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You need two eyes to give you any kind of depth of vision. Right now, each of your eyes is sending a picture of the outside world to your brain. The two pictures you brain receives are very slightly different. As you read, the little differences between the signals from each of your eyes are being compared by your brain and, bingo! You can see in stereo and estimate distances! The value of two slightly different points of view is incalculable; having two eyes makes it much less likely that you will bump into a lamp-post.
The gospels give us more than two perspectives; they give us four, a quadraphonic portrait of Jesus. The first three are often called the synoptic gospels, that is Matthew, Mark and Luke. Synoptic is a Greek word that means "viewed together". Imagine a formula 1 grand prix. There are three people in the commentator's box broadcasting their account of the race on three separate TV networks. They all say roughly the same thing, but each commentary is slightly different. The synoptic gospels are like this, as though Matthew, Mark and Luke had been in the same grandstand watching a race, they report Jesus life from a very similar vantage-point. Just like your eyes, the separate signals give us a richer picture than we would get with only one.
The fourth gospel is John, and is as different from the others as chalk is from cheese. It is as though John had not been in the grandstand at all, but had spent the entire race in the pits interviewing the driver and mechanics. The result is a gospel that concentrates on a small number of events in Jesus life, but has more analysis of what those events mean.
Of course, the moment two different people began to make some kind of record of Jesus life there was the possibility of some conflict between the accounts they created. For the most part the differences give us a fuller understanding of the events. There are some differences that pose more of a problem, but we are a long way from being able to say that the gospels cannot be trusted as a source of reliable information about the life of Jesus. In fact I want to try to show that they can be trusted, so let's begin by imagining that they don't even exist!
Imagine there's no gospels...
There were plenty of people writing books in the first century AD. Several of these mention Jesus and his early followers, if we put together all the information that we can from these sources we would know the following:
A man from Nazareth called Jesus lived in Galilee and Judaea when Pontius Pilate was the governor of that province. He had a brother called James. He became known as a great miracle worker and teacher, and thousands of people were drawn to follow him, some of them were Jews though many were Gentiles. His miracles were inexplicable to both sympathetic and hostile observers, some said that God was at work, others insisted that Jesus was a sorcerer. Pilate had him executed by crucifixion. His followers claimed that three days later he had risen from the dead, and many were prepared to die for this belief. The earliest communities of his followers worshipped him as a god. Within ten years of the crucifixion people were being buried in Judaea with inscriptions in their graves expressing the belief that they too will rise from the dead just like Jesus. Within twenty or thirty years there were large numbers of Christians in Rome, the centre of the empire.
This summary is compiled mainly from the writings of four contemporary sources. The first is Josephus, a pro-Roman Jewish historian who wrote a history of the Jews. There is some suspicion that early Christians tinkered with manuscripts of his books, and it is quite possible (though not certain) that some over zealous Christian scribes did insert a line or two into his work. I have not used the disputed lines of Josephus in the above summary. The second source is Tacitus (AD 55 to117), a Roman political commentator and historian who hated Christians ("a most mischievous superstition" he said). He explains why the Emperor Nero was persecuting the Christians in Rome. The third is Pliny the younger (AD 61-113), a rather indecisive Roman governor in Turkey who outlined the practices of early Christian churches in his province. He didn't like the Christians either; "a degenerate sort of cult, carried to extravagant lengths" he wrote. Two Christian women were tortured to help him reach that conclusion. Lastly, some small archaeological finds mentioning the name of Jesus have contributed to the above picture. Most people are surprised to learn that so much can be known about Jesus from books written by pagans and anti-Christian writers!
All of this is evidence that Jesus really lived, and had quite an impact on the Roman Empire. The main elements of his life are corroborated from these non-Christian sources, and some of the beliefs and practices of the most primitive Christian believers are also revealed. This is useful, but we can only glean so much from these sources of information, to discover more we need to assess the accuracy of the accounts of Jesus life written by Christians.
Memory and poetry
In the first century part of a rabbis job was to teach his pupils to remember his teachings accurately. Jesus did the same, using traditional methods proven by the rabbis through the centuries; his words were couched in semi-poetic form, and even his stories had a certain rhythm to them and were easy to remember. As children Jesus' disciples will have learned to memorize, it was an essential life-skill in their society, anyone who could not make the grade in this vital skill would simply not succeed.
Yet Galilee and Judah were literate cultures. A significant number of people could read and write, and written editions of the teachings of important rabbis were treasured. Most people have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a huge cache of written material hidden in a cave by a semi-monastic Jewish community around the time of Christ. Most of the documents are pre-Christian and testify to the abundance of written documents, writing skills and a passion for collecting this kind of material.
Wherever Jesus went he moved in literate circles and affected them very deeply. It is impossible to imagine that people like this did not write down what they had experienced at the time or soon after. This combination of memorized and written materials, circulating amongst the first Christians would have formed the first sources for those who began to feel the need to write down a fuller life of Jesus for future generations. Luke tells us that he has this kind of material in front of him as he writes his full and orderly arrangement of the life of Jesus. But he had more than a few fragments, as it turns out he had quite a library.
The scroll detectives
Luke's gospel is especially important to me. After my first year at university I was enjoying a climbing holiday in the French Alps when my partner and I decided to take a day away from the mountains. We drove to Geneva and spent the day admiring the city and looking at stuff we couldn't afford in the shop windows. Towards the end of the afternoon we returned to our car. It was parked in a side street and under the windscreen wiper was a plastic bag with some papers inside. My heart sank, it looked as though we had been given a parking ticket.
It was not a parking ticket. Someone had carefully wrapped a small English edition of Luke's gospel in the plastic bag and left it there for us to find. I looked at it dubiously. I was not religious, and not very interested in the bible, yet it was small and light, ideal for carrying with me in the mountains. I shoved it in my pocket and carried it with me for the rest of the summer. By September I was hooked, and I had to find out more about Jesus.
Luke begins his biography of Jesus with a candid confession of its purpose:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eye-witnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught."
Luke 1:1-4
Theophilus may be a fictional reader (it means "lover of God" in Greek), but it is clearly not Luke's intention to write fiction. From his prologue we learn that he was not himself an eyewitness of the life of Jesus, though he has available to him material that was written by people who did actually see what happened. He also tells us that he has done his own research, carefully establishing the facts and that he intends to put it all down in an orderly or structured manner.
What writings did Luke have in front of him as he set out to write his own account of the life of Jesus? Scholars have been researching this question for years, and their detective work has helped to get some answers at least to this question. It is probable that Luke had the Gospel of Mark in his library, because much of Mark's work is repeated very much word for word in Luke. But Mark does not tell us anything at all about the birth and childhood of Jesus and tantalizingly little about the resurrection. Clearly, Luke felt that there were gaps to be filled, and he wanted to organize his material more logically.
A lot of researchers think that Mark may have been the first synoptic gospel to be written. An early Christian writer called Papias who lived in Rome around AD 140 describes how Mark's gospel was a record of the memories of the Apostle Peter, and that though it was an accurate account it was not an orderly one. Another Roman Christian remembered Mark by his nickname, "stumpy fingers", apparently he was fondly remembered by his community and the memory that he was also "Peters disciple and interpreter" was very strong. Mark was concerned to record what Peter taught, and if Peter didn't teach it then he didn't write it. It is the shortest and fastest moving gospel, just the right size for the busy citizens of Rome to fit into their filofaxes!
If the academics are right and Mark had been the first off the blocks to write like this, it is clear that Luke depended on him a great deal, but where did he get the rest of his information from? Once more the text-detectives think they know the answer; both Matthew and Luke record similar material that cannot be found in Mark, but the similarities are so great it looks as though they have a document or documents that they are both copying from. The detectives call this source "Q", like the inventor of James Bonds gadgets. So Luke had in his library either an early gospel a bit like Mark, or a collection of smaller documents that gave him the material he needed to supplement Mark's story. If you look again at Luke's introduction he tells us that "many" had written about Jesus, it seems likely that Luke had quite a collection of written materials.
Luke had something else too. He had discovered from a written source, or by speaking to Jesus family, some of the more intimate details of the birth of Jesus that only he knew and Matthew couldn't have known about. Matthew by the same token had access to some material that Luke was probably unaware of. So in addition to Mark and document (or documents) Q both Luke and Matthew had some material of their own that the detectives call "L" and "M" respectively. This sounds more and more like a spy novel as we go on!
This reconstruction of the development of the three synoptic gospels is still a little speculative, even if it is the most widely accepted amongst New Testament researchers. But even if you forget the details one thing is worth remembering: Luke and his colleagues had a number of written accounts of the life of Jesus to go on and these must have been around from the earliest times.
The result of Luke's work is the longest of the gospels, written in beautiful Greek and displaying a passion for accuracy. So it is not enough for Luke to tell us that John the Baptist preached in the wilderness, he has to tell exactly when he began:
" In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert. He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins."
(Luke 3:1-2)
The curious thing about this passage is that Luke even gets the titles of the dignitaries right, Herod is not a king or a governor but a tetrarch. This man was very fussy!
It was this man's gospel that changed my life. When I drove out to the French Alps with my friend I was a very happy pagan, thoroughly enjoying my life and looking for nothing... well, not God anyway! By the time we drove home I had gained an ambition, more than anything else I wanted to find out if Luke's story was true. I had to clarify a nagging doubt in the back of my mind. Had Luke had just taken the story of an impressive country rabbi and made into something much bigger, the story of the Son of God?
Gospel writers or spin-doctors?
Politicians often make mistakes, but will rarely admit it. Instead, they hire media consultants to re-present the blunder as a triumph. We are familiar with the dark art of the spin-doctor; taking the facts and putting the most favorable spin on them to further their political master's career. It is sometimes said that the writers of the gospels were doing just this, re-working the life of Jesus so that an ordinary man is presented as divine, foisting their own theology on the world by putting their own words in the mouth of Jesus.
Yet the first Christians worshipped Jesus as God before the gospels were written. This is clear from early evidence, such as the writings of Pliny whom I mentioned earlier. Indeed, this was the reason so many of them faced such cruel persecution. As Roman megalomania grew, they insisted that people worship the emperor as divine, the Christians refused to do so out of loyalty to Jesus and suffered horribly as a result. So the Gospel writers didn't need to present Jesus as divine, most Christians had already made their minds up on that issue.
In fact, if Luke and co. were intending to put a favorable spin on the life of Jesus they did not do a great job. The really fascinating thing about the gospels is the way they do not hide information that could be used to discredit Jesus. As we will soon see, Matthew's gospel begins with a portrait of him as royalty, reaches a climax as Peter realizes that Jesus is the Messiah but then he ends up being crucified saying "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Now, if I had been Matthew, I would have left that rather embarrassing low-point out of my presentation of the life of Jesus. There are many other details you will find in the gospels that an intelligent spin-doctor would have left out, yet they are left in for the world to read. That shows real integrity.
The essence of spin is to be simple, repetitive and easy to understand. The gospels are the opposite, full of information that could easily be used against their central claim. They tell a story of great complexity and seem keen to miss nothing out even if it prejudices their case. If the gospel writers strike some people as naïve it is because of their simple commitment to the truth. They believed that they should tell the amazing story of Jesus just as it really was.