The Gospels as A Developing Tradition
Understanding Nonliteralism Part I
Last week, in my article It’s Time I was Straight With You I wrote about how I now identify as a nonliteralist and nonexclusivist Christian. To help understand practically what it looks like to view the Bible as a nonliteralist, I will spend the next five weeks walking through how I came to understand the gospels this way.
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An essential idea around understanding the Bible nonliterally is the concept of developing tradition. Seeing the Bible and, in particular, the gospels as a developing tradition means at least five things:
Defining a Developing Tradition
The gospel narratives develop and grow over time. For context, if we break the first-century c.e. into thirds chronologically, this is how our timeline would look:
First-third (1-34 c.e) is the life and ministry of Jesus.
Second-third (35-70 c.e.) is the oral tradition about the life and ministry of Jesus.
Final-third (71-100 c.e.) is the written tradition of the gospels.
During the second and third periods, we see how the gospels were developed and grew into the narratives we now possess.
- The gospels contain history and symbols. This is significant because some pieces of the gospels go back to Jesus. Jesus most likely took these actions, such as performing healings, and words Jesus actually said, such as parables and aphorisms. At the same time, the gospels also include symbolic narratives designed with the language of myth and metaphor to teach about the meaning of Jesus in the life of the early Christian communities.
- Although the gospels contain some historical material, they were not written primarily as historical reports. Gospel means good news, explicitly sharing good news of a military victory. The messenger of this good news is known as an evangelist, which is what the authors of our gospels are. As evangelists, the authors are not historians or journalists; therefore, we shouldn’t treat the gospels as history reports but as an intentional message of good news.
- The Gospels are human products made by early Christian communities for those communities. Each gospel author wrote from within the context of a specific community. They also wrote their Gospel with that community in mind when deciding how to communicate this good news.
- Within the gospels are apocalyptic expectations. There are voices within the gospels and throughout the New Testament that possess an expectation of a second coming.
A Moment to Consider Josephus
The gospels provide us, by far, the most robust description of the life of Jesus. However, there are a few non-Christian historians from the first century who do briefly touch on Jesus. There is Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius, and most notably Flavius Josephus.
Of the four historians, three are Romans, while Josephus is Jewish he was notably very loyal to Rome. Furthermore, the consensus among scholars is that Josephus is the earliest non-Christian historian to mention Jesus. As such, it is worth quoting what Josephus says about Jesus in full:
“Now, there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawul to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works-a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; (64) and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.” (Josephus’ Description of Jesus)
From Josephus, we learn the following about Jesus:
- Jesus was a wisdom teacher
- A doer of wonderful works who attracted a following
- He created a stir for both Jewish and Roman authorities, who worked together to execute him
- Those who loved him did not forsake him
- The movement still existed during the time of Josephus
What’s essential when it comes to understanding how Jesus grows through a developing tradition is even within our non-Christian historical references, we know Jesus was a wisdom teacher, performed wonderful works, was executed, and his followers claimed to experience Jesus after his execution still.
The Origin of the Gospels
Finally, we must have a working understanding of where our gospels come from. To start, we don’t know who wrote each Gospel. We get the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from the early Christian tradition, but none of the gospels have something akin to a signature saying, “I, Mark, wrote this gospel.”
At the outset, there is no consensus by historians and scholars regarding who wrote each Gospel and when each Gospel was written. I will share the predominant mainline understanding and the one to which I also hold. I’m not going to dive into who I think wrote which Gospel, but I will focus on when I believe each Gospel was written and its implications.
According to my view, I believe Q is the first Gospel. I won’t go into detail about Q, but here’s a link to learn more. Essentially, Q is a book of approximately 200 sayings of Jesus written in the early 50s. There are no narratives of Jesus in Q, miracles, birth, death, or resurrection.
Mark is the second Gospel, written at approximately 70 A.D. After Mark comes Matthew and Luke, about ten years apart, around the year 90 A.D. Mark, Matthew, and Luke are called synoptic gospels. They are called synoptic because 90% of Mark is in Matthew and Luke.
Fun fact: So much of Mark is in Matthew and Luke that we can virtually recreate the book of Mark just from what we have in Matthew and Luke.
The implications of Matthew and Luke relying on and changing Mark is a smoking gun showing us how the gospels were shaped as oral traditions, reshaped as written traditions, and then shaped again by each gospel author to fit their emphasis. The preeminent Jesus Scholar John Dominic Crossan goes so far as to say:
“We don’t have three different gospels, we have one gospel, Mark, told in three different ways.”
Finally, John is altogether different from the Synoptics. Where Jesus mainly speaks in parables and aphorisms in the synoptics, he teaches in long discourses in John. In Mark, Jesus doesn’t speak of himself in the exalted language (e.g. I am the way, the truth, and the life), while in John, he does regularly. In Mark, Jesus’ message is about the Kingdom of God, in John, it’s mainly about himself. The differences between John and the Synoptics are so great that the early church father Clement of Alexandria called John the “spiritual gospel.” John proves most valuable to contemporary Christians by showing us what Jesus had become to the early Christian community.
When we take everything discussed above, we get a composite of how the story of Jesus was preserved through those who experienced him in his ministry, to the oral tradition about him, and finally to the written tradition that came about at the end of the first century. We know the oral and written traditions were developed and grown by the early Christian communities and retold in ways that met the needs of each community. We have a clear starting place on the historical Jesus by seeing how non-Christian historians, specifically Josephus, wrote about him. Finally, we can see tangibly how early Christians have left bread crumbs within the gospels on how Jesus developed and grew through the retelling of Jesus’ story in each Gospel.
Starting with my next article, we’ll look at four stories in Jesus’ life where we can trace how the historical Jesus developed and grew into Jesus Christ.
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