The Fourfold Gospel

A Theological Reading of the New Testament Portraits of Jesus

Watson, Francis

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781493403578
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

This groundbreaking approach to the study of the fourfold gospel offers a challenging alternative to prevailing assumptions about the creation of the gospels and their portraits of Jesus. How and why does it matter that we have these four gospels? Why were they placed alongside one another as four parallel yet diverse retellings of the same story? Francis Watson, widely regarded as one of the foremost New Testament scholars of our time, explains that the four gospels were chosen to give a portrait of Jesus. He explores the significance of the fourfold gospel's plural form for those who constructed it and for later Christian communities, showing that in its plurality it bears definitive witness to what God has done in Jesus Christ. Watson focuses on reading the gospels as a group rather than in isolation and explains that the fourfold gospel is greater than, and other than, the sum of its individual parts. Interweaving historical, exegetical, and theological perspectives, this book is accessibly written for students and pastors but is also of interest to professors and scholars.

Part 1
Perspectives

At different times and places, the prophet Ezekiel and the seer John experience visions of the throne of God—or is it the throne of Christ? In one case, the throne is also a chariot, identified as such by its wheels and by the fact that it comes to meet the prophet as he meditates in exile by the waters of Babylon. In the other case, the throne stands in heaven. There are no wheels, and the seer must himself be transported into the heavenly world in order to view it. In both cases, the throne is accompanied or surrounded by four living beings, each with four different faces according to the prophet, each with one of the four different faces according to the seer.

For early readers of the canonical gospels, these scriptural images match their own experience of four very different texts that together bear witness to the one Christ. This correspondence between the different faces of heavenly creatures and earthly texts is most clearly visible in the gospels’ different starting points. There is a human face, and it corresponds to Matthew’s opening genealogy of the Jewish Jesus, descended from David and from Abraham. The lion’s face evokes the roar from the desert with which Mark introduces the wild figure of John the Baptist. The face of a calf speaks of sacrifice and the temple, which is where Luke’s narrative both begins and ends. The eagle that soars into the heights is the evangelist John, whose gospel opens by bearing witness to the eternal Word who was with God in the beginning and who was God. Like the heavenly creatures, the four evangelists behold the same divine-human reality through different pairs of eyes. These plural yet complementary perspectives are integral to the fourfold gospel, and we may follow the lead of its earlier readers in tracing them back to the divergent gospel openings.

1
The First Gospel: Jesus the Jew

In most ancient Christian references to the gospels and their origins, the evangelists are listed in the order Matthew–Mark–Luke–John, supposedly the chronological order in which they wrote. In some early Greek and Latin gospel books, the texts themselves are arranged in a different order: Matthew–John–Luke–Mark. Here Mark and John have changed places, with John now promoted to second position in view of his apostolic status and Mark relegated to fourth. Either way, Matthew is presented as the first gospel, the foundation on which the other gospels are built. The question is how and why this gospel attained its foundational status.

In this tradition of placing Matthew first there is one dissenting voice, and it is an important one. Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, made the first surviving reference to a gospel of Matthew in the early decades of the second century. On the evidence of Eusebius (who quotes him), Papias seems to have referred to Mark immediately before his reference to Matthew.1 Papias tells us that Mark’s gospel was based on Peter’s preaching, whereas Matthew “set out the sayings [of Jesus] in the Hebrew language, and each person translated them as he was able.” Eusebius presumably quotes these two closely related passages in this order because that was their order within Papias’s own text. According to Papias, Mark came first, then Matthew. Mark wrote “the things said or done by the Lord, though not in order,” whereupon Matthew compiled his own version of the Lord’s sayings. The term “gospel” is not used, but Papias probably implies that both works presented the sayings of Jesus within a narrative context.

If Papias placed Matthew after Mark, later writers always put Matthew first. That Mark was actually the first gospel to be written was the (re)discovery of the nineteenth century. But the reasons for prioritizing Matthew remain interesting and important, even if they lack credibility as purely historical claims. In the preface to book 1 of his commentary on Matthew, Origen passes on the tradition he has received

about the four gospels which alone are undisputed within the whole church under heaven: that the first to be written was the one according to Matthew, formerly a tax collector and later an apostle of Jesus Christ, who produced it for believers with a background in Judaism, writing in the Hebrew language.2

When early Christian writers assume that Matthew wrote his gospel for Jewish Christians, they probably have in mind the opening genealogy that traces Jesus’ ancestry from Abraham onward. According to John Chrysostom, who preached a series of homilies on Matthew in Antioch in the late fourth century,

It is said that Matthew, when Jewish believers came and asked him to leave in writing what he had said orally, composed his gospel in the language of the Hebrews. (And Mark in Egypt at the request of the disciples did likewise.) So Matthew, in what he wrote for the Hebrews, sought to show nothing other than that Christ was descended from Abraham and David. . . . [This] evangelist began with the genealogy; for nothing so pleases a Jew as to learn that the Christ was descended from Abraham and David.3

Here too, Matthew is the first of the gospels; Mark in Egypt followed the precedent set by Matthew in Judea. In appealing to the genealogy to establish Matthew’s Jewishness, Chrysostom assumes that the distinctive character of an individual gospel is determined by its opening. All four gospels end with passion and Easter narratives, but their starting points are different: the descent from Abraham (Matthew), the ministry of John the Baptist (Mark), Zechariah and Elisabeth (Luke), the eternal Word (John). If we wish to understand what makes Matthew Matthew and not Mark, Luke, or John, we are directed to Matthew’s opening; his genealogy establishes the character of his gospel as a whole. Matthew’s gospel was placed first because it was believed to have been written for the oldest Christian communities, which were Jewish. And this belief was based largely on an assessment of this gospel’s distinctive character, established in the genealogy of Jesus the Jew with which it begins.

Evangelist traditions of this kind were repeated again and again until they were exposed to critical scrutiny from the late eighteenth century onward. From a modern scholarly perspective, these traditions are historically questionable.4 In reality, the first to write a gospel was Mark rather than Matthew. “Matthew” and “Mark” are just convenient ways of referring to the unknown individuals responsible for compiling these two gospels. “Matthew” used “Mark” as the basis for his own work; he did not write an independent eyewitness account, and he was not an apostle. Like Mark, his primary source, he wrote in Greek, not Hebrew. When Matthew is viewed as the interpreter of Mark, the results are often illuminating, and it is understandable and right that modern scholarly work on the later text should read it in the light of the earlier one.

Within the canonical collection, however, Matthew remains the first gospel. In modern Bibles Matthew still precedes Mark just as surely as Genesis precedes Exodus. In principle an edition of the New Testament might be prepared in which the texts were arranged in chronological order, with 1 Thessalonians at the beginning, James or 2 Peter at the end, and Mark, Matthew, Luke-Acts, and John in between. Yet such an edition would make little sense. The New Testament is an anthology of twenty-seven early Christian writings organized into three distinct collections (Gospels, Pauline Epistles, Catholic Epistles), with important structural roles for Acts in the middle and Revelation at the end. If the collections are dismantled, the New Testament itself disappears; there wil...