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What Are the Gospels?

Early one glorious evening when the sun seemed determined not to set I stopped in at my cousin’s house and found his two young boys glued to the television. It was rare to find them indoors when the weather was so good unless it was to watch Ireland play football. I wondered what programme had proved stronger than their irrepressible instinct to have real adventures outdoors. They were watching Baywatch, a series set on the beaches of southern California with huge ratings and a low budget for the cast’s wardrobe. How these Bere Island boys would compare the fantasy world of southern California with the cold pebbly beaches of West Cork where any bathers attracted admiration more for their physical courage in undressing than for their defined physiques, I discussed later with my cousin. He looked pensive.

In the old days, he said, before twenty-four hour TV, people entertained each other with the recital of their family histories. Every evening, even in the worst weather, they would do the tour of each other’s houses to sit by the peat fire with a glass of the real stuff in reach and recount again the epic stories of each household. The same stories would be repeated continuously, often re-interpreting familiar facts. There would be frequent updates with news about those who had gone to America or Australia or England. Personalities, deaths and births, feuds and reconciliations. Powerful feelings tempered by time or the instincts of justice. Storytelling was a liturgy of the island community. It was also a way of entertainment, a characteristic Irish delight in the use of imagination and words for their own sake. But it was serious too: a way of making meaning of the close-knit world of Bere Island and its now dwindling population.

Privacy and the low whisper were important values among this community that constantly communicated itself to itself. People lived so closely to each other that mistakes were hard to undo. What was said in anger or bitterness today might take years to stop hurting. But nothing went unnoticed or uncared for. Privacy did not mean isolation. And in the perspective of history all events belonged to the community not only to the individual or the family. After the invasion of television people no longer braved the winter cold, the devil that prowled abroad to chase late-night card-players on their way home or the spirits that were older even than the church’s angels and devils. People no longer did the rounds of their neighbours to talk their own stories into the larger stories of the island. Now they stay indoors and watch soaps made in Hollywood for a global market. The ancient stories were dying for lack of telling, as friendships or plants die when they are not given the time needed to tend them. To forget is the unforgiveable sin.

The gospels were written only after they had long been talked. Even today their stories need to be spoken aloud and can only be properly read within the oral as well as a bookish tradition. Word of mouth is still their essential means of transmission. And the old wisdom of the islanders applies to this story-telling as well: to tell a story you have got to believe it, to put yourself and all that is important to you, into it.

To read the gospels through is to see that, to understand who Jesus is, we must start by seeing him at the least as a teacher. Everyone agrees that Jesus is a teacher.

His way of teaching was both private and public: to an inner group of disciples and to the crowds. But it was not esoteric in a secretive sense. He told his judges at his trial that he had taught openly and not in secret.¹ He did not have a schoolhouse or Academy in the style of Greek philosophers. Instead he walked the roads of Palestine. He spoke in the open air, by the side of lakes, hillsides, in fields and also in synagogues, at meals in private homes and in the courts of the Temple in Jerusalem. He taught by parable and aphorism. His language was simple and graphic showing a preference for natural symbolism and the kind of stories which a people in touch with the life of nature and of a local community would have enjoyed. It avoided intellectual analysis and legalistic hair-splitting. He drew on well-known stories and daily images familiar to his listeners.

We know his teaching almost entirely from the four gospels. In a sense the gospels are the notes taken by others of the living words of a teacher who, like Socrates and the Buddha, did not himself write books. Only once is he shown writing when he bends to write unknown words in the dust.² He communicated his message orally, in the interactive process of teaching people who sat listening to his words, some spellbound, some thinking of dinner, everyone watching his facial expressions and gestures. It is a living teaching of ‘one who taught with authority’ waiting for us in these inspired notebooks. That is why it is so important to consider how we should read them.

First of all, there are four gospels not one. Like all notebooks they remind us that everyone takes different notes of the same talk and in the later oral report further elaborations are made. An industry of scholarship today explores the theories of how the gospels were written, by whom, for whom and how they influenced each other. There will probably never be universal agreement. The major goal however is not to explain how they were written but how to read them well. To try merely to reduce the four perspectives to one ‘historical’ reality behind them is to seriously misread them.

We make the same misreading when we dissect the gospels in search of the ‘real historical Jesus’. The problem, to paraphrase Pontius Pilate, is to know ‘What is real?’ We have become so conditioned to the prose of science and sociology as the language of reality that we have lost an ear for the other tones in which human experience expresses itself and what is beyond itself. We dismiss them as ‘unhistorical’ or ‘mythical’ and try to translate them reductively back into the language of ‘factual truth’. This attempt betrays the text. It fails to see how other methods can communicate truths that the scientific method will never grasp. To deny the many-layered texture of reality that calls for different methods of expression is like claiming that the mystery of human consciousness can be reductively explained away as electro-chemical processes in the brain.

We can never know for sure, ‘in fact’, who wrote the gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. As texts they grew within both oral and written traditions but were further refined by personal prayer and communal discussion. People walked from place to place thinking of the stories and sayings that later coalesced in the texts we know. As in the first moments after the Big Bang, the bits and pieces of the cosmos of the gospel were still in a disconnected and chaotic state in the early days of the Christian movement. By being told and retold they fell into shape and eventually into the form of the written texts we know. Each textual problem illustrates how a text represents the mind of a whole community for whom the individual is a channel. Such rich texts enshrine many levels of meaning of which the literal-historical is only one.

The gospels make explicit what was already implicit in the several oral traditions that developed in the first Christian generation. Although they are based on historical events they are not investigative journalism. How can we ever neatly separate different levels of meaning or draw a sharply defined line between the symbolic and the historical? Partly, at least, by not worrying about the inconsistencies between the four books. The gospels have a unity but they are not uniform nor were they intended to be. Their various strands cannot be unraveled without losing the whole pattern. Early modern scholars, like Strauss, Renan and Schweitzer, attempted to do just this. Their failure nevertheless helps to define our way of approaching the historical Jesus and the way the gospels were composed. Bultmann, the German biblical scholar, came to the conclusion, one largely accepted today, that a normal historical biography of Jesus cannot be conceived because historical or psychological biography was not what the gospel writers were about. Some modern scholars do claim that by the standards of their time the gospel writers were writing biographies. Nevertheless, for us, the great silent gaps in the early life of Jesus, the loss of the original contexts in which Jesus’ sayings were uttered and even of a sure chronology of events, all mean that we should not expect to read the gospels as normal biography.

A new book about Tolstoy means a reinterpretation of well-attested facts or the revelation of new facts or documents. Any book on Jesus adopts or adapts a position of faith not just an interpretation. The historical facts about Jesus that we can be sure of are important but they are principally interesting with regard to who we say he is. The insight into his identity is the first and foremost meaning of the gospels not just ‘what really happened’ in a journalistic or legalistic sense. What really happened in a spiritual sense, as in the case of the Resurrection precisely reveals who he really is. This means that we cannot talk about the identity of Jesus without in some way asserting or rejecting faith. The method of modern investigative reductionism is a rejection of faith. It leads to a profound misreading of texts which themselves are expressions of faith. If this sounds like saying that you can only fully understand what the gospels are and mean if you share their faith, that is what I am saying. How we respond to the redemptive question of Jesus determines how we read the gospels–and vice versa.

In 63 BC the Roman general Pompey strode sacrilegiously into the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem to find out what was at the heart of the Jewish religion that was causing him so much trouble. He expected to find a statue or cult object, some kind of visible mystery. He found nothing at all, merely a small empty room and left astounded and contemptuous. To invade the gospels with that kind of insensitivity will breed the same kind of insensitivity. To read them well we must also understand what we should not be looking for. Otherwise we will not see what is there, waiting silently for us to find.

Reading the gospels means more than studying and analysing them or performing textual surgery. But it also means more than making a cult object out of them and reading them with daft literalism. Another kind of reading is required: a prayerful reading. The monastic tradition called this method lectio divina.

One of the most ancient Christian ideas is based on this: lex orandi est lex credendi, the structure of prayer is the structure of belief. The way we believe is the way we pray. The quality and depth of prayer determines the quality and depth of our beliefs and therefore also of our way of living. For so many Christians the gospels, like prayer itself, have got stuck at a superficial cerebral level–the level of merely thinking about and speaking to God. Cerebral here does not mean highly intellectual. Getting stuck here encourages fantasy just as much as rational thought. As the experiential wellsprings of faith remained unopened in the training of most Christians, it is no wonder that their spiritual maturity is often so shallow. Even Christians trained in their religion from childhood have seldom read the gospels right through on their own. And few are encouraged, in school or parish, to pray in more than the way they learned as children, checking in with heaven from time to time to ask for favours or to assuage guilt. Without deeper spiritual development earlier, it is hardly surprising when the storms of adult life shake such faith to its roots.

Whether and how we read the gospels shapes how we believe, not only about Jesus but also about ourselves. Our way of reading the gospels is itself trained through a regular contemplative practice of prayer. If most Christians have to learn how to read their scriptures, most also have to discover that prayer is more than telling God what we want and flattering or bargaining with Him to get it. Like reading the gospels, to pray is a continuous education and training in faith. Prayer and lectio are not scientific methods or techniques but spiritual arts. Neither is an art that one perfects in a lifetime. They require regular practice and perseverance. They are delightful and challenging in themselves. But both demand the generous commitment needed for all learning: attention, discipline, detachment from preconceptions and prejudices, and openness. What are these gospels that we must learn to read prayerfully and that also teach us to pray?