Better Understanding the Gospels

In her sermon last Sunday, Pastor Alison spoke a bit about the nature of Jesus's story in the Bible and the process by which the relevant texts were formed. There are four books in the Bible — or four gospels narratives — that tell the story of Jesus’s life through an ancient form of biography. These books — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — agree on many points, but they also have distinct perspectives and particular details that differ from each other and that cannot be reconciled. Some of the reasons for this are because these books were written by different authors, in different years, for different audiences, and using different sources.

In many cases, the differences were actually a result of intentional choices made by the gospel writers regarding how they wanted to present Jesus's story. Hearing this can be troubling for modern audiences with modern sensibilities around historical accuracy. But it's important for us to understand that ancient people did not have the same expectations. When it came to biography, they were more concerned with conveying the essence of a person (their essential characteristics and personality traits) than with conveying indisputable facts about the events of their life.

With this lens in mind, we can approach the differences and contradictions between the gospels not as a problem to be solved but, instead, as an invitation to dive deeper. To be curious about what the author was trying to help the original audience, and now us, to understand about Jesus and about God in particular. To ask ourselves, “What truth about Jesus (or about God) was this author trying to convey?”

To help you explore this topic further, we'd like to recommend an episode of The Bible for Normal People podcast with special guest Bart Ehrman (the New Testament scholar Alison quoted in her sermon). The details are included below:

Episode 263: Bart Ehrman – The Gospels & Historical Reliability
In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman joins Pete Enns and Jared Byas to discuss the historical reliability of the Gospels, highlighting the roles of oral tradition, authorial bias, and contradictions within the texts. Join them as they explore the following questions:

• What’s involved in the historical study of antiquity?
• What are we talking about when we’re talking about the question of the Gospels and their reliability? 
• Does having an eyewitness account guarantee accuracy?
• Do we have literary evidence of Jesus from the same time frame which is outside of the Scriptures?
• What examples from the ancient world do we have documenting other historical figures?
• Is there such a thing as an unbiased source?
• What do we mean when we ask whether the Gospels are reliable? Is that usually assumed to mean historically accurate?
• What is orality?
• What kind of assumptions are we prone to placing on the Gospels about their accuracy?
• If we don’t have outside sources to compare the Gospels to, then what has led scholars to their conclusions about the historical reliability of the Gospel traditions from within the Gospels themselves?
• How can we look at the Gospel contradictions as positive?

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Tweetables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.

• If you’ve got two sources and one borrowed from the other, then you actually don’t have two sources. You’ve got one source. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• Archaeology can tell us a lot. The problem with artifacts is that they don’t interpret themselves, right? So it’s also interpretation not just if you have a writing, but also if you have some kind of material remain. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• Sometimes people say that there’s lots of references to Jesus outside the Christian sources, the Gospels, and it’s actually not true. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• There’s no such thing as an unbiased source. If somebody decides to write something about someone, they’re doing it for a reason. And if they’ve got a reason, they’ve got a bias. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• It’s not that there are such things as unbiased sources. It’s that you have to compare sources with one another and to try and figure out what the biases are so you can get beneath them. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• If you’ve got two sources that flat out contradict each other, they both can’t be historically accurate. Either one is accurate and the other’s not, or they’re both inaccurate—but they both can’t be accurate historically. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• You know, they’re called gospels. They’re not called histories. — @BartEhrman @theb4np