Welcome to this seminar on the gospels.  In this first section we want to deal with some general questions about these incredibly important books of the Bible.  First of all, can anyone tell me what that term “gospel” means?  The gospel is good news.  Not just any old good news, though.  These four different accounts are specifically the good news of Jesus Christ.  Take a look with me at the first four verses of Luke’s gospel, his good news. 

            So the four gospels are essentially four different accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.  The first question we have to answer, though, is why were they written, and why these four?  At that time not everything was written down like we do today.  It’s amazing the stuff that gets written down today, just because it’s so easy.  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard of some document surfacing from the congressional record or out of politician’s records of his actions in office and I think “what are they writing that down for?  Didn’t they know it could just get them in trouble?  What are they thinking?!?”  But that’s just what we do. 

            At the time the gospels were written, though, it wasn’t nearly as easy and they relied much more heavily on word of mouth.  But they were very good at remembering things that they passed on.  They turned them into stories, or short sayings, or quotes or other kinds of things that were easy to memorize and recount to someone else.  You can see that in the gospels.  The sayings of Jesus and the stories of his life appear in the different gospels in slightly different ways or even at different times in the story.  That’s because of the primary reason these stories of Jesus were written:  To bring people to faith.  Take a look at John 20:30-31 with me.  That about sums up the reason for these stories.  The fact is that this good news of Jesus Christ, this gospel message, was discovered by a lot of people to be the critical event in the history of the world.  With this story of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ life all of a sudden makes sense and people could live with real purpose again.  It really was the good news!  They knew what you need to know:  that if you don’t understand the message that is in these books, you’ll miss out on the very meaning and purpose of your existence.  

            The problem was that these books weren’t written until about 30 years after the death of Christ.  By that time this good news had become contagious and was spreading so fast that it just simply couldn’t be done just by talking.  They needed a written record that they could send around and that people could read for themselves.  They also needed something they could use to instruct all of these thousands of new believers all over the Roman Empire in the basics of the faith.  As we know today from some of the cults, it’s really easy to distort just a part of the message and lose the whole power of it.  John 1:1 is just one example.  When John writes about the word of God here he’s talking about Jesus.  The Jehovah’s witnesses take that verse and re-translate it in their Bible to read that the Word was a god, rather than that the Word was God.  Just a little change like that can be part of the foundation for a false religion that is still based on the Bible, but loses the very part of it that leads to salvation.  The same kind of thing was no doubt beginning to happen in the first century, and the church needed good records of the real story. 

            The Gospels are titled Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  Two of these, Matthew and John, were disciples of Christ.  Mark was a close associate of the disciple Peter and the material in his gospel comes directly from him. Luke was a very learned and scholarly sort, in fact he was a physician, who carefully researched information from a variety of people who were witnesses of all of the events that he records.  The important thing to note is that all of the gospels are based on eyewitness accounts.  They go back to the people that were part of the original events and they were very concerned about the accurate transmission of those events, for the reasons that we talked about.  This was the good news that brought salvation and they had to get it right!

            One of the questions we have to answer is whether we can trust these documents as we currently have them as being accurate.  First of all, we may as well realize that none of the original manuscripts have survived.  What we have is copies of the originals,  either whole or in part.  The question scholars have to ask when that is the case, is how many copies do we have, how close are they to the original, and how many differences are there between them?  In the case of the New Testament, there exist more than 5,300 Greek manuscripts that date back to within 100 years or so of the originals.  If you include the Latin translation and other portions that have survived, then there are more than 24,000 copies or portions of the New Testament in existence today.  That might seem like a long time, but if you compare it to other ancient documents that we accept as having been reliably transmitted, it really doesn’t amount to much.  Take Homer’s Iliad, for example: 

Work               When Written               Earliest copy                 Time Span        # of Copies

Iliad                  900 BC                        400 BC                        500 yrs.            643

New Testament  40-100 AD                125 AD                        25 yrs.              Over 24,000

            It has been said that if we want to deny the life of Christ because of a lack of written evidence, we would have to do the same with Julius Caesar and many other famous men of history. 

            There is also the issue of some variances in the original manuscripts.  There are some, but they comprise less than 5% of the total New Testament.  The important thing to remember is that they are all relatively minor spelling and grammatical errors and that not a single one of them has any effect whatsoever on the meaning or message of the text.

            The other important thing to remember is this:  God had a hand in creating these and preserving them for us.  The story of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ is at the very heart of God’s plan to redeem humanity.  It is at the very center of Human history, not just in terms of time but importance.  The whole Old Testament leads up to the story found in these gospels and finds its fulfillment in them.  The rest of the New Testament that teaches us about the church and how to live within it, and the end of the story of the redemption of mankind in Revelation all proceed from gospels.  Absolutely everything revolves around the message in these four books.  Without it the Bible makes no sense and neither does life itself.  So its just logical for us to believe that God wouldn’t make a mistake and allow the wrong stuff to be written down and preserved in our Bible about something that important. 

Historical Background          

            In order to really get the message of the gospels, some things about the historical background that led up to their being written really have to be understood. 

            The story in the gospels took place in the land of Palestine. This was the land that God had promised to Abraham in Genesis and that the people of Israel had occupied after the Exodus from Egypt.  Not only are the gospels the central story in human history, but the land of Palestine is the central region in human history.  This is where God has chosen to effect his great plan of salvation, including the life, death and resurrection of his Son. 

            It is also a very strategic location for human history in general.  It is right in the middle of the area where Human history began, but it is also at a critical place geographically. For the first few thousand years of human history all of the major nations existed surrounding Palestine.  So it served as a kind of hub for human activity.  All roads led through Palestine, so to speak.  So you can see that this is a logical area for God to choose to get the plan of salvation out to the whole world.

            The timing was also perfect because of a couple of important events that created a perfect environment for the spread of the gospel.  One of those was that in the fourth century BC a guy that you may have heard of by the name of Alexander the Great moved in and pretty much conquered the entire area around the Mediterranean Sea.  What this meant was that by Jesus’ time the entire area had a common language and culture.  Prior to this time, if anything like the gospel story had happened it would have had to stay local and maybe never would have spread to the whole world like it has.

            After Alexander came the Romans, the greatest and longest lasting empire up to that point.  With the establishment of that empire came two critical elements needed to make the story of Jesus something that would change the world:  social structure and ease of travel.  The system of laws that the Roman empire set up created what could have been the most stable and far-reaching society ever.  The Roman law created a society that had the stability required for a message like the gospel to move literally throughout the known civilized world.  You can find examples of how important it was when you read through the book of Acts and the letters of Paul and see how often being a Roman citizen with the privileges that attached to that literally saved his life so that he could go on and continue preaching the gospel.   

            The other major contribution to God’s plan that the Roman empire made was the system of roads they created.  The entire Mediterranean region was inter-connected by the paved roads that the Romans created, making travel immensely easier than it had ever been before.  The reason for that was to enable commerce and control of their subjects, but the real benefit is that it allowed this good news of Jesus Christ to travel as rapidly as it did.  It probably isn’t an exaggeration to say that without them it would have taken so long to take the message to the world that it either would have died out or been hopelessly altered during the time it took to get the message out to the far reaches of the empire.  It also underscores why it is we have the gospels themselves, since the gospel was spreading so quickly to places so far away, that they needed a written account to stand in for the physical presence of an apostle or other authoritative teacher.

            So a look at the history leading up to the time of Christ reveals in an amazing way the hand of God working through human events to make it possible for the life changing message of Jesus Christ to explode from Palestine and be taken to the whole world. 

            Another important piece of background to the gospels that you need to understand in order to read them right is the state of the Jewish religion at the time. The Jewish people had mostly been exiled to Babylon about 6 centuries beforehand, but had managed to get back to Palestine around 500 to 450 BC.  Between that time and the gospels is a great big gap in the Bible of about 400 years, called the inter-testamental period.  As far as the Jews were concerned, God had pretty much stopped talking to them.  During that time some important events happened.

            One is that the Jews had segmented into various groups within themselves. 

            The Pharisees.  This term means “separated ones” which describes their attitudes pretty well.  They considered themselves more righteous than anyone else and were extremely legalistic.  In other words, they had lots of rules and regulations that they liked to put other people down for not keeping, but really weren’t very good at it themselves.  That’s why Jesus is always calling them hypocrites.  Just one example would come from Luke 11:37,38 where a Pharisee hosts Jesus for a meal and is astonished to see that he ate without washing first.  The Pharisees were obsessed with washing before a meal, not so they could have clean hands to eat their food, but so they would be ceremonially clean.  In addition, the Old Testament divided all persons, places, and animals into the categories of clean and unclean.  Camels, badgers, swine, vultures, eagles, and winged insects- just to name a few- were considered unclean.  Clean objects could be contaminated if they were merely touched by a contaminated person or animal.  In the Mishnah (the written form of the oral tradition) 185 pages are devoted to laws of defilement and purity.  Another huge issue for them was the keeping of the Sabbath.  An amazing amount of rules and regulations in regards to what was and was not work on the Sabbath were created and watched over by the Pharisees.  Turn to John 9:6.  In the story of Jesus’ healing of the blind man, it’s easy for us to wonder why the heck Jesus would do something so bizarre as spitting on the ground to make mud to put on the blind man’s eyes.  Seems gross to us. But if we realize that in the oral tradition of the Pharisees spitting and making mud was one of the specific tasks prohibited on the Sabbath, it being too much like making pottery.  So Jesus was actually creating a powerful picture of what he thought of their rules, and what it really takes to heal people, and who is Lord of the Sabbath.

            The other important group was the Sadducees.  These were basically Jews who had political connections.  They didn’t believe in anything the Pharisees did, especially regarding the resurrection from the dead, which they didn’t believe in.  (they were “sad, you see).   This was their major beef with Jesus.  They were sworn enemies of the Pharisees, but Jesus was such a threat to both of them that these two parties actually banded together to get him crucified.  The Pharisees came up with the reasons for it and the Sadducees had the political connections to make it happen.

            Two other groups not in your notes are the Zealots and the Essenes.  The Essenes  were another legalistic group.  The most interesting group were the ones at a place called Qumran who saw it as their job to study and copy and preserve Scripture.  They are responsible for something called the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The Zealots were a bunch of radicals who wanted to bring the kingdom of God in any way possible, especially if it meant cutting the throat of a Roman.  One of Jesus disciples was a Zealot.  (Luke 6:15)

            Another important thing to understand about the Jewish religion of that time is regarding their Scriptures.  At the heart of it is the Torah, which is basically the Old Testament that we know today.  Jesus regarded this as totally authoritative and the authentic word of God.  In addition to that, however, there was something called the oral tradition, which was the commentary that various Rabbis had made on the Torah.  This eventually became known as the Talmud when it was written down, but at that time was still preserved in oral form. Nevertheless, by Jesus’ day, these were regarded by many Jews as just as authoritative as the Old Testament and a lot of Jesus’ teaching against how the Pharisees use the Scripture is directed at their use of these traditions.

            One of the important things to understand about the Jews of that time was their attitude toward non-Jews, which was basically to stay separate. As far as the Jews were concerned, they were the chosen people of God as an ethnic race.  Anyone else was something called a gentile, which basically referred to anyone but an ethnic Jew.  A good Jew would have as little as possible to do with a gentile.  But in the life and ministry of Jesus, gentiles show up all over the place which is constantly getting him in trouble with the Jews.  A good example of this is the problem with Samaria.  This was a region settled by people who were the descendents of mixed marriages between Gentiles and Jews.  To a good Jew, this was the ultimate sin and basically meant that you had messed up the pure blood line of God’s chosen people.  When Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10, Matt. 22, Mark 12) he made the Samaritan out to be the hero of the story rather than the two good Jews who walked by the wounded man on the road, that infuriated the Jews who were listening to him to the point that they actually tried to kill him.

            Another critical thing to the Jews was the temple. This was a huge, beautiful structure in Jerusalem that the Jews pointed to as evidence of God’s involvement in their life and destiny.  The story of the cleansing of the temple really ticked the Jewish rulers off and pretty much is the beginning of the end for Jesus in terms of starting the process that got him crucified.  Jesus prophesied the destruction of the temple which in fact occurred in 70 AD, an event that pretty much marks the end of a unified Jewish religion as it had been known up to that point.  The point is that Jesus said about himself that he is the temple and that his coming is the mark of God’s involvement in our life and destiny, so the physical temple is no longer needed.  The Jewish rulers of the time did not relate to that at all.

            Finally, something that has to be understood concerns their attitude toward the future:  that the coming of the messiah was imminent.  That was an assumption that was very common to that time.  At this time the Jews were basically an occupied country ruled by Rome, which really didn’t fit well at all with their belief that they were God’s chosen people and that this was the land God had given them.  The belief that the Messiah was going to come and deliver the Jewish people from their occupation by Rome was really at a fever pitch among Jews at that time.

            All of these factors:  The geographic location, the Greek language and culture, the Roman empire, and the state of the Jewish religion at the time made for an extremely interesting and explosive situation for Christ to show up into and make the claims that he did.  And they’re critical for understanding the Gospels.

Content Survey

            One of the big questions about the gospels is why there are four of them.  The fundamental reason is to give us four portraits of Jesus. It needs to be understood that there were four different authors writing to four different audiences, all for, different purposes so each one of the stories of Jesus was crafted to meet the needs of various groups and together they paint a wonderfully complete picture of Christ.  It is absolutely true that without any one of the gospels we would not have the full revelation of who Christ was and is, so in that we see once again the hand of God guiding the creation of Scripture to complete his revelation to us.  In order to take a quick look at the content of the gospels, we’re just going to touch briefly on the differences among the four and hopefully that will help enrich your study of them when you read through them.  We’ll call them the four portraits of Jesus.

            Portrait #1:  Matthew

            Matthew was written primarily for the Jewish community. The way the gospel of Matthew portrays Jesus is as Israel’s Messiah.  As you read through this gospel you’ll realize that everything about the life of Christ including his birth, life, teaching, death and resurrection are all seen by Matthew as the fulfillment of prophecy.  This gospel portrays vividly the fact that the life of Jesus Christ was the central event in human history, all the details of which were prophesied hundreds of years earlier.  It is clearly a gospel that was meant to prove to its audience, probably Jews, that Jesus truly was the Jewish Messiah.  Matthew’s use of the Jewish title “Son of David” is another indication of that. 

            What is curious about this gospel, given the emphasis on Christ as the Jewish Messiah, is his insistence that Jesus came also to the gentiles, or non-Jews.  The gentiles as people who benefit from Jesus’ ministry show up all over the place, including the Magi who are the first to acknowledge Jesus, a centurion who is praised for a greater faith than the Jews had (8:10), and a gentile woman whose faith is rewarded with the healing of her daughter (15:21-28).  Matthew even says that many gentiles will come from east and west to sit down the Jewish patriarchs of old, the heroes of the Jewish faith. (8:11-12)  The big deal, though, is the great commission at the end of the gospel that calls its readers to take the story to all nations, including gentiles.  Given that this was written to a Jewish audience, this was pretty wacky stuff for the time.

            The way to put these two together, the emphasis on Jesus as the Jewish messiah as well the emphasis on his ministry being for the gentiles, is to understand his emphasis on the church.  Matthew’s gospel is the only one that actually mentions the church by name in 16:17-19 and is the only gospel with specific instructions about how to behave in the church.  (18:15-17) 

To Matthew Jesus came to recreate the true people of God, which is the church.  The 12 disciples represent the 12 tribes of Israel re-made into a new people of God.  Jesus was shown in this gospel to be Israel’s true messiah, but since the original promise to Abraham was that his descendents would be a blessing to all the nations, he is also a savior to the entire world, not just Jews.  And the way that he fulfills that promise is by beginning the church which the gates of Hell will not prevail against.  We are the beneficiaries of that.  And it is our job to continue the mission put forth to take that story to the nations.

Portrait #2, Mark.

The author of this gospel is John Mark, a close associate of Peter’s.  The gospel of Mark is a collection of the recollections of Peter, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, and to a large degree appears to be written for the Roman community.  It’s almost funny as you read it how just about everyone and everything, even demons, understand who Jesus is except the Jewish religious leaders.  One of the primary reasons for Mark’s gospel was to show Jesus as really the Son of God, something that shows up all over the place. So this is a gospel that is focused on the supernatural Jesus.  It’s a fun gospel to read, because its almost all action, one event after the other showing how powerful Jesus was.  And yet this gospel also takes pains to portray Jesus as a servant.  10:45 says, even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.  A primary emphasis in this gospel, then is on discipleship and what that means for people who would follow Jesus.  What it means to Mark is that those who would follow Jesus are going to be those who have to be willing to take up their cross as he did.  The death of Christ is a central feature of this telling of the Jesus story.  10 Chapters are devoted to 30 years of Jesus’ life and then 6 just on the last week of that life.  As you read through the story of Jesus in the gospel of Mark, you are confronted with the reality that Jesus is the son of God who came as a servant and paid the ultimate price for the kingdom.  The implied question as a reader of that story is, are we willing to do the same?

Portrait #3: Luke

At the very beginning of the gospel he gives his purpose for writing it:  “Since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus.” (1:2)  So Luke is basically known as an historian, and he’s a very good one.  Thanks to the information in this gospel, we can place the life and ministry of Jesus historically with great accuracy.  He wrote from a Greek perspective and wrote basically for the non-Jew, or gentile community. One of the ways you see this is in the great pains he takes to explain a lot of the Jewish customs. The gospel of Luke is actually the first half of a two volume work that includes the book of Acts to give a big picture of the work of Christ, including the beginning of the church. But, like the rest of the gospel writers, he is more than just an historian.  He has some particular things that he emphasizes about what the work of Christ means.

First of all you can tell from the gospel of Luke that he is convinced that the work of Christ is for everyone.  You can see this right away when the angels announce that the peace of God is for all.  In chapter three Luke traces Jesus’ ancestry all the way back to Adam as opposed to the way Matthew did it, which was only back to Abraham, the father of the Jewish race.  That’s just one of many clues in this book that Luke wants his readers to know that what Jesus did during his life was for all mankind.

Luke is one of the gospels that definitely focuses on the fact that what Jesus did was to bring salvation.  His great statement of what his mission was in Chapter four when he quotes from the Old Testament book of Joel confirms that:  “The Spirit of the Lord is on me…to preach good news to the poor.. to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as something that results in salvation that is available for the whole world is made particularly clear in the gospel of Luke

Another aspect of Luke is his concern for those of lower status in society.  This included the poor, children, Samaritans, tax collectors, and especially women.  Jesus gave women a measure of dignity and respect that was virtually unknown in society at that time and Luke takes pains to record that.  Women were Jesus’ traveling companions and supporters (8:1-3), and the praise that he gives to Mary for desiring to know spiritual things and allowing her to sit at his feet as a learner would have been unheard of at that time.  If anybody ever accuses you of belonging to a faith that treats women as second class citizens, the gospel of Luke would be a good place to point them, especially if you understand the status they had in that day and the radical nature of the role they played in Jesus’ ministry.

Another major emphasis for Luke is the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit shows up all over the place in Luke, much more than any other gospel.  If you keep in mind the fact that this is the first volume which is connected to the book of Acts, which you could almost say is mostly about the Holy Spirit, you definitely have a gospel writer who helps us understand the important place that member of the trinity played in the life and ministry of Jesus.

            Portrait #4, John

            Finally, we have the gospel of John.  The traditional way of thinking of the audience of this gospel, is that it was written for the church. This is what has been called the spiritual gospel.  The purpose is specifically set forth in 20:31.  So it as theological gospel—about the things we need to believe.  It is also a gospel that is way different from the other three.  In fact, the other three gospels have come to be known as the “synoptic” gospels, which simply means “seeing together.”  They basically follow a similar pattern in reviewing the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, even though as we have seen, they all have distinctive messages and contributions to the big picture of who Jesus is and what his life was about.  Well, John is even more distinctive.  In fact, over 90% of the gospel of John has no parallel at all in any of the other three gospels.  But it makes a unique and indispensable contribution to the portraits of Jesus. 

            The primary way John views Jesus Christ is as God incarnate.  “God in a bod.” He puts a lot of emphasis on the humanity of Jesus while at the same time emphasizing his divine qualities. 

            The big contribution John makes is his emphasis on the need to believe.  Most of you probably have at least heard of the famous verse, John 3:16.  That’s a typical verse for John and with principle of having to have faith in Christ to gain salvation is basically what all of the other themes in John flow out of. 

            Another interesting aspect of John is his emphasis that all the benefits of the kingdom of God can be enjoyed now.  This is something scholars call “realized eschatology”, but really only means that John wants us to experience the joy of living in the kingdom here on earth, not just in the sweet by and by.  (John 10:10)

Four gospels, four portraits of Jesus that we can clearly see the hand of God in helping us get the entire picture that we need in order to discover who Jesus really is.  As a conclusion, let me offer just four summary statements for these four portraits of Jesus:

Matthew:  Behold your King.

Mark: Behold my servant.

Luke: Behold the man.

John: Behold your God.

Theological Themes  

            We have seen that the gospels are put in the form of four portraits of Jesus and some of the different ways that those portraits give us the complete picture that God wanted for us to have of this Jesus character.  The question that remains, though, is just what is the message that God wanted to get across by inspiring these four gospels to be written?

            One of the dominant themes of the gospels is the Kingdom of God.  Without a proper understanding of what that means, there really is no way you can really interpret the gospels correctly.

            Let me offer a definition of the kingdom of God that emerges from the gospels:  The rule and reign of God.  There are some important things that we need to understand about what the reign of God is, however.  First of all, it is both spiritual and physical.  Remember that the Jews had a certain expectation of what the kingdom would like when it came: The messiah raising up their nation to conquer and rule the world.  But the kingdom that Christ brought wasn’t quite like that. The kingdom that Christ brought is defined by people deciding to give Christ permission to reign over their lives. One of the most important verses about this is in Luke 17:21.  Our friends the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God would come, and he replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.”  The fact of the matter is that passage could also be translated “The kingdom of God is among you.”  If Luke wanted to make sure we knew that it was either within us or among us, he had perfectly good ways he could have done that. But he chose to be deliberately ambiguous.  A look at the whole story in the gospels makes it clear why that is.  The kingdom of God is not only a spiritual reality in terms of Jesus being the Lord of your life, but it also has to do with caring for the poor, casting out demons, and all the other things that cause the Kingdom of God to physically be present in the world. 

            But the other things that you will realize as you study these books is that the kingdom of God that is described in the gospels is upside down from the world’s standards.  The sermon on the mount in Matthew 5 can be called kind of the “constitution of the upside down kingdom.” To the world it is the rich that are blessed, but in the kingdom it is the poor.  In the world we retaliate against our enemies, in the kingdom we respond with kindness.  As you read the parables in the gospels you will constantly get a flavor of the backwards nature of the kingdom of God.

            The kingdom of God begins as an internal, spiritual reality and the way that it is worked out is through the law of love, which is backwards from how the kingdoms of this world operate.  But the kingdom of God will also come with power to finally defeat the enemies of God at Christ’s second coming.  That is because the kingdom of God is both now and not yet.  In other words, the kingdom came when Christ arrived two thousand years ago, but it still has yet to come in all its fullness.  That means for now that we live between the times. 

So even though we have all the rights and privileges and position of priests in a kingdom that is already here, we still live in the old age that has yet to come to an end.  So we are currently living in that boxed area until Jesus comes again.  That’s a critical thing to understand, so you know why there are passages that seem to talk about a coming kingdom right along-side passages that make it sound like its already here.  That’s because it’s both.

            Another important thing to understand about the gospels is that they were written to describe the fulfillment of God’s plan. The stories represented by the Gospels are at the pinnacle of salvation history as it is portrayed in the Scriptures. A proper reading of the Bible puts the gospels right at the center of the story of how God chose to redeem his people.  That was a critical message that the gospel writers wanted to get across.  There are hundreds of prophecies in the Old Testament that find their fulfillment in the New Testament and the life of Christ.  Reading the gospels with that in mind gives you an incredible sense of seeing the big picture of God’s plan, something they call salvation history.  All of history really led up to the life of Christ as recorded in the gospels, and all of history proceeds from it.  The fact that we even start our system of dating from that event makes that easy to remember.  But reading the gospels with that in mind, and keeping in mind that the whole reason for it was so you could be a fully functioning member of that kingdom that came with Jesus Christ, should make you just sit back in awe of what God has done for you in Jesus Christ.

            There are many other things that can be said about the important themes that emerge from the gospels, but we have to make sure we get to the real meat of it:  What response do the gospels call us to make to these portraits of Jesus?

            First of all, our response has to be belief.  John says in his gospel, “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book.  But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (20:30,31) The primary reason the gospels were written was not just to tell the story of a man called Jesus, but to tell the world that his life was what will enable them to have eternal life, if they will just turn from this world and put their faith in Jesus Christ to save them.

            Another thing that the gospels call us to is a life of discipleship.  There is nowhere in the gospels, or anywhere else in the Bible, that admits of the possibility of being saved by faith in Jesus Christ without that resulting in some kind of response from us.  In Luke 9:23 Jesus says,”If anyone would come after me he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”  John 14:21 tells us, “He who has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me.”  The gospels do not paint the picture of Jesus merely as a savior, but as the Lord.  That means that while it is never our behavior or what we do that saves us—Jesus did all the work for that—there is nevertheless the expectation that believing in him means to make him Lord.  That’s the kingdom of God that we were talking about: the reign of God in your life.  The gospels, as well as the rest of Scripture, always expect a response to your faith in Christ that means living to please him. 

            Finally, the gospels give us a clear call to mission.  The reason these were written was so that the people who were taking this story to the far reaches of the known world would be able to accurately tell it.  And there is an expectation that anyone who decides to make Jesus Christ their Lord and join the kingdom will be a part of helping to make that kingdom come in this world.  The great commission in Matthew 28:19 did not stop with the disciples—it is for anyone who reads the message of these gospels and decides to join the kingdom.  Jesus says to all of us:  “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.  And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” 

Studying the gospels

            For our final section, we want to take a quick look at some hints on how to study these portraits of Jesus for yourself.

            First of all, don’t waste your time trying to harmonize them.  Many people have looked at the differences between these four books and twisted themselves all in knots trying to figure out how to make them all match each other.   Keep in mind that these are stories that were put together from the oral traditions and bits and pieces and stories of the life of Christ that were memorized and common knowledge to the believers at that time.  But they were put together in particular ways by the four different authors to make certain points. So if John puts the story of the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of his portrait of Christ instead of the end, we don’t have to automatically assume that there must have been two of them.  Jesus certainly did go into the temple and drive out the money changers, but while Matthew, Mark and Luke use that incident to touch off the events of the last week of Christ’s life, John uses it to make a different point about Jesus’ relationship to the Jewish faith and traditions.  So the gospels are history as well as theology, or an interpretation of that history, simply in the way that they tell their stories.  Instead of getting all worried about the fact that there seem to be differences, ask yourself why there is that difference based on what we’ve talked about regarding who the authors were and who they were writing to. 

            Another important aspect of the gospels is the fact that there are different kinds of writing in them.  For instance, there are narratives, and teachings.

When you read a narrative, or a story, read all of it. And look not just for the history but for the theology of it, or the point that the author was trying to make through interpreting that history.  A lot of the miracle stories are basically just narratives showing that Jesus was who he said he was, but many of them make a very important point as well, such as Jesus calming the storm to show him to be Lord of creation, or Peter trying to walk out to Jesus and sinking to demonstrate the importance of a continuing and unwavering faith in Christ. 

One of the important things to remember is the variety of ways that Jesus taught.  He was a master teacher by the admission of even his critics, and as such he used a variety of ways to get his points across.

One of them is parables. A parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.  With a few exceptions, it’s usually not very productive to spend your time trying to figure out exactly what every detail of the parable represents.  Here again, it is best to read the entire thing to get the answer to the question, “What’s the big idea?  For instance, rather than trying to figure out who all the people in the story of the good Samaritan represent, and what the oil is, and the inn and whatever else, it’s usually a lot more productive to ask what’s the point. That is to answer the question:  “Who is my neighbor?” That’s always the point of a parable, to get us to ask ourselves how we should respond.

Another method Jesus used is metaphor.  “You are the salt of the earth” is a metaphor.  Nobody is going to put you on a hamburger to make it more tasty.  But what it means to be a flavoring or a preservative for the world is an important teaching.