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 The Four Gospels

and other texts

A Critical Handbook of the New Testament

 

Dick Butler

About the Bookbook cover

          My book is a scholarly account of recent developments in the study of the Gospels.  Most of what is in it will be new to most of my readers. It is written to be intelligible to anyone with an interest in the Gospels, but is designed to be particularly helpful to clergy and all who teach the New Testament.  I call it a Handbook because, although quite small at just over 200 pages, it is in part a reference book.  It includes tables of Synoptic Parallels, Outlines of each Gospel, Lists of Parables and Miracle Stories, and other information referred to in the text but set out in summary form.  There are also special chapters on the Birth and Passion Narratives, the Empty Tomb, the Lord’s Prayer, the Friends and Family of Jesus, and the Sermon on the Mount.       

             For many years the evangelists have been thought of as editors, dependent upon written sources, including the infamous Q.  They were believed to have threaded the stories, which they found in them, randomly, “like beads on a string”.  This has now been shown to have been mistaken - there were no such written sources   Instead the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) are successive re-writes of a single Gospel.  The evangelists were not editors but authors or, as they would have said themselves, Scribes, writing Scripture for the church’s use.
            Mark’s sources are inaccessible, but Matthew’s Gospel is a re-write of Mark’s, and Luke’s is a conflation of the other two.  Each also added new material of his own, in the style of Jewish midrash.  And in doing this they left fingerprints, so that we can build up a clear picture of each evangelist’s own perspective on the Gospel.

             Our understanding of John’s Gospel, too, has moved on with the discovery of the identity of the Beloved Disciple.  It shows his to have been a Gospel for Pauline Christians.     If all of this seems complicated to some, or controversial to others, be assured that it is based on sound scholarship and, taken chapter by chapter, is accessible to anyone with an interest in the Gospels