Joel B. Green
The Gospels appear first in the New Testament. This is not because they were written first, but because their subject matter is of first importance. They bear witness to the priority of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to the entire witness of the Bible. Each in its own way, they help us to understand that the story of the Bible is only one story, which runs with essential continuity from the story of ancient Israel to the story of the early church. This is God's story, and God's story cannot but pivot around the good news of the advent of Jesus as God's Son and Messiah.
What is a "Gospel"? Originally, these four books (and others like them) are unlikely to have been known by this name. In fact, the unadorned titles of these books as they appear in Greek would be "According to Mark," "According to Matthew," and so on. At a basic level, there is only one "Gospel," who is Jesus Christ, and these books are simply different ways of portraying him. Placing these four books side by side in the New Testament, the ancient church bore witness to the fundamental unity of their focus and subject, Jesus, while at the same time allowing that Jesus' significance could be faithfully rendered in more than one way.
Scholars now largely agree that the Gospels are most like examples of the ancient genre of "biography" The ancient philosopher and biographer Plutarch (ca. A.D. 45-125) wrote of his biographical approach: "As portrait painters work to get their likenesses from the face and the look of the eyes, in which the character appears, and pay little attention to other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to dwell especially on things that express the inner character of these men, and through them portray their lives" This description helps us to understand why we have four Gospels and why they do not agree on all of their particular elements. Like Plutarch, those who wrote the "lives" of Jesus we now know as "Gospels" were like portrait painters who selected what they regarded as most important about him. Often drawing from the same reservoir of episodes and traditions about Jesus, they chose the material and placed it within a narrative framework that helped to highlight what they regarded as most significant about Jesus. Like Plutarch's biographies, the Gospels are not mere chronicles and are not concerned with telling us everything just as it actually took place.
What can we expect of the Gospels, if they belong to the family of Roman biography? (1) They will focus on Jesus' public life as an adult. (2) They will demonstrate why Jesus was so important as to have merited treatment in a biography. (3) The episodes they report will not be fictional accounts but will be interpreted in sometimes fresh ways by their inclusion in a narrative representation of Jesus' life. (4) They will present Jesus as an example worthy of emulation - as one who embodies the values and commitments of those for whom the Gospels were first written.
This last point encourages us to regard the Gospels as written first and foremost for Christians. In fact, each of the Gospels opens in a way that assumes on the part of its readership a belief that Jesus is God's agent of salvation. This assumption is not likely to have been granted, and certainly not shared, by nonbelievers reading the first column of a Gospel scroll in the ancient Roman world.
Of course, the analogy with Plutarch's approach should not be pushed too far. This is because biographies in Roman antiquity emphasized the life, virtues, and accomplishments of their subject, whereas biographical material in the Old Testament and in Jewish writing roughly contemporary with Jesus highlighted instead God's call on the lives of persons, on the character of their divine mission, and on how that mission was accomplished. Clearly, the Gospels share these emphases with Israelite biography. From the perspective of the Gospels, a narrative of the life of Jesus belongs to a much larger story, which is nothing less than the story of God's creating and redeeming purpose.
Telling a story is always difficult in this way. "How far back in the story must I go in order to make sense of the story itself? Where shall I begin?" we ask. The Gospel of Matthew begins with a genealogy - a very important point of beginning in Matthew's world, though not necessarily so today. In many times and places, including the context of the Old Testament and the Roman world of the ist century, the status of one's ancestors determined one's status within the community. The question, "Who am I?" could be addressed in terms of one's ancestral heritage. Thus Matthew claims that the story of Jesus cannot be understood apart from an initial understanding of his parentage, and especially his relationship to Abraham and David. Having established this, Matthew is in a position to begin his account of Jesus' birth, which is seasoned generously with affirmations of divine intervention and direction and scriptural fulfillment.
Matthew proceeds from these beginnings to explore more fully in his narrative the vital relationship between Jesus' life and the history and hope of God's engagement with Israel. It is within this relationship that Matthew develops his concern with the church. Among the Evangelists, Matthew alone employs the Greek word for "church," ekklesia (Matt. 16:18; 18:17), and one finds in the pages of this Gospel heightened concerns with church discipline, liturgical practices, and mission (e.g., 6:9-13; 18; 26:26-28; 28:16-20). Here the Evangelist has brought the traditions about Jesus to bear on the needs of still-youthful Christian communities struggling with important issues of power and authority, identity and witness, and so, of internal behavior and relations. Insisting on the church's roots in the mission and message of Jesus and its continuity with historic Israel, Matthew works to aid his readers as they endeavor to find their way as a new religious movement in the Mediterranean world of the 1st century.
Mark's approach is somewhat different, but the effect he achieves is similar. Mark mentions nothing of Jesus' birth and says nothing of Jesus' family until Jesus returns to his hometown to preach (Mark 6:1-6). Where does Mark begin? As his opening citation of Isaiah 40 makes clear, for Mark the beginning of the Gospel is in Israel's hope for the coming of God to bring consolation to Israel. Opening his narrative in this way, Mark claims that the coming of Jesus is nothing less than the coming of God to bring salvation.
This opening emphasis on Jesus' identity is crucial to a Gospel where the identity of Jesus seems often to be in question. Numerous characters make inquiries about Jesus' identity, and the Gospel as a whole turns on the question Jesus himself raises at its midpoint, "Who do you say that I am?" (Mark 8:29). Mark is not concerned with Jesus' identity for speculative reasons, however, but so that he can develop a perspective on God's work and on authentic discipleship that will address the realities of the lives of those who seek to follow Jesus, and who experience suffering because of it.
Luke takes a still different approach. Unlike Mark, he devotes a great deal of attention to the birth of Jesus - tying it, first, into his account of the birth of John the Baptist, and, more profoundly, into God's promises to Abraham, now coming to fruition (Luke 1:5-2:52). For Luke, then, the story of Jesus cannot be understood apart from its location at the center of God's ancient purpose to bring salvation to the whole world through the people of Abraham. The narrative Luke weaves is fundamentally oriented around the theme of salvation - not as a merely spiritual or primarily future matter, but as a matter that embraces life in the present. Salvation signals the restoration of the integrity of human life and the commissioning of the community of God's people to put God's grace into practice among themselves and toward ever-widening circles of outsiders. Early on, Jesus is identified as savior (2:11), and in this role he communicates the presence of divine salvation for those who dwell on the outward bounds of acceptable society. Luke's Gospel is thus concerned with the history and practices that define the community of God's people, and with the invitation to participate in God's redemptive project.
John initiates his narrative of Jesus' adult life and ministry by tracing Jesus' beginnings neither to his baptism nor birth, nor even to scriptural promise, but to the eternal past. Echoing the words of Genesis, John writes, "In the beginning. . " (John 1:1), then affirms that the Son of God, God's own Word, was God's agent of creation and, indeed, was God. For John, then, the mural of Jesus' life is not complete unless it is set in relation to all eternity and the whole cosmos.
Readers who expect Gospels to center on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus may be puzzled by the beginning of the Gospel of John, with its commentary on the creation story of Genesis 1. This beginning does not segregate Jesus from concerns with the people of God in the 1st century A.D., however. In fact, throughout the Gospel, Jesus is shown to be superior to Jewish ancestors in the faith (John 4:12; 6:32; 8:35-38) and to replace by his own person both Jewish feasts and Jewish institutions (2:1-11, 19-22; 6:32-41; 7:37-39). What we learn, rather, is that the significance of Jesus cannot be contained in such disputes, and that the good news is for all times and places. Near the end of the Gospel of John we find a purpose statement: "Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name" (20:30-31). Those first disciples in whose presence Jesus performed signs are thus distinguished from those who would come later and who did not witness his earthly ministry. John is clear. Even if these later disciples do not witness the ministry of Jesus firsthand, they do have the Gospel and, just as Jesus' significance cannot be relegated to the annals of ist-century Palestine, so their faith and discipleship cannot be dismissed as second rate.
Apostles gathered at the Last Supper; fresco from rock-carved church at Goreme, Turkey. (©Gilles Mermet/Art Resource, NY)
Plainly, the New Testament Gospels orient us to the significance of Jesus' life in different ways, but all of them situate him squarely within the purpose of God and present Jesus as the fulfillment both of Israel's hopes and of God's plan to bring salvation.
Thus far, we have discussed the Gospel of Luke alongside the books of Matthew, Mark, and John. This is justifiable in that, for the New Testament, these four have served as "the fourfold Gospel canon" Indeed, together these four books comprised one of the first collections of Christian literature that circulated in the early church. Its particular relation to the Acts of the Apostles nonetheless gives to the Gospel of Luke a special character apart from the other Gospels.
At the onset of Acts we read, "In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen" (Acts 1:1-2). This provides an obvious bridge back to the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, which likewise contains a dedication to Theophilus (Luke 1:1-4). If Matthew, Mark, and John are most reminiscent of the traditions of biography in Israel and in Roman antiquity, Luke, now bundled together with Acts, is most related to traditions of history-writing, or historiography, in ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. As history-writing, the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, or Luke-Acts, would have functioned above all to tie the story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection into the story of the early church, and both into the ancient and eternal story of the outworking of God's purpose in and through people who have oriented their lives radically in relation to him. Read together, Luke and Acts are focused on the invitation to participate faithfully as God's people in God's redemptive purpose.
If Luke and Acts are two parts of the same story, why are they separated in the New Testament? On the one hand, this is because of the striking similarity among the Gospels, and especially among the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Other reasons have to do with the particular role of Acts in the New Testament. Located between the Gospels and the collections of letters in the New Testament, the book of Acts serves two immediate functions. First, it provides a bridge from Jesus to church, showing how the movement initiated by and surrounding Jesus in Palestine developed into communities of believers throughout the Roman Empire. This "bridge" supports the spread of the good news to the Gentiles throughout the world. Second, the chronology of Acts provides an outline on which to hang the people, places, and events of the New Testament era. Without Luke's historical narrative, we would know little of the chronology and progression of the Pauline mission, and we would grasp less fully the role of Peter the apostle and James the brother of Jesus in the earliest days of the Christian movement.
JOEL B. GREEN