Why gospels are different

Ultimately, Mark concludes with an implicit call to action. This Gospel tells a powerful story with a challenge that essentially asks believers what they will do with what they now know. Luke is a sophisticated account of the life of Jesus that is intended to appeal to educated Greeks that were a whole generation removed from the life and ministry of Jesus Christ and who are no longer interested in mythical stories from the past but want a conclusive argument in support of the validity of the historical figure of Jesus Christ.

It is not presented to convert people to Christianity from other religious traditions, but is written to devoted, committed Christians in the Church that John founded and led. As these Christians struggled to understand the challenges of faith and fidelity to Jesus Christ in a world that they saw as increasingly hostile to their beliefs, John writes to encourage the believers in the validity of their decision to believe in Christ.

One way of understanding the great differences in the Gospels is to look at them through the modern lens of marketing. If a person or company had a product that they needed to sell, the first thing they would do is develop a marketing campaign that would focus on, and tailor to, the specific audience they hoped to reach.

For example, nobody would use the same advertising and marketing message to sell to middle-aged married women that they would use to sell a product to twenty-something single men. The only explanation as to why you can have this word- for-word agreement, in the opinion of most scholars, is that one of these Gospels is being used as a source for the other two. In other words, there must be copying going on.

I sometimes have difficulty convincing my students that if you have three accounts of the same event that are in the same words, somebody has to be copying somebody else. Suppose we waited 30 or 40 years, and, instead of asking you to write down what happened that day in class, I asked friends of yours that you had told about what had happened in class. If I then got two accounts that were exactly the same, what would you assume had happened? If you explain the similarities on the basis of a miracle, then you have trouble explaining the discrepancies.

When you read them this way, vertically , one at a time, they all sound very much alike. Yet when you read them horizontally— one story in Matthew, then the same story in Mark, and the same story in Luke—you begin to notice discrepancies that are very hard to reconcile with one another. What scholars think today is that Mark was the first Gospel written, and that Matthew and Luke both had access to Mark, and used Mark as one of their sources.

Matthew and Luke had other sources available to them as well. The Gospel of John does not contain most of the stories found in the synoptic Gospels. Jesus never tells a parable in the Gospel of John. Jesus never casts out a demon in the Gospel of John. They each focused on some details while ignoring others entirely.

Is that a contradiction? In the first century, there was no functional difference between a centurion telling you something face-to-face or through an emissary. He simply shines a spotlight on one individual. You can find this when Jesus is tempted in the desert. Matthew and Luke have the order of the last two temptations reversed Matt. Matthew, on the other hand, ends with Jesus standing on a mountain looking at all the nations of the world.

For a writer who sees mountains as places of revelation and epiphany, this is understandable, too. When did Jesus clear the temple? Did it happen once or twice? If it happened once, when did it happen? Were these different versions of the same event? Or could they be the gradual unfolding of their experience with Jesus? Six days before Passover, John describes Mary, the sister of Lazarus who had been raised from the dead, anointing his feet Jn.

Simon is a fairly common first-century Palestinian name. Jesus displayed a tenderness and respect toward women that they were not accustomed to, and it created fierce sense of loyalty—look at the way women supported him financially Lk. Doublets are two episodes which are typically in the same gospel that critics claim came from the same story. Examples of doublets include:. Are these all examples of cases where gospel writers treated two separate versions of a story or teaching as different events?

Jesus ministered to a lot of people in a lot of different places.