Log In
Or create an account ->
Imperial Library
Home
About
News
Upload
Forum
Help
Login/SignUp
Index
Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels
Introduction
1. For Whom Were Gospels Written?
2. The Holy Internet: Communication Between Churches in the First Christian Generation
3. Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels
4. About People, by People, for People: Gospel Genre and Audiences
5. John for Readers of Mark
6. Can We Identify the Gospel Audiences?
7. Toward a Literal Reading of the Gospels
Contributors
by Richard Bauckham at the British New Testament Conference in Bangor (Wales) in September 1995.1
The title of this chapter could be analyzed into two distinct questions, only one of which it will a
the answer given by the scholarly consensus: that all Gospels were intended to reach, in the first p
The point is not, of course, that this question is not relevant to the concerns of current or recent
the community for which, it is assumed, each Gospel was written. Almost all contemporary writing abo
no doubt a teacher in a particular church, wrote his Gospel for that particular church, with its p
The view that each evangelist wrote for his own community is an old view in British scholarship, goi
conclusion.?
At the same time as Swete, Alfred Plummer in his International Critical Commentary on Luke (first ed
a religious classic, if not yet an inspired scripture, before the four were combined into a collecti
Mark in particular survived the competition from Matthew and Luke because of the prestige it had a
which need not detain us because the argument is rarely found today, but we should note that, if i
As he puts it, "The Gospels were written in and for different churches"12
context in which Matthew originated still discuss. A chapter on "The Gospel and Judaism" covers the
Kilpatrick's book is the direct ancestor of the way recent major commentaries on the Gospels - for e
Fitzmyer on Luke15
reading the Gospel as addressing the particular needs and concerns of the community. Though this pot
What was the Sitz im Leben from which and for which Mark's gospel was written? To answer that questi
special case of the Fourth Gospel, Johannine scholarship pursued its own peculiar path, increasingly
since it was the source of that obsession with the Johannine community that has dominated most sub
community behind the Gospel. Characters and events in the Gospel story are taken to represent groups
The second characteristic of work in this tradition is the increasingly sophisticated use of social-
(1987),22
while Matthew has recently become a major focus, with Andrew Overman's Matthew's Gospel and Format
and several essays in the multi-authored volume Social History of the Matthean Community (1991).24
for example, J. Louis Martyn's classic argument that chapter 9 of the Fourth Gospel should be read,
Does this constitute evidence that the Gospel addresses the specific situation of the evangelist's
possible,27
implied audience.28
The first stage of the argument consists in contrasting Gospels and Pauline epistles.29
The first is the question of genre. It is a special quality of the letter genre that it enables a wr
Of course, the genre of the Gospels is debated, but recent discus- sion31
The obvious function of writing was its capacity to communicate widely with readers unable to be pre
Christian author who wrote the first Gospel. Jewish religious literature in Greek, wherever it might
Why should Mark, if Mark was the first evangelist, have written merely for the few hundred people,
early Christian community as a self-contained, self-sufficient, introverted group, having little con
Overman discusses the Matthean community's theological and social self-understanding as though the
The first thing this information tells us is that mobility and communication in the first-century Ro
Unprecedentedly good roads and unprecedentedly safe travel by both land and sea made the Mediterra
So the context in which the early Christian movement developed was not conducive to parochialism; qu
Third, we should note that most of the Christian leaders of whom we know in the New Testament period
← Prev
Back
Next →
← Prev
Back
Next →