A Reader's Digest

Celebrating One Year Behind the Gospels

On 7th January 2024 – one year ago today – I began writing Behind the Gospels.

As someone who ‘writes to think,’ it was my way to keep thinking amidst the busyness of work. I gave myself the new years’ resolution of writing once a week. To my great surprise, I am still writing a year on. (It may be the first resolution I have ever kept.)

Yet an even more delightful surprise has been to find that I am not only writing, but you are reading. To my readers – to you – and to all who have commended my work on their own fine platforms, I want to say a massive thank you for your support!

To celebrate a year of writing, I have put together a readers’ guide – a kind of digest - to Behind the Gospels. It is tour through seven of this year’s leitmotifs.

#1 Behind the Nativity Stories

In advent and Christmastide, my attention turned naturally to the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, a hot-bed of historical controversy among Gospels scholars.

I began by challenging the popular trope that Matthew invented his story of the virginal conception on the basis of a mistranslation of Isaiah 7:14 – a theory which does not quite capture the evangelist’s interest in that passage.

In another post, I drew on recent scholarship to temper our confidence that Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem was simply a theolougemon. While there are historical problems with Jesus’ Bethlehem birth, it was probably not a well-known idea that the Messiah would be born there. The evangelists therefore did not need to meet that expectation.

Widening my frame of reference, I unpacked seven historical problems for the infancy narratives. This drew upon an earlier piece, How to Write an Infancy Narrative, which explored the stock tropes in the birth accounts of figures in ancient biography. As I suggest in both articles, the stories of Jesus’ birth are highly conventionalised.

I have also become fascinated in this season with Matthew’s magi. Following my post on the historicity of the infancy narratives, I answered a reader’s question on whether there is any historical truth to their narrative, and what their story signifies. I expanded on this answer in another post, Five Myths about Matthew’s Magi, which suggests that the magi’s story is historical – but not in the way one might expect…

#2 The Authorship of the Gospels

Another theme which I have touched on intermittently is the Gospels’ authorship. I explored this area, not only because it is foundational to the study of the Gospels, but also because it is a topic upon which there is enormous confusion online.

To clear up some of this confusion, I wrote a short post entitled, Why are the Gospels Anonymous? This unpacks the consensus view – held across the ideological spectrum – that the titles of the Gospels are likely not original to the Gospels, but were added according to a standard formula when the Gospels came together as a collection.

I also took a deep-dive into the authorship of individual Gospels. For example, I took a look at idea that Peter stands behind Mark’s Gospel and explored some reasons why this link may not be as far-fetched as many Markan scholars surmise.

I also took a longer look at the authorship of Matthew over three posts. In part one, I explained why modern scholarship does not consider Matthew as the author of Matthew. In part two, I looked at one attempt to link the Gospel to the tax-collector, Matthew, through its use of money. And in part three, I explained how the Gospel may have a connection to the apostle, even if he was not its author.

With respect to Luke, I explored Joan Taylor’s idea that Luke-Acts may have been written by a woman. In 2025, I hope to extend these probings to the Fourth Gospel.

#3 Jesus’ Death & Resurrection

In another cluster of posts, I unpacked recent angles on Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection. This began in the crypt cafe of St Martin-in-the Fields’ at Easter, when I explored the historical arguments over what sort of burial Jesus received.

Along similar lines, a few of my pieces discussed the empty tomb. For example, I looked at a new argument for the empty tomb based on Paul’s resurrection language. I also explored what the empty tomb narratives have in common with ancient ‘translation fables’, in which a hero’s body mysteriously vanishes after death.

Of more popular interest was the first post in my two-parter, Ranking Seven Arguments for Jesus’ Resurrection. This looked at three weak historical arguments for the resurrection, including the evidence of the medieval Turin Shroud, the argument from women witnesses to the empty tomb and the disciples’ martyrdom. Part two for all paid subscribers will follow shortly with a consideration of four further arguments.

#4 C.S. Lewis & the Gospels

Anyone who has followed this blog will know that I love C.S. Lewis. It was Lewis who initially sparked my interest to study the Gospels at Magdalen, the Oxford college where he spent much of his teaching career. There, I also saturated myself in the Lewis community, touring his home and serving as Secretary of the Lewis Society.

I was delighted to be invited earlier back to the Society this Trinity (summer-term) to speak. I gave a paper on what we can learn from Lewis’ engagement of the Gospels – both his insights and his mistakes. Some of the contents of that talk can now be found in this shamefully-titled summary, What C.S. Lewis got Wrong about the Gospels.

More constructively, I was delighted to give a talk in Lewis’ town of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. (Tolkien supposedly once quipped that Lewis had ‘Ulsterior’ motives for not crossing the Tiber once he had converted to Christianity.) There I explored Lewis’ response to the problem of Jesus’ dashed apocalyptic expectations. This was a portrait of Jesus I had already unpacked on the blog and then defended from some key objections.

#5 The Missing Years of Jesus

As someone who writes to think, I am somewhat surprised at how much I found myself thinking about Jesus’ missing years. But in retrospect, I suppose that is exactly the sort of topic one would expect a blog called Behind the Gospels to address.

I became conscious that there is a lot we don’t know about Jesus’ childhood. And yet this silence doesn’t offer a creative license to reconstruct Jesus’ early years in whatever way we like – we can really be very sure that he didn’t travel to India, for example, or even to England’s green and pleasant land (sorry William Blake.)

Cutting through these conjectures, I wanted to offer a more historically responsible approach. After an initial brainstorm of the possibilities of his missing years, I honed in on more specific aspects of his childhood. Could Jesus read or write, for example, and what are we to make of the popular notion that carpentry was his trade?

#6 Jesus and Other Figures

Another series I worked on this year compared Jesus with other ancient figures.

The inspiration for this series began with an interest I took in the The Life of Aesop during my doctoral research. Although the biography of the ancient fabulist is not well-known to New Testament scholars, it can shed much light on the Gospels. My first post in this series addressed this topic: Jesus, the Tortoise and the Hare.

Another post, inspired by the Olympic games’ controversy, explored the ancient connections between Jesus and Bacchus/Dionysus. I have also written a few pieces on the Emperor Vespasian. I argue there that Vespasian helps us to understand Jesus’ characterisation in Mark’s Gospel, as well as Jesus’ connection to the Temple’s destruction, a theme I also picked up in an interview with Dr Nathanael Vette.

#7 Other Bits & Pieces

Coming into land, there was some miscellany. For example, I considered whether we can know what Jesus said, critiqued the idea that the Gospels’ traditions were passed along by telephone, and questioned the identity Mark’s mysterious garden deserter, to name just a few. I also examined some mainstream ideas which are not often discussed in Church.

Coming up in 2025: Essays, Chat, Podcast

Now… you can breath! (At least for a moment.)

If you have got to the end of this digest – and like me, are still digesting it – then I have good and bad news for you: there is (God-willing) still much more to come!

What sort of things might lie in the pipeline? Here are just a few ideas.

Essays. I will continue writing essays. This year, I hope to look especially at the ideas surrounding oral tradition, eyewitness and collective memory behind the Gospels. This was the focus of my master’s work at Oxford and an area of ongoing fascination.

Chat: For paid subscribers who are supporting my work, I am going to open up Substack’s chat function. This will be an easier way for our ‘community’ to discuss the blog, as well as to have me answer your questions on Gospels’ scholarship.

Podcast. Paid subscribers will also get early access to the incoming Behind the Gospels podcast. The yeti has been purchased. I have begun recording. It is now just a matter of finding the best format. Whatever works, I hope to release my first recording to celebrate another subscriber milestone, which may be soon!

Before I go, I would like to thank you again for reading. I know it is a sincere privilege to have the time, resources and readership to explore this subject in the way I have done in 2024, and I am truly thankful for the gifts I have been given.

If you have any ideas for BTG, please feel free to send me a message. Until then, I wish you a blessed new year – a very merry Christmas, for any Orthodox folk – and an exciting journey onwards, as we continue our quest behind the gospels…

With warm wishes,

John Nelson