Reading the Gospels Wisely

A Narrative and Theological Introduction

Pennington, Jonathan T.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441238702
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This textbook on how to read the Gospels well can stand on its own as a guide to reading this New Testament genre as Scripture. It is also ideally suited to serve as a supplemental text to more conventional textbooks that discuss each Gospel systematically. Most textbooks tend to introduce students to historical-critical concerns but may be less adequate for showing how the Gospel narratives, read as Scripture within the canonical framework of the entire New Testament and the whole Bible, yield material for theological reflection and moral edification. Pennington neither dismisses nor duplicates the results of current historical-critical work on the Gospels as historical sources. Rather, he offers critically aware and hermeneutically intelligent instruction in reading the Gospels in order to hear their witness to Christ in a way that supports Christian application and proclamation.

1

What Are the Gospels?

Defining “Gospel”

Brainstorming “Gospel”

If we were to engage in a little brainstorming about the word “gospel,” many different ideas would emerge. Many readers would immediately think of the “Romans Road” or the “Four Spiritual Laws” or some other basic, evangelical Protestant explanation of the “gospel,” that is, “the basic message of salvation.” For others an obvious answer would be the four stories about Jesus found in the Bible. The lovers of English philology among us, or at least some fans of 1970s Broadway musicals, may offer that our English word “gospel” comes from the older “God-spell,” meaning “good” (OE gód) plus “tidings” (OE spel).[4] Those with a knowledge of Greek may proffer the etymological analysis of eu plus angelion, “good news.” Some may even go further by noting that around the time of Jesus this Greek word was often used to refer to the announcement of “good tidings,” especially that a new emperor had been born or ascended to the throne.[5] Opening our Bibles to the beginning of the New Testament would remind us that this word “gospel” is used in yet another way: in conjunction with the accompanying phrase “The Gospel according to X” as the heading or title for the first four books of the New Testament. That is, it used to be so; many Bibles and commentaries today no longer use “The Gospel according to” in their titles,[6] despite the fact that from the earliest days of the church, the connection of the Gospels with a known person was very important.[7] Such thoughts and possibly others would arise from our brainstorming reflections on “gospel.”

“Gospel” in the Apostolic Witness

Moving beyond these reflections we can examine specifically the ways in which the noun “gospel” (euangelion) and its verbal cognate “gospelize” (euangelizomai) appear in the New Testament. When we consider the apostolic witness outside the Gospels, we find that both forms of this word occur with regularity as an overall description of the apostles’ message, or kerygma (proclamation). For example, the noun is found sixty-six times in Paul’s letters and the verbal form (often translated “to preach” or “to evangelize”) another twenty-one times. Significantly, Paul uses “the gospel of God” as the way to describe his ministry at the opening of his missionary letter to the Romans. He unpacks what he means by this gospel from or about God in the following verses. It is the good news that God promised beforehand in the Holy Scriptures (1:2), namely, the coming of Jesus, descended in the flesh from David (1:3) but shown to be so much more, God’s very Son, as demonstrated by the power of the Spirit and Jesus’s resurrection from the dead (1:4). This is “good news” because it is grace, and consequently it is a call to all the nations to come and believe in this message of hope (1:5–6). In Paul’s opening words to the Galatian churches, he reproves them for potentially abandoning this same good news message about Jesus Christ. This is foolish, he says, because the “different gospel” they are turning to is really no good news at all; it is a hopeless attempt at accepting Jesus plus Torah obedience (Gal. 1:6–7; cf. 2:16). In another early letter, Paul likewise repeatedly refers to the “gospel of God” or “gospel of Christ” or just “our gospel” to describe the message that he had proclaimed and taught among the Thessalonian believers (1 Thess. 1:5; 2:2, 4, 8, 9; 3:2). This wording is a particular favorite of Paul’s, but the same usage can also be found elsewhere, for example, in Hebrews (4:6) and 1 Peter (1:12, 25; 4:17).

We will not take the time to examine all the occurrences of this important word in the New Testament, which are readily available in other studies.[8] Instead, we may simply observe that consistently throughout the New Testament Epistles the “gospel” refers to the oral proclamation about Jesus the Christ (meaning the anointed Davidic King)—who he was; what he accomplished through his life, death, and resurrection; the promise of his future return to establish God’s reign; and the concomitant call to repent and have faith.[9] This is not a message of moralism or a call to greater religious obedience but rather is a proclamation of God’s grace and the invitation to hope. This is why it is rightly called “good news.”

There is another biblical reason it is called good news, and we will explore this below. But before we move on to the question of how the apostles’ use of the word relates to the evangelists’ usage, we should note one other important connotation inherent in Paul’s choice to call his message “gospel.” As mentioned earlier, scholars have observed that the noun and verb forms of euangelion/euangelizomai are certainly not unique to the Bible or Christian witness but instead have currency in the Greco-Roman world surrounding nascent Christianity. Namely, “good news” was used in a propagandistic way to announce the birth or ascension of an emperor and as part of the Roman imperial cult or worship of emperors.[10] Thus, it has political and religious implications, ones particularly irksome to both Jews and Christians in the first century who refused to honor the Caesars as deity and who certainly did not consider their rise to be “good news.” Undoubtedly Paul and the other early Christian missionaries were well aware that calling their message “gospel” or “good news” was not only something related to Judaism and Christianity but also simultaneously a political, worldview, and eschatological claim. It was the claim used by the savvy Jewish leaders to get Jesus crucified by their Roman oppressors (see John 19:12–15; cf. 18:33–37); it was also a claim that at times would land Jesus’s followers in trouble (e.g., under the Neronian and Domitianic persecutions). To preach that Jesus is the true King over all kings, the only true Son of God, and therefore the only one worthy of worship is not merely a personal conviction of individual piety but is necessarily a public, political, and polemical proclamation.

From “Oral Gospel” to “Written Gospel”

We have seen that the New Testament’s “gospel” is a highly charged and theologically significant expression used by the apostles to summarize their proclaimed message about Jesus. It is a kerygma or proclamation. We still use the word in this way today, such as when we speaking of “preaching the gospel,” though usually with a sense narrower than the apostles. That is, at least in much of Protestantism “the gospel” has come to refer to the doctrinal information about the justification possible through faith in Christ. Especially in evangelical circles, “the gospel” has come to refer specifically to the forgiveness of sins available through Jesus’s death and resurrection. Although certainly not wrong, this meaning is notably incomplete and narrower than Paul’s own usage, which much more comprehensively refers to Jesus’s entire life, death, life after death, and future return; it is the whole proclaimed message, not just the particular (and partially polemical) issue of “justification by faith,” which Paul has in mind when he speaks of “the gospel.”[11]

We use “gospel” to refer not only to the oral proclamation of the good news but also to the written documents about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This is not a modern invention; as early as the first quarter of the second century AD, the noun euangelion was being used to refer to our written accounts, our “Gospels.”[12] This raises an interesting question: If the apostles and the New Testament letters use the word to refer to their oral proclamation only, how and when did it come to be a literary designation? The answer is not an easy one and not without a variety of opinions. It is entangled in another, related debate about the publication and manuscript transmission of the Gospels. I can offer a brief explanation of these important questions and suggest a probable answer.

Our inquiry must start with what is likely our first Greek Gospel, the Gospel according to Mark.[13] Mark begins his account with words that are strikingly recognizable to those familiar with Paul’s proclamation: “The beginning of the Gospel of/about Jesus Christ” (Archē tou euangeliou Iēsou Christou). It is very reasonable to assume that Mark’s choice to open his account with this weighty word “Gospel” stems in large part from its current and well-known usage in earliest Christianity.[14]

A couple of comments can be made on Mark’s Greek phrase. First, the ambiguity of the genitive “of/about Jesus Christ” (Iēsou Christou) is best left as just that. Commentators disagree on whether this is a subjective or objective genitive. The rich flexibility of the genitive here likely accommodates both the sense of a Gospel about Jesus Christ (so a heading over the book) and the gospel from or by Jesus Christ, that is, the message of the good news about God’s kingdom that has come from and through Jesus the Christ, or even that preached by him. The comments of A. Y. Collins are well put: The genitive here is ambiguous because those readers familiar with Paul and the other apostles would understand the phrase to mean “the good news about Jesus Christ.” But “in light of the following portrait of Jesus as proclaimer [of this gospel in 1:14–15], the phrase also takes on the meaning ‘the good news announced by Jesus Christ.’”[15]

Second, we may also note the unexpected anarthrousness (lack of the Greek article) of archē at the beginning of the phrase. Apollonius’s rule would suggest that the head noun “beginning” (archē) and the modifying genitive noun “of the Gospel” (tou euangeliou) should both be either articular or anarthrous. However, the lack of the article with archē here likely signals that this word and phrase serve as a heading or title as can be found elsewhere.[16]

Stemming from this observation, convincing arguments can be made that Mark’s opening phrase does not just refer to the first few events of the story, nor is it a mere comment that the Christian proclamation began here. Rather, this opening phrase serves as a title for the whole message of salvation he is presenting, namely, his narrative as a “kerygmatic biography.”[17] The rest of Mark’s uses, as we will see, still have the primary (and older) sense of the orally proclaimed message, but 1:1 serves as an incipit, or the beginning of a book, designating this narrative as an euangelion. Loveday Alexander, reflecting on the connection of the oral and the written senses of “gospel/Gospel” observes that “from the earliest recorded stages of church tradition, then, the written gospels had a dynamic, two-sided interface with oral performance. They were seen as the deposit of oral teaching and preaching; and they were used as the basis for ongoing oral instruction in the early church.”[18]

Thus, we can see that our word “gospel” is already being stretched in a new but not unreasonable way to refer not just to the oral proclamation about Jesus (as in Paul) but now also to the written accounts of the same. Because Paul’s gospel is the same as the evangelists’—all are apostolic witness—it is quite natural that “gospel” came to mean both the oral proclamation and the written witness to it, even as it does in our current parlance. Indeed, one striking passage in both Mark and Matthew (Mark 14:9; Matt. 26:13) makes this equation quite specific. As Denis Farkasfalvy notes, in this account of the anointing of Jesus at Bethany, the evangelists suppose that the proclamation of the “good news” (the gospel as salvific message) goes hand in hand with the narrative accounts. Jesus here guarantees or even commands that any presentation of the gospel message include (at least) this narrative account.[19]

We may push this argument a bit further into the question of the titles or superscriptions for the Gospels. As I have mentioned, the title form “The Gospel according to . . .” will prove to be an important aspect of how we understand their witness to history. Related to the fact that in the early second-century the Gospels were already called euangelia, we can note that also from very early on the Gospels were being titled as codices (books as opposed to scrolls) in this way: “The Gospel according to . . .” (euangelion kata Matthaion, euangelion kata Markon, etc.).[20] We know that the New Testament documents were organized and transmitted in fairly standard manuscript packets. That is, we find that the Gospels (or more accurately, the fourfold Gospel)[21] were regularly bound and copied together, with the consistent titling of “The Gospel according to . . .”[22] This was often followed by other sections, also grouped and titled: the book of Acts (praxeis), the General Epistles (epistolai katholikai), the Epistles of Paul (epistolai Paulou), and the Revelation of John (apokalypsis Iōannou).[23] This indicates that at least by the time of this kind of editorial activity, the word “gospel” had come to refer to a literary genre and not only its older and more generic meaning of “a proclamation of good news.”[24]

How early this occurred we cannot know for certain. Martin Hengel argues most strongly for their originality. That is, Hengel believes that Mark’s designation of his work as a “Gospel” became well known and widely accepted.[25] Then, when publishing their subsequent and related works, Matthew, Luke, and John also appeared with the same now-accepted literary designation. The other evangelists did not necessarily title their works “The Gospel according to [me].” In fact, they would have presumably been content with other descriptions such as “the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ” (Matt. 1:1) or an “orderly narrative” (akribēs diēgēsis from Luke 1:1–2). But because of Mark’s influence, these later Gospels were always published and disseminated with these superscriptions.[26] In my opinion the strongest argument for the originality of these titles (at the publication level) is that ancient books were rarely anonymous, and the apostolic connection for these narrative accounts was especially important for their use in the church.[27] Another weighty argument for their originality from Hengel is that suddenly in the second century these titles appear consistently and are referred to as authoritative. It is difficult to imagine this happening if the titles were not original.[28] Indeed, ancient books were often identified with a variety of titles, but this is not the case for the Gospels; they are consistently referred to together as “The Gospel according to . . .” This is most easily explained if they were on the autographs or at least very earliest copies made.

Regardless of whether one is convinced by these arguments, it is clear that our word “gospel” very early underwent a transition or, better, expansion to include both an oral and written sense of “good news” related to Jesus Christ. But we have still not examined the four Gospels themselves to see how they define and nuance the word. Pride of canonical place leads us to listen attentively to the evangelists’ treatment of “gospel.” We will find that there is great consistency in their explanation of “gospel,” yet it is not exactly what many of us would expect or offer in our earlier brainstorming activity.

“Gospel” in Mark

After his opening salvo, Mark uses the noun euangelion six more times,[29] but the most important occurrences are found in 1:14 and 15: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel’” (1:14–15).

After his opening words in 1:1, in a span of a mere twelve verses Mark introduces us to two men. One is a wild-man prophet who is preaching and baptizing in the wilderness. The other is the Spirit-imbued Son of God about whom John is preaching and who undergoes his own wilderness trial before bursting onto the public scene in Galilee. This second man, Jesus, has as his message the announcement that God’s promised reign or kingship[30] has drawn near and consequently the call to repent and believe in this message. Most important for our inquiry, this message is explicitly called “the gospel of God” or simply “the gospel” (Mark 1:14–15). This is the key defining point for Mark’s explanation of what “gospel” means. The other four uses of “gospel” in the rest of his narrative are nondescript, assuming the definition and explanation given here. What is this definition? It is that the “gospel” is the ...