Chapter Seven
The Gospels
Traditional Approaches to the Gospels
BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP ON THE GOSPELS has been preoccupied with questions of
historical authenticity, theological content, relation to the religious milieu of the
first century church, literary precedents or models, and stages of oral trans-
mission that can be traced backward to a primitive original from the written form
in which we currently find the Gospels.
A Literary Approach to the Gospels
A literary approach substitutes an entirely different agenda of interests that are
complementary to the traditional questions and that have been unjustifiably ne-
glected. A literary approach begins with the conviction that the Gospels are first of
all stories. Once this premise is accepted, the reader’s attention focuses on a clus-
ter of related concerns: unifying plot conflicts that move toward a final resolution;
the overall structure and progression of the story; narrative and artistic patterns
such as repetition, contrast, and framing; the characters who generate the action;
the settings in which events occur; the point of view from which the story is told,
including patterns of approval and disapproval of characters and events that the
story encourages the reader to adopt; image patterns and symbolism; style (with
emphasis on economy of expression, choice of concrete details that suggest a
bigger picture, the prominence of dialogue and speech patterns, and the poetic
bent of Jesus); and the characteristics of the narrative “world” that each Gospel
builds in the reader’s imagination.
The Primacy of Story
These matters have long received scattered attention, but not until recently have
they been integrated into a systematic and popular approach to the Gospels. The
main new factor is a growing consensus that the primary form of the Gospels is
narrative or story, not sermon or saying. Above all, literary critics are now saying,
the Gospels consist of characters doing certain things in a series of settings. “The
genre characteristics of the gospel are. . .narrative characteristics,” writes a biblical
scholar as he criticizes the inadequacies of traditional approaches.¹ “The Gospel
writers produced neither volumes of learned exegesis nor sermons,” writes an-
other; “rather, they told stories; and if we wish to understand what the Gospels
say, we should study how stories are told.”² And a third warns that “there are spe-
cial aspects of narrative composition which biblical scholars will continue to ig-
nore if there is not greater awareness of how stories are told and how they
communicate.”³ In short, the starting point for understanding the Gospels is what
I said about stories in chapter 2.
The Hybrid Nature of the Gospels
If we come to the Gospels with the usual narrative expectations of cause-effect
plot construction, a strict beginning-middle-end framework, and the principle of
single action, we will be continuously frustrated. The Gospels are too episodic
and fragmented, too self-contained in their individual parts, and too thoroughly a
hybrid form with interspersed nonnarrative elements to constitute this type of uni-
fied story. The Gospels are an encyclopedic or mixed form. They include elements
of biography, historical chronicle, fiction (the parables), oration, sermon, dialogue
(drama), proverb, poem, tragedy, and comedy.
The Realism of the Gospels
This very mixture and randomness produce an unusually powerful realism. They
capture a sense both of the kind of life that Jesus actually lived and of what it
would have been like to live through the experiences narrated in the Gospels. The
kaleidoscopic variety of scenes, events, characters, dialogues, speeches, and en-
counters, always revolving around Jesus at the center, conveys an astonishing
sense of reality.
The Portrait of Jesus in the Gospels
The unifying focus of the Gospels is the central character, Jesus. How, then, is
Jesus portrayed? Let us pause for a moment to analyze how three types of visual
art—a photograph, a painted portrait, and an abstract painting—portray a land-
scape or person.⁴ The photograph is virtually objective: it shows every detail as it
appears to the eye (with the corresponding limitation that it cannot highlight a
given aspect of the scene or offer an interpretation of the subject). A painted por-
trait is more selective in its details, highlighting whatever features of the subject a
painter wishes to call attention to as he or she tries to capture the spirit of a scene
or event or character. An abstract painting conveys only a vague impression of its
subject and depends almost wholly on the subjective response of the viewer for
its final content.
Given these three possibilities, the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels is most
like the portrait. The Gospel writers did not record everything about Jesus. They
were highly selective in what they included. Through a combination of selection of
material, arrangement, repetition, contrasts (foils), and interpretive commentary,
each Gospel writer produced a verbal portrait in which certain features of Jesus
and his message are highlighted.
Complementary Perspectives in the Four Gospels
Because the Gospel portraits are interpretive in nature, the four Gospels are com-
plementary. Trying to harmonize them into a single photograph is, from a literary
perspective, unnecessary (though I do not thereby imply that a literary approach is
sufficient by itself). Someone has proposed the helpful analogy between the
Gospels and the slow-motion replays that are familiar to us in television coverage
of sports events:
In these replays the action can be dramatically slowed down so that one is able
to see much more than one was able to see in the action as it actually oc-
curred. If one is given the full treatment—closeup, slow-action, forward-and-
re-verse, split-screen, the same scene from several perspectives, and with the
verbal commentary and interpretation of an expert superimposed—one has a
fair analogy of what the evangelists do. . . .One might add to the force of the
analogy by pointing out that the true significance of certain plays can only be
known after the game is over. Now they are often seen in a new light, their true
meaning dependent on what subsequently transpired.⁵
As we watch a television event from various angles, we often do not even see the
same people or scenic details from one perspective to the next. Might the same
thing not be true of the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus?
The Narrative World of the Gospels
Each of the Gospels creates its own narrative “world,” and one of the best general
approaches to the Gospels as stories is to allow them to build a total, self-
contained picture in our imaginations. Someone has rightly said that in every story
there is presented to us a special world with its own space and time, its own
ideological system, and its own standards of behavior. In relation to that
world, we assume (at least in our first perceptions of it) the position of an
alien spectator. . . . Gradually we enter into it, becoming more familiar with its
standards, accustoming ourselves to it, until we begin to perceive this world
as if from within.⁶
In Matthew’s Gospel, for example, we enter a Jewish world where Old Testament
prophecies and religious practices are a constant force, where Jesus is repeatedly
portrayed in terms of royalty, and where the teaching of Jesus is presented in very
orderly fashion. When we read the Gospel of Luke, we are in quite a different
world, a cosmopolitan world in which people on the social and religious fringes—
women, outsiders, the poor, people in shady professions—are important because
they are the ones who receive Goďs grace.
SUMMARY
The Gospels, taken as literary wholes, are first of all stories. As readers we can
best organize our total impressions of them around such narrative concerns as
the characterization of the central hero, the general (but not strict) chronological
arrangement of incidents in the life of Jesus, the presence of unifying plot con-
flicts (they mainly involve Jesus and groups of characters such as the disciples
and Pharisees), a linear or progressive movement of the action to the climactic
death and resurrection of Jesus (if we count chapters, the four Gospels devote
anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-eight percent of the total story to the Passion
and Resurrection), and the distinctive narrative “world” that unifies each Gospel.
Individual Stories in Gospels
If narrative provides a literary framework for a Gospel as a whole, it is an equally
good device for dealing with individual narrative units within the Gospels. These
brief stories will yield their meanings best if we ask the usual narrative questions:
where? who? what happens? At the level of action, these brief stories (unlike a
Gospel as a whole) follow the Aristotelian principle of one event leading by a
cause-effect link to the next event. These stories are tightly constructed, with one
detail producing the next in a marvelously coherent fashion. Most of them have a
central conflict moving to resolution, and many of them progress toward a cli-
mactic epiphany (moment of revelation, insight, understanding). The story of
Jesus’ meeting with the woman at the well (John 4:1–42) is a classic case of how a
Gospel story moves from one event to the next in a seamless progression from an
initial situation to a final resolution or epiphany.⁷
Individual Gospel Stories as Small Dramas
Because the Gospels contain so much dialogue and encounter, it is also a helpful
procedure for many of the longer episodes to lay out the story into separate dra-
matic scenes, as though it were a play, focusing on each segment and also noting
the sequence or positioning of scenes as we move through the episode from
beginning to end. Many of these stories are, in fact, dramas in miniature. As a
variation on this model, we can approach some of the episodes as though we
were watching the event on television. There are distant (overview) shots, close-
ups, shifting of focus from one speaker to another, scenes of the crowd, and so
forth.
Genres Within the Gospels
Another thing we can do with individual units within the Gospels is to identify the
precise subtype to which a given unit belongs. The Gospels are made up of sev-
eral general types of material. Many of them can be further subdivided (see chart
on following page). There are, for example, six specific types of pronouncement
stories: correction stories, objection stories, commendation stories, quest stories,
test stories, and inquiry stories.⁸
How Knowing the Genre Helps a Reader
What does such a taxonomy of genres achieve? It tells us what to look for in a
given Gospel passage. It usually provides the best descriptive framework for orga-
nizing a given unit. And sometimes the correct interpretation of a unit depends on
identifying the precise genre of the passage. It is important for the interpretation
of a pronouncement story, for example, to know that story and saying correlate
with each other as stimulus and response. Frequently some of the details in a
story will seem irrelevant until we place the passage into the right literary family,
when suddenly every detail falls into place.
Nonnarrative Elements in Gospels
The list of subtypes reveals that, although narrative is the overriding framework
for the Gospels, much of the material falls into genres covered elsewhere in this
book. The sayings and discourses of Jesus need to be approached with the tools
appropriate to poetry, proverb, parable, satire, and apocalypse (visionary liter-
ature).
SUMMARY
The Gospels are stories about Jesus. To describe and interpret them, we need to
apply all that we know about narrative as a literary form. Within that general cate-
gory, there is much that is unique about these stories, including the range of spe-
cific literary types into which they can be divided.
Further Reading
The best overview of literary commentary on the Gospels is the excerpts col-
lected under “Gospel as a Literary Form” and the four individual Gospels in The
New Testament in Literary Criticism, ed. Leland Ryken (New York: Frederick Ungar,
1984). David Rhoads and Donald Michie, Mark as Story: An Introduction to the
Narrative of a Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), is a model for approaching a
Gospel as literary narrative. On a briefer scale, I conduct a sequential literary anal-
ysis of the Gospel of John in The Literature of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
1974), pp. 276–91. Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis does something similar with the
Gospel of Mark in Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives (Nashville: Abing-
don, 1974), pp. 296–329. John Drury’s Luke (New York: Macmillan, 1973) is an
example of a commentary that shows great sensitivity to the narrative qualities of
