Gospel Harmony and History - Part Three

Harmony of the Gospels:

What about History in the Gospels?

To create a harmony of the Gospels, we have to pay attention to the history inside the Gospels. We need some sense of the order of events to answer our questions about the apparent differences between the Gospels.

But some of us are looking for something different: We want some sense of the history that lays behind the Gospels; something that will make their distant, foreign, and long-ago experience more familiar and understandable to us today.

First a word of caution: If you are looking for history, you'll find history. If you are looking for Jesus, you'll find Jesus. The four Gospel writers each had something to teach, with different emphases for each writer. If you are reading the Gospels according to a historical reading guide or a Gospel harmony, you will miss lessons that the four writers felt were important. I recommend reading the Gospels as they stand first, starting with John, and proceeding through Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Then continue on to Acts, to gather the rest of Luke's lessons.

Now to the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke are quite similar in structure, and it is easy to read them and come to the conclusion that the ministry of Jesus lasted about a year. But these writers are not trying to teach a chronological depiction of what Jesus said or did. Instead, they often gather Jesus' teachings topic by topic, and arrange the narratives to fit the topics and advance the lessons of Jesus. There can be little doubt that Jesus had a "stump speech" which he repeated as he travelled from town to town, teaching that the "Kingdom of God was at hand."

John's Gospel, on the other hand, includes celebration of Jewish feasts as part of his narrative, especially the feast of  Passover. He tells us of three specific Passover occasions and possibly a fourth, which is identified only as a 'festival.'  Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that Jesus' period of ministry covered a span of three to four years. From this we learn why a harmony of the Gospels is organized on the apparent timeline of John's Gospel, with the input from the other three Gospels placed in appropriate time slots.

Speaking from the standpoint of being one of Jesus' disciples, John fills in much more of the early interactions between Jesus and his earliest disciples. From John we learn that Jesus had already spent months with his disciples before that famous day when he walked beside the Sea of Galilee and called four fishermen from their boats, saying "Follow me!" We get a better idea, then, what it may have been like for Father Zebedee as his two sons dropped their work and left him standing there while they departed in the footsteps of Jesus.

My book series JOHN! is a work of fiction based on such a harmony of the Gospels, based on the work of anonymous Christians many years past and brought up to date with my own analysis. It is enjoyable reading, plus you will learn things about the Gospels that you may have never noticed before. It includes endnotes for each story where the reader can refer to the actual scripture verses which form the basis for the story. And since it's about teens, it's a good read for teens!

Looking forward for these blog pages, I'm going to depart from all this boring generalization and get into the actual Bible stories to reflect on what it is that the Bible DOESN'T tell us and what may have happened with the real people who lived the stories.