The Four Types of Gospel by Timothy McDermott, O.P.

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Dr John Marsh, in his excellent Penguin commentary on St John’s gospel, remarks that ‘the gospels read so very much like historical narratives of what took place that it requires effort not to treat them exclusively as such, but to understand them as much more concerned to indicate what was going on in the narrative provided’ (p. 52). One must make the same effort when faced with the differences between the four gospels : these are not simply re-editions, revisions, expansions of one basic ‘life of the historical Jesus’. As Dr Marsh puts it:

If even Mark is not constructed chronologically but theologically (i.e. is not concerned simply to report what took place but always to make plain what was going on), then any correction of Mark made by John could not, in the nature of things, be simply chronological. Any ‘correction’ would primarily be concerned with theology, with meaning, with what war going on and only secondarily by implication, as it were, with chronology, with what took place (p. 49).

This is well said, and nowadays commonly recognized. But is it enough? Is one merely shifting from the idea that later gospels were written to correct earlier gospels’ facts, to the idea that later gospels were written to correct earlier gospels’ theological ideas ? To shift from thinking of gospellers as biographers to thinking of them as theologians seems still to perpetuate the idea that the gospels are four examples of one type of writing. I prefer to think that the differ- ences between the four gospels are a consequence of their authors having wished to write four tykes of book.

Let me try an analogy with the life of Martin Luther. A man might write about Luther’s life in at least four ways (in fact, of course, many more). He might, for example, be interested in Luther as a personal challenge to the people who knew him, be fascinated by the protagonist in a dramatic human situation: he might write a p2.r (called simply ‘Luther’?). Another man might be inspired to write on ‘The Luther of early Lutheranism’-a memoir of a founder, treating of him as reflected in the early form of the movement he founded, playing off the facts of his life against the characteristic impress that life left on the movement. A third man might be more interested in the impress Luther left on the whole of modern history, and write a historical study of ‘Luther and the Inauguration of the Modern World’. Luther might emerge as one of Sir Kenneth Clark’s

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‘universal men’ round which the understanding of a period of history could be organized. Or yet again, a man might universalize the life of Luther in quite a different way and write a philosophical thesis with some such title as ‘History as Protest’, in which Luther’s life became the archetype of all historical events, a sort of philo- sophical clue as to what a historical event is, as to what history is. Now these are four different types of book appealing to four different types of people. I would suggest that the four gospels are different types of book in this sense (appealing to four different types of people, perhaps) ; and that to class them together as biographies or as theological works would be like classing the above lives of Luther together as memoirs or as philosophical theses.

For example, Mark presents Jesus as a dramatic personal challenge to the people who knew him, a person who precipitated a dramatic situation only resolvable by the cross. Matthew is more concerned with comparing the stories of Jesus with the early constitution of the movement springing from him, and so writes a different type of book: the Church’s memoir of its founder. Luke writes a study of Jesus as the figure round whom the understanding of a unique period (indeed, the period) in world history must be organized, as the ‘universal man’ par excellewe. John writes a different type of book again, for here the life of Jesus has become the archetype of what history is, and more than that, the archetype for understanding the eternal event which is God. John is propounding the thesis that Christ is life, the true life.

We call all four books ‘gospels’ not because this word names a particular type of literature, but because the one life of Christ which is their content somehow dominates the different types of book they are. Whereas in the case of Luther the understanding of his life would, in different ways, be serving the different interests of the authors, in the gospels the different interests of the authors are all made to serve the understanding of Christ’s life. It is the life of Christ itself that is the gospel; and the four New Testament books are that gospel according to Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.

To prove the point I am making would obviously require more space than is available in this article, but let me try to illustrate it by examining the different ways in which the four gospellers incorporate in the structures of their different books one element of Jesus’ life- his journeying.

MARK The middle section of Mark’s gospel describes a journey of Jesus

and his disciples from Caesarea Philippi in the far north of Palestine to Jerusalem in the south (8, 27-10, 5 2 ) . Before this journey every- thing has taken place in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee (1, 14- 8, 26) ; after it everything takes place in Jerusalem (1 1 , 1-16, 8). Without doubt this scheme artificially simplifies Jesus’ travels, and

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is designed like the stage-settings of a three-act play to articulate three phases in the dramatic ‘action’ of the gospel. As with any drama, we are going to be asked to yield ourselves gradually to the experience of certain characters, in this case a small group of Galileans, and to suffer the ‘action’ of the drama with them. Apparently firmly settled in their routine of life, this group is to be suddenly confronted with the overwhelming mystery and challenge of Jesus (setting: in Galilee) ; they are to set a hesitant first foot on the road of response, and as a result are to be whirled away into a humiliation and a catastrophe that they are powerless to control (setting: the road from Galilee to Jerusalem). And then they are to be as suddenly abandoned, their whole life in pieces . . . only to discover that-can it be? dare they believe?-it is Life itself that has overwhelmed them, seized them, that they are wondrously reborn.

And so Mark starts in Galilee with ordinary fishermen abruptly challenged (1, 16-20), with something ‘new’ sweeping the whole land (1, 21-45) and challenging all that is ‘old’ (2, 1-3, 12). I t is Jesus, come (he says) to confront the rule of evil (3, 20-35), to open the world to the rule of God (4, 1-34) and dispossess Satan of his strongholds (4, 35-5, 43). Slowly the eyes and the ears of the small group are opened (6, 1-8, 26) and one of their number is led to con- fess that, whatever other men may say and think, Jesus is the promised Messiah, he in whom God’s rule has broken into the world (8,27-29).

The closer one examines the structure of this first act of Mark’s drama, set in the disciples’ Galilean homeland, the greater the literary and dramatic power it reveals. Thus it divides into three ‘scenes’,l each of which is introduced by a step forward in the experience of the disciples: their first challenge (1, 16-20), their establishment as a group of twelve (3, 13-19), their first active sharing in Jesus’ own mission (6, 7-30). Each scene is developed with great constructive skill. The first begins with one compact day devoted to the first shock of confrontation with the ‘new’ (1, 21-45) and then shows the collision of ‘new’ and ‘old’ in a terse cluster of five con- flict-stories (2, 1-3, 6).2 The second scene begins to interpret: the ‘new’ is nothing less than the rule of God struggling with men’s acquiescence in the rule of Satan (3, 20-35), it is as yet only a seed that few can see (4, 1-34) but it has power to pacitjr the primeval chaos (4, 35-41), to exorcize the hosts of evil that roam unfettered the unholy lands of the pagans (5, 1-20), and to show up death as a mere sleep from which mankind can be awakened (5, 21-43). The third scene takes the question which has haunted the ‘action’ up till now and faces the disciples with it explicitly: ‘Who is Jesus?’ The question having been posed (6, 1-6, 1P-16), a carefully con-

1The three scenes are announced perhaps in the act’s opening words: ‘1, The Time is fulfilled. 2, The kingship of God is at hand. 3, Repent and believe the gospel’ (I , 15).

*‘Who can forgive sins?’ (2, 1-12). ‘Why does he eat with sinners?’ (2, 13-17). ‘Why do your disciples not fast?’ (2, 18-22). ‘Why do they/you break the sabbath?’ (2,23-28; 3, 1-45).

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structed series of incidents’ shows Jesus struggling with the hardness of his disciples’ hearts and opening their ears and their eyes (6, 30- 8, 26), until finally Peter is led to answer the question and recognize the Messiah (8, 27-29). And so, as the disciples make their first hesitant step on the road of response to Jesus’ challenge, Mark brings his first act to a close.

But now a second phase in the drama begins, for this first hesitant step commits the disciples to a journey which will snatch them away from all that has meant home in Galilee and absorb them into the destiny of Jesus to be played out in Jerusalem. The setting of Mark’s second act is a journey from the extreme north of Palestine to Jerusalem in the south, and its theme is no longer the disciples’ confrontation with the mystery of Jesus but the implications of their response to it, their ‘following’ of him. They are setting out with hope and glory in their hearts, maybe, ‘following’ him who can satisfy the need of all mankind; they will have to learn that his road actually leads to humiliation and catastrophe.

Again the act falls clearly into three scenes, each of which is now introduced by a reference to the stage of the journey (Caesarea Philippi; passing through Galilee; going up to Jerusalem) and by a prophetic announcement of the end of the road: the passion, death and resurrection of the Son of Man (8, 27-31 ; 9, 30-32; 10, 32-34). In each case the announcement is followed by an example of how the disciples misunderstand the road they are travelling, and how Jesus must insist that the way of the Son of Man is a way of humility and of suffering service.

Thus, in the first scene Peter refuses to accept the announcement (8, 32-33) and Jesus must insist that ‘following’ involves the self- denial of the cross (8, 34ff). And this is commented by the incidents of the transfiguration and the healing of the epileptic boy, in which the glorious Old Testament picture of God shown to Moses and Elijah is left behind (9, 1-13) and exchanged for the picture of a

lWith superb artistry Mark patterns the eight incidents in such a way that the second four reflect the first four. First group: 1. Jesus as provider of bread enough for all (6, 30-56),

2. Opposition from the Pharisees (7, 1-23), 3. Restatement: bread enough for all (7, 24-30), 4. The opening of deaf ears (7, 31-37).

Second group: 5. Jesus as provider of bread enough for a11 (8, 1-10), 6. Opposition from the Pharisees (8, 11-12), 7. Restatement: bread enough for all (8, 14-21), 8. The opening of blind eyes (8, 22-26).

Mark is linking the need of the disciples (under the symbol of deafness and blindness) with the self-revealing gift of Jesus (undrr the symbol of bread). The first desert feeding leading up to a manifestation of Jesus’ power on the lake (literally ‘Take heart; I AM, have no fear’) reminds us of the Old Testament manna (cf. Exodus 16, 12: ‘At twilight you shall eat flesh and in the morning be satisfird with bread; then you shall know that I am YHWH your God’). Then Mark contrasts the ritual exclusivism of the Pharisees with the availability of God’s bread to all. Then comes an apparent discontinuity in the pattern: the healing of a deaf man. But when the fifth and sixth incidents have briefly served to set the pattern off again, a seventh incident draws the threads together: it is the disciples who are deafand blind to the all-sufficiency of the ‘new’ bread. And so Mark ends with the healing of a blind man in two stages, referring back symbolically to the twofold pattern of his whole scene.

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compassionate God sharing the torture and convulsion of human flesh and thus winning a triumphant new life for man (9, 14-29). In the second scene the disciples’ obsession with the question who among them is the greatest, is answered by a collection of Jesus’ teachings on the way of Christian life as that of ‘little ones’, for ‘the first will be last and the last first’ (9, 33-10, 31). And finally, in the third scene, James’ and John’s desire for glory is countered by Jesus’ teaching that they must share the lot of the Son of Man who ‘came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (10, 35-45). And so the act ends, like the previous one, with a miracle of the blind seeing and following Jesus as he makes his final approach to Jerusalem (10, 46-52).

And now comes the climax of the drama, in which we, with the disciples, are faced with the final question. Is this the story of a man destroying himself by intolerable behaviour : entering God’s city as though he were its king (11, 1-11), accusing the very centre of Jewish religion of worthlessness ( 1 1,12-12,12), provoking the hostility ofPharisee (12, 13-17), Sadducee (12, 18-27) and scribe (12,28-44), threatening the city with destruction (13, 1-37) ? Or is it the story of a day of judgment descending on his city, the coming of the master of the house ‘in the evening or at midnight or at cockcrow or in the morning’ to find his servants asleep (1 3, 35) ? Is evening in the upper room, midnight in the garden, cockcrow in the high priest’s court- yard, morning before Pilate the judgment of Jesus or the judgment of Judas, Peter, the disciples, the high priests, Pilate, the people ? (14, 1-15, 15). Who is mocking whom when, at his death, he is proclaimed king? (15, 16-32). How are we to interpret the juxta- position of Jesus’ cry of forsakenness with the tearing down of the veil which separated God’s dwelling place from man’s, and with the words of the Roman soldier who ‘when he saw that Jesus thus breathed his last, said: Truly, this man was God’s son’ (15, 33-39) ? Are these last words meant to remind us of our privileged glimpse of Jesus before he met his disciples, when the heavens were ‘torn open’ and a voice from heaven declared : This is my beloved Son ? (Mark’s prologue: 1, 1-14).

The third act ends; but then occurs what seems to me Mark’s most dramatic stroke of all. A short epilogue (15, 40-16, 8) suddenly introduces quite new characters of whom we had not previously heard. The disciples are gone, scattered, broken. On to the empty stage step women, those who had humbly served Jesus, ‘little ones’ who had been overlooked, and as they prepare to do their last service and finally proclaim his death, there comes a fearful new and sudden twist: ‘He is risen, he is not here!’ They flee in awe and trembling and say nothing to anyone ‘for they were afraid’.’ Mark remains true at the end to his whole dramatic presentation: the mystery of

lIt is generally recognized that Mark’s original text ends at 16,8.

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Christ is one which men cannot understand, which cannot be told. . . . But, as the curtain falls, it is alive and challenging us.

Like the other gospel-writers Mark is concerned with the life of Jesus, but, unlike the others, he presents it first and foremost as a dramatic challenge to the people who knew Jesus, to his main characters-the disciples, and thus to all those who read and yield themselves to the drama. And so the journeying of Jesus is drawn into the service of this dramatic challenge, as the terrible and glorious journey which Jesus invited his disciples to share, and to which Mark now invites us. If we will go with him to Jerusalem, then he will go before us to Galilee and there we will see him (16, 7). But we must come to that vision ourselves; it cannot be told.

MATTHEW What cannot be told in Mark is told in Matthew. He ends his

gospel with the disciples’ vision of Jesus in Galilee, and in so doing he does not merely expand Mark, he changes Mark’s viewpoint entirely. He does not leave us with challenged disciples but with committed ones, he does not leave us with a Christ questioning us but with a Christ commanding us: ‘All authority has been given to me. Go and make disciples of all nations teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you’ (28, 16-20). Moreover, it is this Christ who appears throughout the gospel : although Matthew’s account often shows a word-for-word parallelism with Mark’s, he nevertheless succeeds in relaxing nearly every moment of Mark’s dramatic tension and totally abandons his dramatic structure. In place of the dramatic struggle of Jesus for the faith of his disciples, we have the picture of a great teacher instructing his already- committed following, of an incipient Church faithful to its founder and contrasted with those who rejected him. Matthew is building up a didactic account of the Church as the true Israel founded by the fulfiller of the Old Testament prophecies.

So it is that Matthew starts with the genealogy and birth of the new king (1-2), replaces Mark’s abrupt opening day of authoritative power (Mark 1, 21-45) with a long exposition of authoritative teaching (Matt. 4, 23-7, 28), and then follows this by collecting miracles from very diverse parts of Mark‘s drama into one ‘tableau’ or ‘stained-glass window’ of mighty deeds (8, 1-9, 34). Immediately afterwards Jesus launches into another long instruction com- missioning his disciples as sharers in his power, in such a way that we are already conscious of them as the budding missionary Church (9, 35-11,l). In later passages where Mark had described the disciples as deaf and blind, Matthew contrasts their hearing and their vision with the deafness and blindness of the ordinary people (cf. Mark 4, 10-13 with Matt. 13, 10-17; the omission in Matthew of Mark 6, 52; 7, 31-37; 8, 22-26; and the softening of Mark 8, 14-21

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into a temporary misunderstanding at Matt. 16, 5-12). And at the same time he begins to build up a picture of Peter and the Church by his insertions at 14, 28-31, 16, 17-19, 17, 24-27. Mark’s account of the way of discipleship as being that of ‘little ones’, provoked by the disciples’ desire to be great (Mark 9, 33-50), becomes an exposition of charity in the Church in response to a simple question. And one could go on multiplying such examples. But everything shows that Matthew has transformed the dramatic character and structure of Mark into a much less tense and more didactic structure, woven out of a portrait of Jesus and his instructions for the early Church. This is the Church‘s memoir of its founder, his teachings and his command- ments.’

If we now ask about Christ’s journeying in Matthew, we shall find that the starkness of Mark’s central journey to Jerusalem is much reduced, Matthew does not start it from Caesarea Philippi but much later from Galilee (cf. Matt. 17,22 and 19, l), and by so doing destroys its dramatic relationship to the threefold prophecy of Calvary and the threefold objections of the disciples. Moreover, Matthew intro- duces a network of continual withdrawals from one place to another which he seems to explain by Jesus’ wish to avoid wrangling (12, 15-21) and which connects with the instructions to the missionary Church to move from place to place to avoid persecution (10, 23). All in all, the journey theme no longer marks out one phase of a drama-the disciples choosing, somewhat in the dark, to set their foot upon Christ’s road-but rather haunts the whole narrative, and represents the missionary atmosphere that the committed Christian life must have.

LUKE If Matthew, in expanding Mark to include the vision of Jesus in

Galilee, betrays a wholly different literary intent, what are we to say of Luke, who tells us of forty days of resurrection appearances, leading up to a solemn exit from this world, which itself initiates a whole new story-the story of the Acts of the Apostles? The very fact that Luke’s gospel is only one half of a two-volume work com- prising the gospel and the Acts, betrays its different literary form.

The gospel starts (after two chapters of prologue) with Jesus’ baptism, described later at Acts 13, 23 as his eisodos, his coming into the world. When he turns his face towards Jerusalem it is not simply to go to his death, but to go to his ascension: the exodos or going out of the world of Luke 9, 31 or the ‘taking up’ of Luke 9, 51. But for this ‘taking up’ which concludes Jesus’ journey through history we must wait till chapter 1 of Acts, and there it is presented as the immediate historical cause of a new baptism, the baptism of the

11 can no more accept the Jerusalem Bible’s introductory description of atthew’s gospel as ‘a dramatic account in seven acts of the coming of the kingdom of heaven’, than I can its remark that ‘the plan Mark follows is the least systematic of all the synoptics’.

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apostles with the Holy Spirit (Acts 1 , 5; cf. Acts 2). And this new baptism initiates a new journey, the journey of the apostles out from Jerusalem, through Judea and Samaria, to the ends of the world (Acts 1,8). This journey through the world of the apostles is a witness to the journey through the world of Christ, and continually imitates it (cf. Acts 7, 55-60 with Luke 22, 69 and 23, 34, 46; and Paul’s last journey to his arrest with Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem).

The themes on which Luke lays stress are all themes which help to weld together Jesus’ journey and the journey of the apostles. For example, he stresses at every opportunity the importance of Jerusalem, for it is the place where Jesus’ journey will end and the apostles’ journey begin. Again, he stresses the period of the resurrec- tion-the forty days of converse between Jesus after his death and the apostles before their mission. It is this period above all which proclaims the triumph of God in the world, and to which the apostles must witness. To fill Judas’ place, says Peter, ‘one of the men who have accompanied us during all the period in which the Lord Jesus came in and went out in our presence, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us-one of these men must become with us a witness to his resurrection’ (Acts 1, 2 1-22). Again, special emphasis is laid on the Holy Spirit, whose all- pervasive activity welds together both Jesus’ life and that of the early Church: he it is who leads Jesus forth on his journey (Luke 3, 22; 4, 1, 14, 18, 21) and later leads the apostles on theirs (Acts 2 and passim).

Out of all this Luke builds up one unified picture of Jesus pulling all past history towards a critical moment in Jerusalem, and of the apostles’ mission pushing all future history onwards and outwards from there. History from Adam is summed up in the glory of this one man (cf. Luke 3, 23-38), who is then the ‘author of life’ (Acts 3, 12-16) for future ages. This is no longer Mark’s immediate personal drama or Matthew’s memoir of the Church’s founder, but is a real study of Jesus as the universal man round which the period of world history is organized. For Luke the journey to Jerusalem is not merely the challenge set before the disciples (as in Mark), nor merely part of the general missionary atmosphere of the Christian Church (as in Matthew), but is the very ongoing of history itself- passing from creation through the events in Jerusalem to the second coming of Christ.

JOHN

But for John this whole history-from creation through Christ’s exaltation to his second coming-is one single enormous event, the outward manifestation of the event which is God. For God himself is an eternal journey: the journey of the Son from the Father to the Father. John identifies the life of Christ with the creative word which came from the Father in Genesis, and with the word which will

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speak eternal life for all at the resurrection and take us to the Father.

The creative word was ‘Let there be light!’. This is the word which has become flesh in Christ, the true light (John 1, 1-18); this is the old commandment which we have had from the beginning and which is coming true in Christ (1 John 2, 7-8). Christ’s life is the creative archetype of the whole history of the world,l the word which speaks the world into true existence. I t is thus also the call of the whole world to the Father, the call of the whole world to that eternal life which is but another name for the life of God. From chapter 7 of John’s gospel onward the symbol of a journey to Jerusalem (firstly in secret, then at chapter 11 in deadly earnest) is woven in to the manifestation of Jesus as the journey to the Father: ‘the way, the truth and the life’ (cf. 13, 1-3; 13, 33-14, 12).

For Mark Christ’s journeying performed the dramatic function of presenting an existential challenge to faith ; for Matthew it performed the didactic function of instructing the nascent Church in its missionary obligations; for Luke it became the central and critical period of the journey of all history. For John the journey has become the ‘event’ of God himself, the becoming flesh of the eternal relation- ship between Son and Father, the coming out from the Father of the Son and the return of that Son to the Father: an event which is the archetype of all history.

Mark‘s ‘drama’, Matthew’s ‘memoir’, Luke’s ‘historical study’, John’s ‘revelation of God’ are all gospels, but what different types of gospel they are !

‘In John’s first four chapters we find symbolized the whole of Luke’s history as we have just described it. A journey of Jesus from Judea to Galilee during which the disciples learn to follow him and finally see his glory symbolizes the whole gospel story as we find it in Mark (John 1, 19-2, 12); a second journey which starts from the last Passover of Jesus’ life (2, 13-22) and passes from Jerusalem through Samaria to the resurrection of the pagan’s son in Galilee symbolizes the history of the Church as we find it in Acts (John 2, 13-4,M). Then, as though having summarized the synoptic point of view, John proceeds to identify Christ’s life with the eternal sabbath work of God in chapter 5. Christ’s life is where God has always been bringing the world to life.