Five Facts about the Gospels (You Might Not Hear in a Pew)

In the cottage industry of online content about the Bible, a distinction is often made between what is taught in Church and the insights of scholarship. This or that academic claims to reveal what your pastor didn’t (or didn’t want you) to know…

I am not particularly bothered by this distinction. Personally, I feel that what happens in a pulpit is naturally different to a lecture. To put it crudely, a lecture is for information; the pulpit for transformation. (I don’t go to Church to improve my Greek.)

Given that the priest and the lecturer are attempting to do different things, however, it can be easy for Churchgoers to pick up ideas about the Gospels which are not well-informed by biblical scholarship – or, at least, not by mainstream ideas. This is especially the case in settings where academic theology is perceived as a threat.

In a brief attempt to restore the balance, then, I look here at five ‘facts’ which may surprise the average Church-goer. They present a challenge to popular ideas we have about the Gospels – some of which we have inherited from the ancient Church. But they are facts which I believe will ultimately help us to read the Gospels better.

It is important to note, moreover, that these facts are held by scholars from across the theological spectrum. So, while they are not often heard from the pulpit, scholars do not find them to be the theological cause for concern some understand them to be. They may be consigned currently to the ivory tower, but they need not stay there.

1. The Gospels are Anonymous

The first fact is perhaps the most surprising, namely that the titles of the Gospels - ‘The Gospel according to X’ - were almost certainly not original to the Gospels.

The reason for this is simple. It is not until the late second century that we have clear evidence that the Gospels were called by their current titles. Prior to this time, the Gospels appear to have circulated anonymously. Christians were quoting from these books, but not by the names we know them with today.

When they do show up with titles, it is a curious fact that all of the titles follow the same structure: ‘The Gospel According to X’ or its abbreviated, ‘According to X.’ For most scholars, the best explanation of this is that the Gospels were given these titles when they came together as a collection; they did not all happen to copy one each other.

It may seem surprising that the Gospels could circulate anonymously. But it is actually not so. Biblical books were often anonymous, and so the first line of a text would have served as its title. This anonymity lent the Gospels a certain gravitas.

2. The Gospels Copy Each Other

Another striking fact is that the Gospels copy one another - a lot!

The first three Gospels - Matthew, Mark and Luke - are called the ‘Synoptic Gospels’ because they can be ‘seen together’. And they can be ‘seen together’ because they share a lot of the same material. To give just one example: almost 600 of Mark’s 660 verses are also found in Matthew, many written out word for word.

How exactly to explain why the Gospels share so much of the same material – the so-called ‘Synoptic Problem’ – is hotly debated, and no one has a perfect solution. However, the dominant theory is that Mark wrote first, and was used by both Matthew and Luke. And Matthew and Luke also had their own material, which they used independently. This is often called ‘Q’, from the German Quelle (‘source’).

The most common solution to the Synoptic Problem is known as the ‘Two Source Theory’, the two main sources used by Matthew and Luke being ‘Mark’ and ‘Q’.

The question of John is more complicated. Given how the Fourth Gospel differs from the Synoptic accounts, some scholars think that he did not know the earlier Gospels. But a growing number of scholars are convinced that John knew at least Mark, and probably Luke as well.¹ They argue that while John’s revision of the earlier Gospels is quite extensive, it is well within the bounds of ancient literary imitation.

As with the anonymity of the Gospels, it may seem a strange literary practice for the Gospels to copy one another. Today, such copying would be regarded as plagiarism. It is worth noting, however, that the classical world did not have the same sense of literary ownership or copyright as we do today. Composing a work could be an extremely arduous task, and writers often imitated earlier works to write their own.

3. The Gospels are Not Gospels

The third fact is that the Gospels are not Gospels. That is, were you to shelve the Gospels in an ancient library, you would not find them in the ‘Gospels’ section.

In the twentieth century, it was common to think that the Gospels were totally unique. This reflected the view of a school of thought - form criticism - according to which the Gospels were not really works of literature at all. Rather, they are collections of stories (‘forms’) which were stitched together - like beads on a string.

The view that the Gospels are a completely unique form of literature was theologically attractive. Surely if the subject of the Gospels - Jesus of Nazareth - is a figure of unique significance, it makes sense that the form which attests to him is also unique. Thus, the idea of a ‘Gospel’ genre was born.

The problem with this view that it doesn’t make much literary sense. Rather than seeing the evangelists as mere chroniclers, literary analysis has revealed the Gospel writers to be authors in their own right; they were selective and adaptive with the material they employed. And with this turn towards seeing the Gospel as literary authors, the question of genre was reopened.

What then are the Gospels, if not Gospels? Most scholars today would consider them ancient ‘lives’, or biographies. Like other bioi, the Gospels follow a subject’s life from either their birth or career to their death and beyond. If you are interested in what this means for our reading of the Gospels, you may wish to see this piece here.

4. The Gospels are Not Reportage

Our fourth misconception about the Gospels is that they are reportage, close up to the facts. Such was the argument of C.S. Lewis, who pointed to various moments in the Gospels as examples of ‘artless’ (and therefore historical) recollection.

I have questioned elsewhere whether Lewis’ argument works. But quite apart from his examples, ancient biographies rarely aimed for historical accuracy in the way that a modern biographer might do. As Thomas Hagg, a world expert on ancient lives, writes:

Ancient life-writers did not encounter among their contemporaries the same demands for documentary truth as their modern colleagues do, nor did for that matter ancient historiographers… Conversations are allowed to be fictitious, and insight is readily granted into the acting characters’ feelings, thoughts, and motives, as long as some kind of verisimilitude is maintained.

Hagg concludes, “The establishment of any form of higher truth – be it poetic, psychological, philosophical, or religious – overrules demands for the truth of facts.”²

What this means for the Gospels is important. When we read them, we are not encountering a straightforward account of the actual past. We are reading spiritual texts, whose theological purposes will occasionally overrule their historical interest.

5. The Gospels Contradict Each Other

Our final fact about the Gospels is that the Gospels contradict each other!

Sometimes their differences are minor. For example, the Synoptic Gospels don’t agree about what clothes Jesus instructed his disciples to wear on their missionary journeys. At other times, the differences are larger: for example, John does not agree with the Synoptics on when Jesus died, placing it a day before the Synoptic Gospels.

There is a tendency in certain traditions to deny that these contradictions exist. They reason that if the Bible is God’s word, it must be historically perfect. However, as we have already seen, ancient biographies did not always aim at historical perfection.

To take just one example. John seems to disagree with the Synoptics' dating of Jesus’ death because he wants to present Jesus as the Passover lamb. This is why Jesus dies on the day of preparation for Passover (19:14) rather than after the Passover. Even if this is not historically accurate, Christians would say it reflects a theological truth.

The danger in harmonising the Gospels is that we force them to tell a single story and miss the very story each individual writer was trying to tell. Yet this type of harmonisation – incarnate in Tatian’s second-century diatesseron - was famously rejected by the early Church. They thought it was better that we read these as individual books – testifying to the same underlying reality, but with their own unique perspectives.

Five Facts Damaging for Faith?

These facts are not often the subjects of sermons, and present a rather different view of the Gospels than the one assumed by some Church-goers. But this doesn’t mean that these insights of biblical scholarship have to be harmful for faith.

Take the notion that the Gospels were originally without titles. It does not follow from this that no one knew who wrote them, even if it tells that working out who did today is more difficult. (For more on this, see my pieces on Matthew and Mark.)

Similarly, the fact that the Gospels are ancient lives, which treat history in a different way than we do today, does not mean that the Gospels are historically useless. It just means that when we are reading them, we need to reframe our expectations.

Admittedly, the process of re-learning what you thought you knew is often unsettling. You don’t know what you will find out. But for me that is the adventure of biblical studies. Like any other realm of enquiry, we are curious to find better answers to our questions. But we also have the special task of working out what to do with those answers - of fitting them into our wider pictures of God, and history, and the world.

1. See, for example, Helen K. Bond, Catrin H. Williams, John’s Transformation of Mark (T&T Clark, 2021).

2. Tomas Hagg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (CUP, 2012), 3-4.