Gospels Of The Gospels

One of the more surprising features of the Christian faith is that it produced at its very beginning a substantial body of writings. That this should be the case is by no means a necessity: not all religious movements produce writings. Furthermore, that these writings should be collected into one book and thus become a sacred corpus, and that this sacred corpus should continue to influence the life of believers and to determine the content and the practices of the faith two thousand years later is also remarkable.
The four Gospels stand at the head of the New Testament, underlining their importance, forming a “seamless continuity between the story of Israel and the story of the church”. The four documents now known as the Gospels were not known by this name until late in the second century. Until then, there was only one Gospel, the proclamation of Jesus and the kingdom of God, with four books presenting it, each in its own way. Modern readers are so used to seeing the compilation of these writings as the New Testament that they forget that each one was originally conceived to stand on its own. Consequently, to understand the Gospels and the kind of literature that they are, it is crucial to look at them in the first century Palestinian environment in which they were written. At that time, the cultural landscape was dominated by three main elements: Roman rule, Hellenistic culture and, above all, the religious symbols of Judaism. In that context, Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God could be perceived as a challenge to Roman rule, a dismissal of Greek thought and an attack on Judaism.
The symbolic world of Jesus and his followers belonged with Israel, its history and its scriptures. The evangelists and the Early Chri...

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... theology, are either trust or distrust. It is a methodological mistake to attempt to evaluate the authenticity of every event and saying. Correct procedure is to determine whether the source as a whole is trustworthy.
The evangelists wrote their Gospels from the point-of-view of faith, to convince readers ‘to share their faith and serve the God of Jesus Christ”. They demand a response from their readers. This is why they chose to write their accounts in narrative form. Narratives encourage identification with their central character, involve their readers in a rich network of human experiences and draw audiences into their world. in order to understand these narratives and be transformed by them, the modern reader needs to read them as a Bios of Jesus, that draws deeply from the Jewish world and represents the thoughtful testimony of trustworthy eyewitnesses.