Note: asterisked (*) terms appear in the glossary.
Genre. Genre means the kind of writing a work is, whether poetry, *prophecy, bomb threat, letter, etc. Today it is easy to identify the genre of the Gospels, because four of them are grouped together at the beginning of the *New Testament. But when each Gospel was written, people would have read it as belonging to some genre or genres they already knew. Genre is important because our expectation of the kind of writing something is will influence how we read it (e.g., we take poetry less literally than prose).
The Genre of the Gospels. Some classifications of the Gospels have not stood the test of time. Some earlier scholars focused on elite classical Greek literature thought that the Gospels looked like common people’s literature instead of “high” literature. But subsequent studies have shown that literature ranged widely between folk and high literature, and folk literature often imitated high literature. Even our Gospels range from Mark’s rough style to Luke’s sometimes fairly sophisticated style.
By contrast, more recent studies have compared the Gospels with the sources they would have most resembled for ancient readers. Thus the majority of recent scholars have come to classify the Gospels as ancient biography, which resembles the way that the church has historically treated them. Ancient biographies did not necessarily emphasize the same features that modern biographies do, but they were still a form of historical writing.
How historically reliable were ancient biographies? There was a range of reliability, but a major factor in this range was the chronological distance between the writer and the writer’s subject. Some biographers, like *Plutarch and *Livy, certainly spiced up their *narratives, but especially when writing about characters who lived centuries earlier. Writers sometimes openly admitted the difficulty of distinguishing legend from fact when they wrote about reported events centuries earlier. Other authors, like *Tacitus (in the Agricola) and *Suetonius, writing about events of the past century and a half, kept very close to their sources.
When writing about subjects in the past generation, as (for example) the Gospel of Mark does, biographers were able to depend on large amounts of information. Thus, for example, Tacitus, Suetonius and Plutarch in the early second century write about the short-lived emperor Otho half a century earlier. When we compare them, we find that their material overlaps in very considerable detail. Because they follow their sources so closely where we can test them, we may assume that they generally follow them no less closely where other sources are no longer available to us. The Gospels supply much historical information about Jesus.
Biography was a largely Greek and Roman category, but it influenced other writers. Jewish writers could model their biographies after *Old Testament biographical narratives, which everyone in their day took to be reliable. Only Jewish writers composing in Greek created conventional biographies, however, and these often followed Greek forms. *Josephus spiced up his autobiography in good Greek rhetorical style but still expected his readers to take his account seriously, and the substance of his account is mostly reliable. But even works such as *Jubilees, with its haggadic expansions (often to explain details), deletions (often to whitewash heroes) and so forth, follow the basic outline of their sources at most points; the early Jewish *Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities does so even more. Jewish novels about biblical characters also flourished, but not about characters of recent history and not with detailed dependence on sources. Luke wrote like a popular Greco-Roman historian, and none of the Gospels fits the haggadic *midrash pattern.
Ancient Historiography. Both Jewish and Gentile writers could take some liberties in how they recounted their narratives, but biographies about recent characters were supposed to be grounded in facts. Many scholars view ancient biography as a specialized form of ancient historiography. Whenever possible, historians consulted eyewitnesses or those who knew them. While historians and novelists both used some similar storytelling (or in elite circles, rhetorical) techniques, ancient writers (from *Aristotle to Pliny and *Lucian) insisted that history must deal in facts and distinguished it from novels.
Like many historians, journalists and others today, ancient historians had particular themes they wanted to emphasize. History was full of meaning and was to be written in a way that brought out its meaning. Far more often than novelists, historians (and still more clearly biographers) wrote with clear moral, political or theological agendas and expected readers to draw lessons from their works. Most historians and biographers also sought to recount their narratives in a lively and entertaining way. At the same time, however, historians by definition sought to follow the sense of their sources, to be as accurate as possible. Even those who took the most freedom followed the basic substance of history; and, where they had inadequate sources, they aimed for verisimilitude.
Are the Gospels Accurate? On the continuum between more and less careful biographers, the writers of the Gospels are among the most careful. When we test how Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, it is clear that they followed their sources carefully. Writing for ancient readers, they naturally followed the literary conventions of their day. But the first Gospels were written when eyewitnesses were still in positions of authority in the church and oral tradition could be checked, and this supports a higher degree of reliability than found in biographies of much earlier persons; biographies of roughly contemporary characters were normally far more accurate than those concerning heroes of the distant past. See further comment on Luke 1:1-4.
Sayings. Students carefully learned sayings of their teachers, often taking notes to help them memorize. Extraordinary feats of ancient memory indicate the extent to which memory could be accurate in ancient Mediterranean society, where memorization pervaded education from the elementary level. At a more advanced level, *disciples ordinarily learned their teachers’ sayings well, often extensively. Sometimes they even collaborated with other former students to collect the teachings. Ancient schools often preserved the teachings of schools’ founders, making them “canonical” for what the school would teach new adherents. (In one graphic but perhaps fictitious ancient example, *Pythagorean students had to repeat back their teacher’s lectures from the previous day before getting out of bed in the morning. But disciples of other teachers were also rigorous in preserving their masters’ teachings.)
We should expect no less for Jesus’ disciples than for these other ancient students; to expect less of Jesus’ disciples is simply to assume skepticism against our best evidence about how disciples learned. In their own instruction during years and decades that followed, the disciples would repeat the teachings of Jesus that they remembered, hence would know these selected teachings far better than disciples of other teachers who did not become teachers themselves.
None of this means that anyone expected the sayings to appear in sequence. The sayings were sometimes passed on with the stories in which they occurred, and at other times they were passed on as isolated proverbs (sayings of the wise); later students in rhetorical schools could also transplant sayings to other appropriate stories about the same teacher. Taking matters further, some critics warn that sayings of one teacher were also sometimes modified or transferred to another teacher after much time had elapsed. This observation is less relevant for the Gospels, however, since they focus on only a single founder and chief teacher for the movement. Moreover, they were written in the first two generations, when Jesus’ teachings were still in the memories of the writers’ sources, making radical changes unlikely.
Just as we do not expect the sayings to appear in sequence, we do not expect them to be verbatim (impossible for Jesus’ *Aramaic sayings anyway, since the Gospels are written in Greek). Jesus’ words sometimes differ slightly from Gospel to Gospel. We expect such differences, because paraphrasing sayings in one’s own words was a standard school exercise and a common writing technique in ancient times. (Those who conclude that different Gospel writers contradict each other because they quote Jesus differently are thus not paying attention to how works were written in antiquity.)
At the same time, a particular style and rhythm and sometimes Aramaic expressions (e.g., “*Son of Man”) come through Jesus’ sayings, indicating that the Gospel writers did not always paraphrase him, even in translation from Aramaic to Greek. (Jesus probably sometimes spoke Greek as well as Aramaic, but most scholars believe that he would have addressed Galilean crowds especially in Aramaic. Most Galileans would have been bilingual; some Jewish schools conducted advanced discussions even in Hebrew.)
Jesus used many of the Palestinian Jewish teaching techniques of his day, such as *parables and *hyperbole (rhetorical exaggeration), to make his points graphically. To grasp them the way his first hearers grasped them, his sayings must be read in this light and then understood in the context of the whole of his teachings. For example, readers must adequately recognize both loyalty to parents (Mk 7:9-13) and the greater demands of the *kingdom (Mk 10:29-30). Parables must also be read the way Jesus’ Jewish hearers would have understood them. They were illustrations meant to convey truth, but some of the details of most parables are included simply to make the story work, so we should be careful not to read too much into such details.
Literary Techniques. Greek literary conventions permeated most Jewish literature written in the Greek language, and were applied both to historical books (such as biographies like the Gospels) and novels alike. Writers of topical biography had complete freedom to rearrange their sources, so it should not surprise us that Matthew and Mark often have events in Jesus’ ministry in different order.
Although Jesus, like other Jewish teachers, surely repeated the same sayings on separate occasions, some of his sayings probably occur in different places in the Gospels simply because the writers were exercising the freedom ancient biographers had to rearrange their material. This freedom enabled the Gospel writers, like preachers today, to preach Jesus as well as report about him, while still recounting his words and deeds accurately. Ancient Christians already knew, of course, that the Gospels (like the majority of ancient biographies) were not in chronological order, as the early Christian teacher Papias plainly remarked about Mark.
Other Gospels? By the time that Luke wrote his Gospel, other works about Jesus were in circulation (Luke 1:1) this undoubtedly includes Mark. Luke, Matthew and possibly Mark also used material they shared in common, and the common sequence at points suggests at least one written source, which many scholars call “Q.” Based on Papias, some scholars believe this source reflects early notes by Matthew (to which Mark’s narrative was added in forming our current Matthew’s Gospel). These studies are valuable. The only first-century Gospels that survived, however, are the four that the church ultimately preserved as Scripture (and any material from other sources preserved in them). Later writers composed apocryphal Gospels, but instead of reflecting significant information about the Jesus who lived in first-century Galilee they fit the form of novels and derive from their heyday in the late second and third centuries. Later *Gnostics composed collections of sayings attributed to Jesus, but these are not really “Gospels” in the traditional sense of narratives about Jesus like the first-century Gospels. The earliest of these might date to 120 years after Jesus’ public ministry; most belong to the late second century or later.
How to Read the Gospels. Ancient biographies were meant to be read the whole way through rather than jumping from a passage in one book to a passage in another. Each of the four Gospels was written separately to different readers and was meant to be read on its own terms before the reader moved to a different Gospel. We should therefore work through each Gospel, following the flow of that Gospel’s thought.
Ancient biographies often had morals to their stories and set forth the characters as positive or negative examples. Old Testament stories about men and women of God taught morals about faith and how to serve God. The reader is therefore meant to ask at the end of each Gospel story, What is the moral of this story? How does this story help me relate to Jesus better? What does it teach me about the character of the Lord I serve?
Sayings were often passed down as proverbs, which are general principles or graphic ways of making a point; other times they appear in the context of stories where they are applied in a specific way.
Although we speak of “reading” the Gospels, most people in antiquity would have “heard” them. Many people could not read, and few people had economic resources to obtain their own copies of books. Instead, a person who could read would read the Gospels to gathered assemblies of believers, and most believers would “hear” the Gospels. In that sense we should speak of them as “audiences” rather than “readers.” Each Gospel writer may have had a special target audience in mind, but probably most hoped for a wider audience as well. In antiquity, books that succeeded well in public readings came to circulate more widely as more people had copies made.
Applying the Gospels Today. When we read narratives, or stories, in the Bible, we should look for the moral or morals of the story that the author wished to emphasize for his audience. We should try to put ourselves in the place of ancient hearers and listen to the words of Jesus as if we were hearing them for the first time from his own mouth. We should allow Jesus’ graphic language to strike us the way it would have struck the first hearers. The Gospels recorded Jesus’ sayings to apply them to other generations besides Jesus’ own (the writers wrote them down for their own generation, after Jesus had ascended to heaven), expecting their hearers to apply them to their own situations. But before we can understand how Jesus’ teachings apply to our situations today, we must understand what he actually said in first-century Palestine and what he meant.
The Gospels in This Commentary. Matthew, Mark and Luke overlap significantly (see “*Synoptic Gospels” in the glossary), and in order to avoid repetition I have sometimes included more background under one of the Gospels than another one. Because readers will learn the most by working their way through one Gospel at a time, however, I have provided sufficient background for interpretation for each of the three Gospels. Mark was meant to be read quickly, like a tract, whereas Matthew was meant to be studied more, perhaps as a training manual; my comments on Matthew are thus often more detailed, although Matthew and Luke receive less attention where they use Mark. When Matthew and Luke overlap, the commentary is generally more detailed on Matthew. I have treated John independently, because the Fourth Gospel overlaps with the others considerably less than they overlap with one another.
Bibliography. See especially David E. Aune, The New Testament in Its Literary Environment, LEC 8 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987); Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, SNTSMS 70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; 2nd ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004); Joel B. Green, Jeannine K. Brown and Nicholas Perrin, eds., Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013); for a collection of background sources, see Darrell L. Bock and Gregory J. Herrick, eds., Jesus in Context: Background Readings for Gospel Study (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005).
For historical Jesus research, see (among others) Craig S. Keener’s works: The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); “Otho: A Targeted Comparison of Suetonius’ Biography and Tacitus’ History, with implications for the Gospels’ Historical Reliability,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 21, no. 3 (2011): 331-55; “Assumptions in Historical Jesus Research: Using Ancient Biographies and Disciples’ Traditioning as a Control,” Journal for the Study for the Historical Jesus 9, no. 1 (2011): 26-58; and Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011). For others’ works, see, for example, Dale C. Allison Jr., Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010); Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006); James H. Charlesworth, Jesus Within Judaism: New Light from Exciting Archaeological Discoveries (New York: Doubleday, 1988); James D. G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005); Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007); E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993); Gerd Theissen, The Gospels in Context: Social and Political History in the Synoptic Tradition, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991); Ben Witherington III, The Christology of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990); especially extensively, Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998); John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale, 1994–); Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter, eds., Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 4 vols. (Boston: Brill, 2010).
On Jesus’ teachings, see, e.g., Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990); T. W. Manson, The Sayings of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979); Harvey K. McArthur and Robert M. Johnston, They Also Taught in Parables (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990); Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008); Robert H. Stein, The Method and Message of Jesus’ Teachings (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978). On Jesus’s miracles in an ancient framework, one recent helpful work (focused especially on Mark) is Wendy J. Cotter, The Christ of the Miracle Stories: Portrait Through Encounter (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010); on the passion narratives, see Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah—from Gethsemane to Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1994); on the resurrection narratives, see Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010); N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).