GOS-01 Introduction to the Gospels

Why did the gospel writers think it was important to record these facts in such careful literary accounts?

Everyone who’s familiar with the New Testament Gospels should agree that they provide written — even literary — portraits of Jesus. They come to us mainly in the form of narrative stories about his life and ministry and culminate in the events surrounding his death and resurrection. But why did the gospel writers think it was important to record these facts in such careful literary accounts?

It’s important that the Gospel record comes to us in the form of literature for several reasons. One is because as the time of the eyewitnesses of the events of Jesus were beginning to die, those traditions were being passed along orally, and being formed into coherent traditions, but it’s important to set that tradition and to fix it in terms of their accounts. And so, by setting it in literature it’s able to sort of solidify and authorize the apostolic witness to the life of Jesus.

Are the Gospels only valuable because they contain facts about Jesus, or is it also important to consider their literary aspects?

Students and teachers of the Gospels should all be able to recognize that the Gospels are carefully written literature. But modern readers aren’t always sure how our interpretations should be influenced by the literary qualities of the Gospels. Are the Gospels only valuable because they contain facts about Jesus, or is it also important to consider their literary aspects?

Literature is obviously the way that we understand God because God has given us a Bible to read. We couldn’t have been on the scene when Jesus walked the earth. He couldn’t come back in every generation, so God appointed those who were eyewitnesses of what he did to write down what they saw and heard. And the other thing that’s quite significant about the way in which the Gospels are structured is that they tell stories. They tell the story of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection which fits into God’s great big story for the world and our future. And people love stories; people still respond well to the gospel accounts, and they are stories that continue to engage people’s thinking and there is a sense in which we’re invited into the narrative so that we can hear from Jesus for ourselves and respond to him accordingly by looking at the literature that God has given us.