The Gospels' Earliest Readers

For whom were the Gospels written?

Jul 19, 2026

I was recently perusing an old university essay on Mark’s gospel and a small turn of phrase caught my attention. Whenever I talked about the earlier readers or audience of the gospel, I always referred to them as the “Markan community.”

The expression surprised me, because for some time I have been wary about speaking about the gospels’ readers as “communities.” In my thesis I consciously avoided it. Little did I know that I was once an unwitting proponent of “community” speak!

The lesson I might pull from this brief foray into my essay is that it is easy to employ scholarly language without properly interrogating it or – dare I say – knowing what it means. As a master’s student, I didn’t have a studied view of the gospels’ audiences, yet I had seen scholars write of a “Markan community,” so I simply did the same.

Now that I am older (and slightly better read), I wish to return to the question of the gospel audiences. Were the gospels written with specific local “communities” in mind? Or did they have a wider audience in view? To begin with, I set out by addressing what the community model is, and why it became so popular.

The Community Theory

In the twentieth century, it became increasingly fashionable to see the gospels as written to “local groups” or “communities” of Christians. Mark was to Roman Christians in Rome; Matthew to Jewish-Christians; Luke to Gentile converts; and John to a mixed group of Christians who were now distanced from Judaism.

One key piece of evidence for these communities was a “mirror reading” of the gospels. While we lack solid external evidence about the gospels’ earliest readers, it is believed that we can reconstruct an “implied” reader from the gospels themselves.

For example, Matthew upholds the validity of the Torah and has Jesus regularly debate with Pharisees about the law, so scholars assumed that he wrote for a community of Jewish-Christians. By contrast, since Luke is more universalistic and pro-Gentile throughout his gospel, we might assume a specifically Gentile audience.

The extremes of this mirror reading were found vis-a-vis the Fourth Gospel, which had as its audience the so-called “Johannine community.” By mining clues within the text, some scholars believed that they could not only identify a community but reconstruct a multi-staged history of the community behind the gospel.1

This produced a ‘two level’ reading of the gospel. On the first level, John appears to be a story of Jesus. Yet on another level, it can be read as a coded history of the Johannine community who produced it. For example, the expulsion of a man from the synagogue was seen to reflect the community’s own synagogue expulsion, and Jesus’ mission to the Samaritans was actually the mission of the community.

Various scholars have taken issue with the more speculative histories of gospel communities. Yet the idea that the gospels were written with specific Christian communities in mind has been standard fare. Even when scholars disagreed on the location and specifics of the “Markan”, “Matthean” or “Lukan community,” the existence of these particular communities was largely taken for granted.

Two approaches appeared to reinforce this consensus. One was the application of social-scientific analysis to the gospels, which promised to identify the social situation of the gospel audiences with greater precision. Another was the rise of redaction criticism, which analysed the way the evangelists altered their sources. These alterations could be seen to reflect the interests of a particular setting.

The Gospels for All Christians

In more recent scholarship, the idea that the gospels were written exclusively for specific communities, isolated from a wider body of Christians, has received substantial criticism. This is largely due to an influential 1997 collection of essays from leading scholars, The Gospels for All Christians, edited by Richard Bauckham.2

As the title of the volume suggests, Bauckham set out a very different paradigm for the gospel audiences. Instead of seeing the gospels as written for specific communities, he suggests that the gospels were written for all (Greek-speaking) Christians. In what follows, I provide a precis of four arguments for this alternative view, before highlighting some important criticisms raised against it.

a. The Circulation of the Gospels

Bauckham begins by drawing our attention to the gospel of Mark. Putting aside for one moment the question of whether Mark intended to write only for his local context, the fact is that the gospel certainly did circulate beyond that context. We know of at least two of Mark’s early readers (Matthew and Luke) who chanced upon Mark’s gospel, and many scholars are starting to think that John used Mark as well.

This should give us pause when thinking that the evangelists only envisaged their works to be read or heard by a small group of people. If Matthew and Luke were written to supplant Mark – which they seem to be, incorporating much of Mark within their own gospels – we might suppose they envisaged an equally wide reach.

b. The Gospels as Ancient Biographies

Another factor to consider when thinking about the audience of any text is its genre. If we open up Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, we immediately get a sense about to whom this text was written. It was not written for ‘all Christians’ everywhere – rather, it was a circumstantial letter addressed to a specific community in Corinth.

But the gospels are not circumstantial epistles. Many scholars today consider them a form of ancient life-writing or bíos. This is important, for while biographies may have had an immediate ‘target market’ or niche, their audience was not limited to the immediate circle or ‘community’ of readers.3 Moreover, they were not intended to chronicle the history of a community, but to tell the life of an individual.4

c. Networks in Early Christianity

A third challenge to the “community” theory is the interconnectedness of early Christian communities. On the community model, we gain the impression that the early Churches were largely isolated, self-sustaining groups, detached from the wider Jesus movement. Thus, the evangelists wrote only for their specific Christian group.

Yet this overlooks the high degree of interconnectedness within early Christianity.5 Jerusalem was a centre of coming and goings, and information could spread relatively from the centre of the Christian network in just a week. Early Christian literature also furnishes us with frequent references to itinerant preachers, as well as back-and-forths between leaders and the diverse Churches to whom they wrote.

d. The Problems with Mirror Reading

A final methodological problem with the evidence for “gospel communities” is circularity. Starting from the assumption that the gospels were written to local communities, the gospels’ features are seen to reflect those distinctive communities, which is then taken as evidence for the particular communities in question.

Yet it does not follow that if the gospels bear the marks of their context that they were reflective and written for that specific context only. For example, John 9 has been taken to be the product of a community that was ‘excommunicated’ from the synagogue. Yet if John reflects a widespread expulsion of Christians from the synagogue, we might assume that other Jewish-Christians faced a similar situation.6

The Gospels for Some Christians

Bauckham’s volume challenged the consensus, to the point that it is now common for scholars to cite the ‘gospels for all Christians’ hypothesis, even if they do not embrace it themselves.7 Yet to what extent is Bauckham successful in making his case? Here I highlight three strong objections or qualifications to Bauckham’s argument.

a. How Universal was the Church?

One curious fact – make of it what you will – is that Bauckham’s theory has had more traction among evangelical scholars than non-evangelicals.8 This is not to discredit it. But it is to note that Bauckham’s portrait aligns (perhaps too conveniently?) with certain theological convictions, such as the universality of the gospel and the ‘communion of the saints.’ For some, Bauckham makes a tacit assumption: that gospels with a universal message would have, as their audience, a universal church.

Such commitments make for good theology, but there is a question as to how seriously they convey the messy historical reality of the early Church. Consider, for example, the mobile and global nature of early Christianity. Bauckham cites various pieces of evidence that the Church was made up of mobile and highly communicative leaders, and that the Church saw itself as a universal (fictive) family of believers.

Yet not all of the evidence pushes in this impression.9 In the early Church, there was a significant divide between those who believed that they should follow the Torah and those ‘Pauline’ Christians who did not. For fourteen years, Paul did not apparently feel the need to visit Jerusalem (Gal. 2:1). In turn, there is no clear evidence that James, the leader of the Jerusalem Church, left the city. This raises the question of whether ‘all Christians’ saw themselves as part of a “worldwide” Church.

b. The Circulation of Mark

The starting point of Bauckham’s argument is that we know at least that Matthew and Luke came across Mark. From this, he supposes that Matthew and Luke would have imagined their own gospels as having a similarly wide reach.

But the circulation of Mark can be read for the opposite effect. David Sim notes that if Matthew and Luke set out to displace Mark, they have been “mindful of the inherent dangers associated writing for a general audience and expecting their message to be preserved intact.”10 On this reading, Sim judges it more likely that Matthew and Luke envisaged a more limited readership – namely, those who were partial to their own distinctive portraits.

Furthering his critique, Sim suggests that many Christians did write gospels for a limited audience. For example, second-century gnostics envisaged a gnostic audience for the Gospel of Thomas, and the same can be said of later Jewish-Christian gospels. The evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls also reveals texts written for the Qumran community, even when the community was part of a wider Essene ‘movement’.

If we apply this model to the gospels, we might not envisage that the gospels were written exclusively for a community in a specific locale; but we might see them as writing for a brand of Christianity that was closely related to their own.

c. Internal Clues in the Gospels

A lot of the evidence that is presented in Bauckham’s volume is circumstantial. That is to say, it does not provide evidence from the gospels themselves that the gospels were written for ‘all Christians’. Rather, it looks elsewhere: to the genre and circulation of the gospels and the methodological problems with mirror reading.

Perhaps one might point to evidence from the content of the gospel to support Bauckham’s point. Matthew, for example, imagines a worldwide gospel for the nations. Yet it is difficult to know what can be inferred from this. Paul’s circumstantial epistles also envisage a worldwide gospel – and like the gospels, circulated across the empire – yet their intended audience remained limited in scope.

It is the internal evidence that I think presents the greatest challenge for the ‘gospels for all Christians’ model. Consider the gospel of Mark. It is clear that Mark assumes some level of familiarity with his readers. This is why he can give them prompts (‘let the reader understand’) or why he can introduce Simon as the ‘father of Alexander and Rufus.’ He clearly thinks that his audience will understand who they are.

It also seems likely to me that each of the gospels was more suited to some audiences than others. Matthew clearly presumes a familiarity with the Jewish law on the part of his readers, while Mark seems to have envisaged an audience who would take to heart its message on suffering and persecution. Luke, too, writes to a Gentile, the ‘most excellent Theophilus’. While this dedication does not preclude a wider audience, his gospel does seem particularly tailored to the interests of Gentile readers.

To recognise this is not to indulge in the flights of fancy associated with the “Johannine community”. I am not suggesting that we can use the gospels to delineate the precise social-structures of the early Church. Nor is it to perpetuate the notion that the gospels were written for sectarian churches. But it is to push back against the notion that the evangelists had their audience as all Christians everywhere.

It is not circular to recognise that there is an implied reader of the gospels, and that implied reader was not every Christian, but those of a particular background and persuasion. Unless the gospel writers were hermits, they wrote within particular churches. In my view, it is a natural step to see that the differences in the canonical gospels can be accounted for, in part, by the needs of their social location.

The Gospels’ Readers

Who then were the gospels’ intended readers? Bauckham and company have pushed back strongly against the notion that the gospels were written for sectarian communities attached to specific locations, whose histories we can now reconstruct.

In my mind, one of their better arguments concerns the gospels’ genre. While a life of Pythagoras might be read with great interest by Pythagoreans, or a life of Plotinus by neo-Platonists, no one would speculate that these lives had as their sole intended recipient a ‘Pythagorian’ or ‘Neo-Platonist community’. One reason to write a biography – rather than communicating orally or through community documents – was so that a broad audience might learn something from the subject of the life.

The biggest problem with Bauckham’s thesis is whether it fully accounts for the diversity of the gospels and the early Jesus movement. The gospels were written within, and thus naturally shaped by, particular contexts. Though not limited to these immediate contexts, the internal evidence of the gospels suggests that they do have a particular audience in mind. A broad audience beyond a particular community is not a text written to a specific Church. But it is also not a ‘gospel for all Christians’.

Behind the Gospels

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