THE THREE STAGES OF THE GOSPELS
Let us look briefly at how the Gospels came to be.
1. There is a gap between the life and ministry of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels:
About 30 years for Mark, 40 years for Matthew and Luke, maybe 50 years for John.
2. During this time, the teaching of Jesus, stories of his life, reflections upon the meaning of his life, death and resurrection, would have been passed on orally, by word of mouth.
3. The culture of the day would have been used to oral teaching. Oral teaching by its nature is flexible, adaptable to the needs of the audience. Once written, what is written is fixed for ever.
4. The ministry of Jesus was mainly rural, in aramaic speaking and largely Jewish Galilee. Jesus could well have said the same thing, told the same story, at different times and different places. Those who had followed Jesus since his Baptism would have had a wealth of memories.
5. The ministry of the early Church and of the evangelists would have been in the Greek speaking and Greek (Hellenistic) culture cities of the eastern Roman Empire.
6. The creativity of the early Church which covers the gap between Jesus and the Gospels leads us to see a three stage development behind the Gospels:
The Life and Ministry of Jesus
The ministry of Jesus was entirely oral. We have no contemporary written records about Jesus
The Life and Ministry of the early Church
At this stage, teaching was mostly oral but it is possible there were some written collections of the teaching of Jesus as well. These have not survived.
The Life and Ministry of the Evangelist and his community.
This is the written Gospel we now have.
7. The third stage is a reminder that the Gospels would have been written for a specific Christian community with specific needs, presenting Jesus as the one who addresses those needs. “Reading between the lines” of the Gospel can give us some clues as to the nature of the community to which the gospel is addressed.
8. Each Gospel therefore gives us a different presentation, portrait, of Jesus and what it means to be his disciple. Traditionally, the similarity of the Gospels has been stressed (harmonisation), especially of Matthew, Mark and Luke, the Synoptic (“with one eye”) Gospels. Today we are better able to follow the differences between the Gospels and ours must be the gain. That is the aim of this website.
9. All four Gospels are anonymous works. The ascription to apostolic authors came later. The four had canonical status by about 200 AD.