Four Portraits, One Jesus Laminated Sheet

Mark L. Strauss

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780310109365
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Biography

This laminated sheet accompanies Mark L. Strauss's Four Portraits, One Jesus. Following the textbook's structure, this quick-study tool offers summaries, important definitions, dates, and concepts designed to support the students' learning experience and enhance their comprehension of what can be known from the Gospels about the central defining subject of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth.

Four Portraits, One Jesus is a thorough yet accessible introduction to the four biblical Gospels and their subject, the life and person of Jesus. Like different artists rendering the same subject using different styles and points of view, the Gospels paint four highly distinctive portraits of the same remarkable Jesus. With clarity and insight, Mark Strauss illuminates these four books, first addressing their nature, origin, methods for study, and historical, religious, and cultural backgrounds. He then moves on to closer study of each narrative and its contribution to our understanding of Jesus, investigating things such as plot, characters, and theme. Finally, he pulls it all together with a detailed examination of what the Gospels teach about Jesus’ ministry, message, death, and resurrection, with excursions into the quest for the historical Jesus and the historical reliability of the Gospels.

PART 1: INTRODUCTION TO THE FOUR GOSPELS

1. WHAT ARE THE GOSPELS?

■ The four Gospels were written to provide four unique portraits of Jesus Christ.

■ The Synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — have many common stories and similar language. The Gospel of John is written in a very different style and provides much unique material.

■ The Gospel genre may be classified as historical narrative motivated by theological concerns.

■ The Gospels are best read “vertically,” following each theological narrative through the plot from beginning to end.

■ Reading the Gospels “horizontally” — comparing their accounts with one another — enables the reader to see more clearly each Gospel’s particular themes and theology.

■ Harmonizing the Gospels into a single story risks distorting each Gospel writer’s unique contribution.

■ Greco-Roman sources outside the New Testament provide very little additional information concerning the historical Jesus.

■ The apocryphal gospels are generally late and unreliable accounts, far removed from the historical events.

Four Portraits of the One Jesus
Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
The Gospel of the Messiah	The Gospel of the suffering Son of God	The Gospel of the Savior for all people	The Gospel of the divine Son who reveals the Father
Most structured	Most dramatic	Most thematic	Most theological

2. EXPLORING THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE GOSPELS

■ The message of Jesus was originally passed down primarily by word of mouth and then gradually written down to produce our Gospels. Historical criticism examines this process.

■ Source criticism seeks to identify and evaluate the written sources used by the Gospel writers.

■ The most widely held solution to the synoptic problem is that Mark wrote first (Markan priority) and that Matthew and Luke used Mark and other sources.

■ The designation “Q” refers to the common source or sources used by Matthew and Luke in addition to Mark. The designations “M” (= Matthew’s special source) and “L” (Luke’s special source) are used for the unique material each utilized.

■ Form criticism seeks to identify and evaluate the oral (spoken) forms of the stories about Jesus that lie behind our written sources.

■ Redaction criticism evaluates the process by which the Evangelists redacted, or edited, their sources to produce the Gospels. Redaction critics try to discern the main themes and theology of each Gospel writer and to establish the Sitz im Leben (“setting in life”), the community situation in which the Gospel arose.

3. READING AND HEARING THE GOSPEL STORIES

■ Literary criticism refers to various methods which study the Gospels as unified wholes, rather than from the perspective of sources and composition history.

■ Narrative criticism examines the Gospels as story, analyzing features such as plot, character, and setting.

■ The evaluative point of view is the worldview, beliefs, and values that the implied reader is expected to adopt.

■ The plot of a narrative is the progress of the story. It is made up of events, scenes, and acts, which move forward through causation and conflict to climax and resolution.

■ Story time refers to the passage of time in the world of the text.

■ Characters can be individuals or groups. Characters can be round (complex) or flat (one dimensional); they can also be static (unchanging) or dynamic (changing).

■ Setting is all the features of the narrative world of the text. Settings can be local, temporal, or social/cultural.

■ Rhetoric refers to the narrative patterns and literary devices used by authors to achieve a response. Some of these include repetition, chiasm, inclusio, and intercalation. Metaphors, similes, similitudes, and parables carry symbolic significance.

PART 2: THE SETTING OF THE GOSPELS

4. THE HISTORICAL SETTING OF THE GOSPELS

■ The Second Temple period ran from approximately the fifth century BC to the end of the first century AD.

■ The conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC resulted in the spread of Greek language and culture (hellenization) throughout the Mediterranean region.

■ The Egyptian dynasty of the Ptolemies dominated Palestine for one hundred years following the division of Alexander’s empire. The Jews fared ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• PART 1: INTRODUCTION TO THE FOUR GOSPELS
• PART 2: THE SETTING OF THE GOSPELS
• PART 3: THE FOUR GOSPELS
• PART 4: THE HISTORICAL JESUS