About the Book
My book is a scholarly account of recent developments in
the study of the Gospels. Most of what is in it will be new to most
of my readers.
It is written to be intelligible to anyone with
an interest in the Gospels, but is designed to be particularly helpful
to clergy and all who teach the New Testament. I call it a
Handbook because, although quite small at just over 200 pages, it
is in part a reference book. It includes tables of Synoptic
Parallels, Outlines of each Gospel, Lists of Parables and Miracle
Stories, and other information referred to in the text but set out
in summary form. There are also special chapters on the Birth
and Passion Narratives, the Empty Tomb, the Lord’s Prayer,
the Friends and Family of Jesus, and the Sermon on the Mount.
For many years the evangelists have been thought of as editors,
dependent upon written sources, including the infamous Q. They were
believed to have threaded the stories, which they found in them,
randomly, “like beads on a string”. This has now been
shown to have been mistaken - there were no such written sources.
Instead the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) are successive
re-writes of a single Gospel. The evangelists were not editors but
authors or, as they would have said themselves, Scribes, writing
Scripture for the church’s use.
Mark’s sources are inaccessible, but Matthew’s Gospel
is a re-write of Mark’s, and Luke’s is a conflation
of the other two. Each also added new material of his own, in the
style of Jewish midrash. And in doing this they left fingerprints,
so that we can build up a clear picture of each evangelist’s
own perspective on the Gospel.
Our understanding of John’s Gospel, too, has moved on with
the discovery of the identity of the Beloved Disciple. It shows
his to have been a Gospel for Pauline Christians.
If all of this seems complicated to some, or controversial to others,
be assured that it is based on sound scholarship and, taken chapter
by chapter, is accessible to anyone with an interest in the Gospels.
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