. New York: Vintage Books; Toronto:

Random House of Canada.

Vermes, Geza. 2000. The Changing Faces of Jesus. Penguin Books.

Wilson, A.N. 1997. Paul: The Mind of the Apostle. New York: W. W. Norton &

Company, Ltd.

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