Theology And The More Deeply Message Of The Gospels
Often what is "common knowledge" among biblical scholars and what is "common knowledge" among ordinary Christians is not the same thing
. Somewhere from the university to the Sunday school, the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) seem to be unconsciously combined to greater or lesser degrees into a kind of mish-mash or harmony to produce a single cohesive history. The Gospels are thus altogether portrayed, or at least received, not so much as theology but as a singular historical account. Potential theology, then, the Gospels' most valuable asset, is lost.
Young people from religious backgrounds often arrive at their universities and find themselves thrown into existential crises proportional to the Conservatism of their catechism when they discover that what they thought was true about the story of Jesus is actually not exactly "historical." There is much more to the history of Jesus than they were taught in Sunday school. Biblical scholar Janice Anderson points out that to understand that the Gospels cannot be read as histories, one need only read straight through the four Gospels, one right after the other. Only in reading the four Gospels straight through do discrepancies pop out between them to show that something else other than history must be going on. Ironic as it may seem, it is really only then that the figure of Jesus can more clearly be seen. Only short passages are read aloud in church services and then expounded in sermons or Sunday school lessons, so on the whole students tend not realize that each of the four evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) is a full-fledged author in his own right. In their own ways each "full-fledged author" paints a unique portrait of Jesus; but we cannot say, "Each...paints a unique history of Jesus," because then we diminish the theological potential of the Gospels and we surely would not be able to account for discrepancies between them.
Thus young Scripture students who are taught that the Gospels are historical accounts, staggered at finding discrepancies between them, often abandon or renounce the Bible altogether, or, only if they are truly astute, may consider that their truth is not to be sought for in the outward and material letter. Either we abandon the Gospels because they are not historically accurate or we discover that history is not the message. Apparent contradictions in Scripture can always be resolved in this way, by appealing to some higher, more sublime level, and what is more: if those more sublime levels are never reached then surely the full potential of the Gospels' message is also never reached.
The contemporary New Testament scholar "seizes gleefully on discrepancies among the four Gospels...[because such] discrepancies, far from closing the door to understanding, are instead the keys that he or she hopes to use to unlock the particular theological viewpoint of each evangelist" (Janice Capel Anderson & Stephen D. Moore, "The Lives of Mark", in Janice Capel Anderson, & Stephen D. Moore, ed., Mark & Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, Minneapolis, Fortress Press: 2008). It is because of the disharmonious, yet "synoptic" episodes in the Gospels that we can gaze as though through a window at the worlds in which the individual texts were written. Their incongruence helps us to see something in the Gospels that is more "human" than "Holy Spirit," more "of-the-world" than "otherworldly," which does not diminish the Holy Spirit so much as it increases the human. To learn that the authors are more like us than we imagined helps us to bring home Jesus' message and the reality "behind, of, and before the text" (Sandra M. Schneiders, Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, New York, Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003).
The ability to look beyond discrepancies in the Gospels is a good thing. The traditional "good Christian" tends neither to know nor care about them anyway. Not caring about them is the function of a deep faith on the one hand; on the other, being able to identify the ways in which the Gospel accounts are different, and then knowingly to move beyond them, yields a much deeper faith indeed.
by: Michael C. Miller
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