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F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
THE EVOLUTION OF THE GOSPELS
By BERNARD ORCHARD, O.S.B.
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This Rock
Volume 5, Number 3
 March 1994 
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THE Catholic Church has always
held that the four Gospels are the most important part of the written
tradition handed on by the twelve apostles in virtue of their personal
knowledge of Jesus acquired during their instruction by him in the
course of his earthly mission.
How and why the Gospels came to be written has been a matter of controversy
during the past two hundred years. Nevertheless the patient investigations
of eminent scholars enable us today to formulate a hypothesis that
does justice both to critical scholarship and to the integrity of
the ancient Fathers of the Church, who first recorded for us the fundamental
facts.
In the history of the apostolic Church there were four
main phases, four turning points, at each of which a suitable Gospel
statement was found to be necessary for its proper growth: (1) The
Jerusalem phase (Acts 1-12) under the presidency
of Peter, (2) the Pauline mission phase Acts
13-28), (3) the Roman phase requiring
joint action by Peter and Paul, (4) the Johannine supplement.
Jerusalem phase
A.D. 30-42 (Acts 1-13)
According to the divine plan of salvation,
the Messiah was not to appear until the time and circumstances were
right. Among the prerequisites were: (a) the existence of the
Septuagint, an excellent Greek version of the sacred
books of the Jews (the Old Testament), including what we now call
the deuterocanonical books. After the Resurrection the Septuagint
became the Bible of the Christian Church and a powerful instrument
for conveying to the whole world the knowledge of the true God that
had already been given to the Jews; (b)the wide dispersion of the Jews, with their synagogues in all the main centers
of the Roman Empire, which had Greek as its common language, making
the spread of knowledge of the Jewish religion and way of life easily
available to all educated and interested persons; (c) the Pax
Romana, which gave Christianity the opportunity to take firm root
during the working lifetime of the twelve apostles, whose function
it was, as the principal witnesses of the Lord's life, death, and
Resurrection, to proclaim all that he had taught them.
The first thing for us to realize is that the Gospels
presume the existence of the Christian Church and its organization
as we find it described in the Acts of the Apostles. Let us take a
closer look at it.
The descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and
the 120 in the Upper Room gave them the confidence and vision to go
forth and preach all they had learned from Jesus. Their first task,
under the presidency of Peter, was to agree on the minimum organization
necessary to undertake their world mission, and the Acts of the Apostles
reveals to us that from the very beginning the Church of God enjoyed
the good order that came from a right understanding of the mind of
Jesus.
The twelve apostles were the supreme authority in virtue of being
the eyewitnesses specially selected by Jesus to control the development
of the Church. Their Church was a living organism entirely independent
of the theocratic state of Judaism and responsible to no one but God
himself. While reverencing the Temple of God on account of its past
associations, they were obliged to set up their own house churches
(for example, the church in the house of John Mark's mother), where
they were able to celebrate the Eucharistic rite of "the breaking
of the bread" bequeathed to them by Jesus.
This, as well as their insistence on exact adherence
to their teaching about him, led to the immediate emergence of a fellowship
(based on baptism into Christ) that distinguished them from all other
citizens of Jerusalem. Jesus himself, together with his Father and
his Holy Spirit--the one Trinitarian God--was now the object
of worship in the apostolic community of the Church of Jerusalem.
But this "foreign body" of followers of Jesus had to justify
its existence in the face of the fierce hostility of the unconverted
high priests, Sadducees, Pharisees, Levites, and priests.
As soon as the first wave of converts had been baptized
and their instruction organized by the twelve--no mean achievement
because they had no precedent to go by--their thoughts returned
to the practical question of how to unify and consolidate their teaching
about Jesus. The apostles realized that they had somehow to promulgate
those passages of the Holy Scriptures "of Moses and all the prophets
concerning himself" which Jesus had explained to Cleopas on the
road to Emmaus (Luke 24:27). It also became clear to them that their
main apologetical task would be to demonstrate to the Jewish authorities
that Jesus had quite literally fulfilled all the prophecies about
the Messiah. These considerations were the original motivation for
the composition of the Gospel of Matthew.
We are very fortunate to possess the Acts of the Apostles,
which provides us with the necessary background information to enable
us to see that the Gospel of Matthew was the ideal instrument to refute
the calumnies about Jesus that the high priests were circulating.
It met all the apologetical needs of the Jerusalem Church in the years
immediately following the Resurrection, when its doctrines were under
attack--namely, that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, proved by his
ancestry as a Son of David, his being born of a virgin, his birth
in Bethlehem, his commendation by the holy Baptist John, his miracles
(raising the dead, healing the sick, curing the lepers, controlling
the sea and the winds), his "teaching with authority" in
the Temple, his coming to fulfill the Law of Moses and not to destroy
it, and above all by his suffering like the Servant of Isaiah, and
finally by his rejection by his own nation and Resurrection from the
dead.
All the above facts had long been foretold or foreshadowed
in the sacred writings of the Jews. How then was all this and a great
deal more to be reduced to the compass of one commercial roll of ten
meters, the standard length of a book, if they were to travel "light"
in compliance with their Master's explicit instructions? The help
of the Holy Spirit was indeed necessary if the essentials of the life
and teaching of a man of Jesus' eminence were ever to be competently
sketched.
The universal tradition tells us that the twelve entrusted this important
work to the apostle Matthew, and so, not long after the Resurrection,
Matthew set to work. His brief seems to have been to compile schematically
the Master's teachings without special regard to their chronological
order, as it was meant to be a handbook for teaching and administration
in the Church. Perhaps the greatest problem that he faced was that
of reducing the immense mass of material available to the twelve in
the form of their personal reminiscences of the Lord into a manageable
quantity by deciding which stories to include and which to omit, before
editing and setting forth those to be included.
Matthew did not take this challenge lightly and to produce a work
worthy of proclaiming the Lord's glory made skillful use of all five
of the literary forms that were then the hallmark of good writing
in the Hellenistic world: the proverb or maxim, the narrative, the
parable, the anecdote (known as the chreia or
short story), the reminiscence (the apo-mnemoneuma or
longer story).
The use of these Greek literary forms is an important
indication that Matthew composed his work in Greek. In any case, since
Greek was the common language of communication throughout the Roman
Empire and beyond, and with the Septuagint as the successful precedent,
the Greek tongue was the obvious medium for the effective presentation
of the Gospel message. Though highly educated, Matthew shared the
difficulties of anybody expressing himself in a foreign language and
so betrayed his Palestinian origin in the style of the original Greek
text, which contains many signs of his Semitic mother tongue and thinking.
With the help of the Holy Spirit and the rest of the
twelve Matthew then arranged the selected material in three main sections:
(1) the origin of Jesus down to the opening of his
public ministry in Galilee (1:1-4:17); (2) the Galilean ministry
(4:18-18:35)--containing the bulk of his teaching--to
which is attached a brief interlude in Transjordan (ch. 19-20); (3)
all the Jerusalem events of his public mission,
including the passion, death, and Resurrection narratives (ch. 21-28).
Matthew's account of the infancy of Jesus is mostly
apologetical, its aim being to prove that he was conceived by the
Holy Spirit, was born of the Virgin Mary, and was Son of David by
legitimate adoption by Joseph. The main part of the teaching of Jesus
is given in a series of carefully edited sermons masterly compiled
from his words (a literary technique widely used and fully accepted
at the time) and designed to give the reader the clearest possible
idea of the way in which the Messiah, depicted as the Redeemer of
the world, set out his implementation and supplementation of the Old
Law.
Thus the great Sermon on the Mount (ch. 5-7) is constructed to give
the reader the full power and beauty of the new spirit infused by
Jesus into the letter of the Old Law of Moses.
Further teachings are arranged in a series of five other discourses:
(1) the missionary discourse (Matt. 10), (2) parables discourse (Matt.
13), (3) the discourse on the Church community (Matt. 18), (4)
the discourse exposing the wickedness of the opposition to him (Matt.
23), (5) the eschatological discourse (Matt. 24-25).
This Gospel of Matthew was the manifesto of the Mother
Church of Jerusalem, and it is therefore the fundamental document
of the Christian faith. It was the document that each of the apostles
needed to take with him to his own distant field of evangelization
and also the one which Paul was to take with him on his own missionary
journeys and from which he appears to quote in 1 Thessalonians 4-5.
A savage persecution of the Church, begun by Herod Agrippa I in A.D.
42, was the signal for the dispersion of the apostles
now possessing in the Gospel of Matthew the necessary tool to support
and confirm their preaching, while at the same time preserving their
theological unity. The first phase was completed, and the second phase
of the Church's expansion was about to begin with the mission of Paul.
Pauline mission phase
A.D. 42-62 (Acts 13-28)
At the very beginning the apostles
and their disciples had been content to preach only to Jews and to
"Godfearers" (pagans who believed in the truth of Judaism),
but three events that occurred during the first phase were portents
that laid the foundation for the expansion that was soon to follow:
(1) the dispersion of the faithful during the persecution and martyrdom
of Stephen, which first brought to Antioch (Acts 11) missionaries
who converted a number of pagans in that wealthy city; (2) the conversion
on the road to Damascus of Paul, God's chosen vessel for the conversion
of the Gentiles (Acts 9); (3) the reception of the centurion Cornelius
and his family into the Church by Peter with the approval of the Jerusalem
Church (Acts 10-11), without the obligation to be circumcised or to
keep the food and marriage regulations that prevented Jews from mixing
with Gentiles.
Understandably, in the first phase the apostles were
far too busy with the problems of the nascent Church of Jerusalem
to initiate a concerted drive to win over to Christ the Greek-speaking
world of the Roman Empire; their immediate concern was quite properly
their fellow Jews. The rapidly increasing number of converts at Antioch
finally persuaded the Jerusalem apostles to send Barnabas there to
check the new development, and he in turn decided to invite Paul to
join him in instructing these new followers of Jesus who were soon
labeled "Christians" by the general public.
A severe famine (A.D.45-46)
led the Christians of Antioch to send Barnabas and Paul on their famine
relief visit to Jerusalem with a large sum to relieve the brethren's
distress (Acts 11:25-30, 12:24f, Gal. 2:1-10). The Holy Spirit had
intimated to Paul to use the opportunity to compare privately his
teaching with that of the twelve on the requirements of the Church
regarding the admission of Gentile converts. This was an urgent matter
as there was a powerful group of Pharisaic Christians in the Mother
Church who wanted all converts to be compelled to submit to the full
rigor of the Old Law of Moses. Paul's meeting with Peter, James, and
John is recorded in his Letter to the Galatians (2:1-10), and its
outcome was a comprehensive understanding between him and those whom
he calls the "Three Pillars," and it included an agreement
to observe their respective fields of apostolate and a decision not
to ask Gentile converts to take on the obligations of the Mosaic Law.
Shortly after Paul's return to Antioch the Holy Spirit
called him and Barnabas to set out on their first missionary journey
to the districts of southern Galatia. His astounding success (Acts
14-15) quickly aroused the hostility of the strict Pharisees of Jerusalem,
who sent a delegation to remonstrate with him. A fierce debate then
took place at Antioch, and since neither side would give way, Paul
had no option but to go up to Jerusalem and argue for the freedom
of the Gentiles before the "Three Pillars" (Acts 15:16).
He was of course certain about the outcome since previously they had
already acknowledged his complete orthodoxy. The recognition of Gentile
freedom from the Law of Moses at the Council of Jerusalem (A.D.
49) then marked another milestone in the progress of
the Church (Acts 15:16-35).
Above all Paul saw the paramount need to integrate into
one harmonious body the Jewish Christians, with their Mosaic/Pharisaic
traditions, and the Greek and Roman converts. In his great letter
to the Church of the Romans he had, in fact, already produced the
necessary theological synthesis (Rom. 9-11). His missionary experience
had proved that the Gospel of Matthew, which he was faithfully using
as a follow-up to his oral teaching, did not answer all the questions
of his Asian and Greek converts. This made him aware of the need for
a presentation of the Gospel nuanced to suit the mentality of the
Hellenistic world.
He now was faced with a two-fold task, firstly to produce a version
of Matthew's Gospel that would meet the spiritual needs of the Greek
world and secondly to make sure that the modified version would be
acceptable to Peter and the other "Pillars." Before he came
to the end of his third missionary journey Paul had chosen the man
he needed for this difficult and delicate undertaking, his friend
Luke, a physician, who joined him on the latter stages of his voyage
back to Jerusalem. While there Paul found himself disenchanted by
the reserved attitude of James and his elders, who looked askance
at what they regarded as the too-easy terms on which Paul was admitting
Greeks into the Church. The Holy Spirit was now urging him insistently
to look toward Rome, and so he was longing to go there (Acts 19:21f).
As it so happened, Paul's hope did not materialize immediately, because
of his fortuitous detention by the Romans for more than two years
in their headquarters in Caesarea. Nevertheless this enforced stay
in Palestine turned out to be a blessing inasmuch as it provided Luke
with sufficient time to check the details in Matthew's account of
the life and ministry of Jesus, to interrogate many of those who had
known him some thirty years before, and to prepare a new Gospel document
modeled on Matthew's.
Through hindsight we can determine the brief that Luke
had received from Paul, by comparing the Gospels of Luke and Matthew
and noting Luke's deviations. In the first place, Luke carefully followed
the main structure of Matthew throughout, as well as generally adhering
to the order of its various sections and anecdotes, but he also made
highly interesting changes. For example, his story of the birth of
Jesus is totally different from Matthew's, which, as we have noted,
was almost entirely apologetical in tone and content. Luke provided
a straightforward narrative that stems either directly or indirectly
from Mary herself. When he came to the Galilean ministry he added
certain details to each of those stories from Matthew's Gospel that
he decided to adopt.
Indeed in one way or another he absorbed nearly everything that Matthew
had written and yet managed to add a good deal of extra material.
This Luke did in two ways, by omitting a number of stories that he
regarded as duplicates (e.g. the famous Lucan omission of Matt. 14:22-16:12)
and by inserting into the heart of the Matthean text at the end of
the Galilean ministry (Matt. 19:12) a section of no less than nine
long chapters, 9:52-18:14 (his central section) comprising the excerpts
which he had withdrawn from Matthew's six great discourses in order
to lighten the content of his own version of them and additional sayings
and parables which he had collected.
It is perhaps worth noting here that the contents of
Luke's central section roughly correspond with the conjectural document
known as "Q," which many modern exegetes consider to be
one of the sources of Matthew and Luke.)
All the time he was composing Luke was mindful to keep
his eye on the audience and readership for which Paul needed this
Gospel, in particular on the Greeks' scientific bent, their desire
to know names and dates and times, and their interest in the emancipation
of women. Moreover he made it his aim to reveal an aspect of Jesus
that would impress the Gentile reader, namely by exhibiting him as
a hero blessed by God, one too good for this world, yet one who after
his apotheosis was still bringing blessings to the world which he
had saved by his sacrificial death.
Luke completed his task in time to accompany Paul on
the journey by sea to Rome, but there were two reasons for holding
up the publication of his Gospel. In the first place, it was not an
eyewitness account, since neither Luke nor Paul had been eyewitnesses
of the ministry of Jesus, but was in the main a work of historical
investigation, and if it was to have credibility it would need the
support of some eyewitness such as Peter. Even more serious was the
possibility that the publication of this manifesto for Paul's Gentile
converts would result in another explosion from the circumcision party,
which was still very active and was to remain so until the destruction
of the Temple in A.D. 70. Therefore
Luke's Gospel could not be published until this danger had been defused.
Roman phase
The situation was then as follows:
The Gospel according to Matthew had been in circulation for some twenty
years throughout the Christian world, both inside and beyond the Roman
Empire, and Paul was due to arrive in Rome as a prisoner of Caesar
some time in 61 or 62 (Acts 28:30). Luke accompanied Paul, bringing
with him a document which he had been compiling during Paul's detention
in Caesarea, in fact a substantial reworking of the Gospel of Matthew.
Paul's former disciple Mark, who had left him early in his first missionary
journey at Perga and had later gone with Barnabas to Cyprus, had since
become Peter's devoted assistant (1 Pet. 5:12-13, written at Rome
some time between 61 and 63). Nevertheless the letters of Paul to
the Colossians and to Philemon, traditionally said to have been written
from Rome during Paul's detention (which ended not later than 63),
reveal that he remained in intimate contact with both Mark and Luke
(Col. 4:10, 14, Philem. 24).
Paul was well aware of the importance attached by the
secular Greek and Roman world to the testimony of actual eyewitnesses,
but whereas the Gospel of Matthew had emanated from the Jerusalem
community, many of whom had known Jesus personally and could corroborate
the witness of the twelve preserved in that Gospel, neither he nor
Luke had known Jesus while he walked on earth. Of course, Paul had
been given a vision of the resurrected and glorified Christ, but he
was still dependent on the twelve for information about his earthly
life.
As far as Luke was concerned, he too had to rely entirely on the tradition
he had received from the apostles and from the Gospel of Matthew,
to which he added his own personal researches into the events of the
life of Jesus, gleaned from material supplied to him by many surviving
eyewitnesses whom he had succeeded in interrogating. In order to get
Luke's work recognized as a true account and one worthy to be read
in the Christian assembly either alongside or in place of Matthew's
Gospel, Paul needed to get it ratified by an apostolic eyewitness.
Furthermore, although Paul's primary concern was to secure the publication
of Luke's Gospel in the region of the churches he himself had founded,
he was also aware that once published it would inevitably find its
way into the churches of the other apostles. Therefore it was necessary
for him now well in advance to establish the fact that Luke had not
erred in any particular and to avoid any discourtesy to the apostles
affected.
At the time of Paul's captivity in Rome, Peter happened
to be there as well, and of course he was the prime eyewitness of
the public ministry of Jesus. So Paul approached Peter to ask his
advice about the best procedure. Peter realized that Paul needed the
public assurance that Luke's book was in complete conformity with
his (Peter's) own recollections of Jesus and was happy to compare
Luke's treatment of the events at which he himself had been a participant
or witness with Matthew's parallel account.
Peter's plan then was to give a series of discourses in the atrium
of the Roman mansion which he had designated for his weekly Eucharistic
celebration. His secretary, Mark, helped him to prepare these talks,
which were bound to excite the interest of the most influential Christians
in Rome, including members of the Praetorium, the headquarters of
the Roman Army. The news that Peter was going to give a series of
lectures on the life of Jesus drew a great crowd. Since it was the
custom for public men to have their speeches recorded by shorthand
writers, Mark arranged for shorthand writers of Greek to take down
Peter's words just as he uttered them, Greek being the common language
of the inhabitants of Rome in that period.
On the appointed days Peter, with Mark in attendance,
went to the rostrum armed with the scroll of Matthew and the new scroll
prepared by Luke. That these two Gospels were originally inscribed
on scrolls and not on codices is certain because they are each just
about the length of an ordinary commercial scroll, about ten meters
in length. A scroll was written on the inner side in narrow columns
at right angles to its length. When rolled up it was tied with a cord
and put into one of a series of pigeonholes that constituted the bookcase
of a learned man. To handle such a scroll required both hands, the
right hand unrolling and the left rolling up until the reader arrived
at the particular column he wanted to refer to.
Peter's intention was to refer only to those incidents
in the life of Jesus of which he had been an eyewitness or could personally
vouch for, and therefore he would say nothing about the birth and
Resurrection narratives nor about the central section, in which Luke
had gathered a collection of Jesus' sayings. The simple fact that
Peter was prepared to devote so much attention to this new work of
Luke shows that he believed it to be worthy of adoption in its entirety
by the Church.
My own Synopsis of the Four Gospels reveals
(what is not clear in Huck-Greeven's Synopsis or in Kurt Aland's
Synopsis Quattuor Evangelorium) that Peter, aided by Mark,
saw his way to divide for his own immediate purpose the Gospels of
Matthew and Luke lying before him into five parts, i.e. into five
discourses (didaskalias) of 25/40 minutes each, as shown in
the table above.
Further study of the text of Mark indicates that Peter
delivered his reminiscences to his audience by word of mouth, checking
with each Gospel in turn as he went along. By conscious prearrangement
his disciple and secretary, Mark, handed him the scroll first of Matthew
and then at the appropriate point exchanged it for the scroll of Luke,
thus alternately following the text first of the one and then of the
other, as it were "zigzagging" from one Gospel to the other.
Peter of course would have known the Gospel of Matthew
almost, if not entirely, by heart, and therefore he tended to follow
it more closely, but adding Luke's extra details wherever he could.
He also adopted Luke's rearrangement of the early part of Matthew's
Galilean ministry (ch. 5-13). His treatment is also noteworthy for
the introduction of many vivid little details which reveal him to
be an eyewitness, such as Jesus' being asleep on the cushion in the
stern of the boat (Mark 4:38) and the figure of two thousand swine
who drowned themselves in the lake (Mark 5:13).
At the end of his fifth discourse Peter had covered
all the main stories Matthew and Luke had in common (except the centurion's
slave) from the baptism of John to his personal discovery of the empty
tomb. There, at the conclusion of the earthly ministry of Jesus, he
ended his discourses having exhausted his reminiscences, since Paul
had had his own personal visions of the risen Christ and did not require
Peter's corroboration in this respect.
Those who had listened to Peter were delighted with
everything they had heard and demanded from Mark copies of what he
had said. The tradition relates that when Peter was shown the transcript
of his discourses he "exerted no pressure either to forbid it
or to promote it" (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6:14:57).
This indicates that Peter saw no particular advantage in promoting
his own lectures since in Matthew there was already a complete Gospel
available to his listeners. In the light of this public commendation
Paul was able to publish the text of Luke's Gospel in the churches
of Achaia and Asia Minor without further delay or question.
From the above it is clear that Peter was personally
responsible for the text of our Mark and that it was composed not
only after the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but also with their aid.
Despite the fact that it was highly prized by the Church as the personal
reminiscences of Peter, it did not enjoy a universal circulation because
it was not intended to supersede either Matthew or Luke. Indeed, it
is rarely quoted by the early Fathers, and the first commentary on
it dates only from the fifth century. We have seen that its process
of composition was quite unlike that of Matthew or Luke and that Peter
had no intention of making it into a third Gospel. Proof of this lies
in the fact that he did not go on to describe the Resurrection, the
key doctrine of the Christian faith. How then does one explain how
the last twelve verses (Mark 16:9-20), which describe the Resurrection,
got tacked onto the Gospel? The fact is, while about one-half of the
best manuscripts record these verses, the other half either omit them
altogether or give a much shorter ending. The most plausible explanation
is that after Mark had satisfied the immediate demand of those who
wanted copies of the five discourses, which ended at Mark 16:8, the
matter rested there until after the martyrdom of Peter and Mark's
decision to go off to found the See of Alexandria (A.D
67-69).
As an act of piety to the memory of Peter, his father in God (1 Cor.
4:15), Mark then decided to publish an edition of the text that would
include the necessary sequel to the passion and death of the Master.
The attentive reader will discover for himself that these verses form
a summary catalogue of references to the Resurrection stories of both
Matthew and Luke and were most likely added by Mark himself to round
off the final discourse. But as the private edition of Mark, which
lacked these verses, had already been in circulation for some years,
the textual tradition has remained divided to this day. The Council
of Trent decided, though, that these last twelve verses are both authentic
and part of the inspired text of the Gospel of Mark.
Johannine supplement
The tradition of the Christian Church
names John the son of Zebedee, the apostle and beloved disciple, as
the fourth Evangelist, and there is no solid reason to reject it.
John wrote in Greek like the other Evangelists and, in fact, knew
all three synoptic Gospels, making use especially of Luke. Although
the final chapter (ch. 21) seems to be an afterthought, the manuscript
tradition shows that the author published the whole Gospel as one
work. As to its date the first twenty chapters may have been written
quite soon after the appearance of Luke and Mark, about 62-63, but
the final chapter was not written until after the martyrdom of Peter
in 65-67. The date of publication, probably from Ephesus, may
have been at any time between then and the death of John at the end
of the century.
The purpose of John was to supplement in several ways
the account about the ministry of Jesus provided by the synoptic Gospels:
1. John thought it right to set his Gospel in an eternal
perspective by commencing with the heavenly preexistence of the Son
of God (John 1:1-18).
2. While Matthew assumes Jesus to be the Messiah (Matt.
1:1), he does not explain that Jesus asserted his claim at the commencement
of his ministry at the cleansing of the Temple, because his plan was
to place all the Jerusalem activities of Jesus in the last section
of his Gospel (Matt. 21:28). John makes it clear that Jesus staked
his claim in categorical terms (John 2:1-25) at the beginning.
3. John alone makes it clear that the public ministry
of Jesus extended over two years (three Passovers) and possibly longer
and that only part of it was spent in Galilee. The Galilean ministry
was really an interlude forced upon Jesus by the hostility of the
high priests. Nonetheless, John records that he made some four major
visits to the Holy City to bring about the recognition of his Messiahship
before the final visit that resulted in his passion and death.
4. John alone records that during those visits there
took place a number of intimate dialogues that uniquely reveal the
mind and heart of Jesus and his relationship to his Father and to
the Holy Spirit.
To sum up, the author of the fourth Gospel reveals a
knowledge of the milieu of Palestine at that time which none but a
contemporary Jew could describe. Without the Gospel of John our knowledge
of Jesus would have been greatly and irretrievably impoverished.
Conclusion
Matthew is the fundamental Gospel and
the most important, but each was written and published in response
to a particular need of the Church in a particular historical situation.
The real importance of Mark lies in the fact that it was Peter's guarantee
that Luke was fit to be read beside Matthew in the churches of both
Peter and Paul. Mark is therefore to be viewed as the bridge between
Matthew and Luke, as an enabling document for Luke to be freely used
in all the churches to which the authority of Peter, the chief eyewitness,
extended. It stands furthermore as a recognition of the equality of
the Gentiles in all the Churches. It can also be seen as incidentally
harmonizing the various minor discrepancies between Matthew and Luke.
It may also be looked on as judging Luke in relation to Matthew, e.g.,
it suggests by restoring the passage that Luke would have done well
not to omit what is known to us as the Great Lucan Omission of Matthew
14:22-16:12.
We are now also able to see why the Universal Church
from a very early date, perhaps as early as the beginning of the second
century, placed Mark's Gospel between those of Matthew and Luke. By
doing so it signaled the Church's acceptance of the tradition that
the principal function of Mark was to introduce Luke to the Christian
public and to confirm its equality with Matthew; the middle position
of Mark had nothing to do with the chronological order of the Gospels.
Luke was written before Mark was even thought of, but its publication
was delayed until its merits had been approved by Peter, who actually
spoke the words that Mark recorded for him and for the Church.
We may sum up the relationships between the Gospels
as follows:
1. Matthew was composed to meet the urgent needs of
the primitive Church of Jerusalem (the Church set up by Peter), which
needed a manifesto defending its integrity and its right to exist
in the earliest days.
2. Luke was written at the behest of Paul to meet the
urgent need of his churches to have their own manifesto to prove their
full equality with Jewish Christians.
3. Mark was the result of the collaboration of Peter
and Paul to make sure that the spiritual and doctrinal unity of the
Universal Church was not impaired as a result of the appearance of
Luke beside Matthew in the churches of both.
4. The Gospel of John made it clear that the primary
objective of Jesus throughout his public ministry was the winning
over of the spiritual authorities in Jerusalem; at the same time it
had the further purpose of readjusting the chronological sequence
of his ministry which had been somewhat distorted by the literary
sequence of the three synoptic Gospels.
Dom Bernard Orchard is a Benedictine monk at Ealing
Abbey, England. He was general editor of the Catholic Commentary
on Holy Scripture (1953), served as chairman of the editorial
committee for the New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (1969),
and is the author, with Harold Riley, of The Order of the Synoptics
(1987).
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