The Gospels Are Not History Books

The Gospels Aren't History Books!

Wait! ... What?  If the Gospels aren't history books, what good are they?
And what are they, anyway?

This seems a strange way to begin a blog series on the Life of Jesus. We were expecting a manger scene with the infant Jesus! But since this blog series will be primarily sourced from information found in the Gospels, it will be good to know exactly what the Gospels are. For that answer, we will sneak a peek into the back of the book. From John 20:30-31, we find this information:

Jesus did many miraculous signs which are not recorded in the Gospels. But those things that are recorded in them have been written in order that you may believe that Jesus is the Anointed One, the Son of God, and that through believing, you may have eternal life in the name of Jesus.

There it is. The Gospels are teaching instruments, to introduce you to Jesus the Anointed One (e.g., the Christ) and to show that he is the Son of God. They may contain much history about Jesus and his disciples, but their purpose is not to teach history, but to lead you into eternal life.

The Gospels do not necessarily tell their stories in direct chronological format. In fact, they tend to gather the teachings of Jesus into topics or subjects. In other words, the Gospels are not optimized to teach a linear account of what historically happened. Instead, they are optimized in a fashion that will lead you to believe. The four Gospels are also optimized to be understood by four discrete audiences living in the first century AD. But that is beyond our scope here.

A primary tool for this retelling of the story of Jesus will be a Harmony of the Gospels, an instrument which attempts to arrange the Gospel texts in chronological order. In very old Bibles, a harmony of the Gospels was often found in the back material after Revelation, alongside other helps such as topic indexes, money and weight and other measurements, a concordance showing  where to find certain words, and maps of ancient Bible lands.

My retelling is based on such a harmony, which I have expanded into a harmony of the entire Bible, both Old Testament and New, to enable readers to study the Bible in chronological order. I hope some day to publish this as a Chronological Study Guide to the Bible.

Other helpful sources are synoptic studies of the Gospels, which endeavor to compare texts from three or four Gospels which cover the same material. In these, the readings of the several Gospels are presented side by side so that the whole picture of the teaching or event can be appreciated. The sources available to me include Gospel Parallels by Burton Throckmorton, Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum (Synopsis of four Gospels in the original Greek) edited by Kurt Aland, and The Horizontal Line Synopsis of the Gospels, by Reuben Swanson.

Boring? Perhaps, but in these sources lie an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the Gospels. And next week, I promise that we'll start with that manger in the stable that you were expecting here.