As I shared in the last issue of this article, the Pauline letter were written before the Gospels. It is difficult to be certain when the earliest pre-Gospel traditions were written down. It seems reasonable to place in the 50’s some of the works that modern scholars suppose to have antedated the Gospels (e.g., “Q”, proto-Mark, the earliest written tradition behind John). In antiquity Papias knew of a collection of the sayings of the Lord in Hebrew or Aramaic complied by Matthew and Irenaeus states that this material antedated Mark. By the time that Luke was writing (in the 80’s?), many others had undertaken to compile a narrative of all the things that had been accomplished by Jesus. Such pre-Gospel written sources, now lost by theoretically reconstructed by scholars, must have already shown considerable development over the words and acts of Jesus. They would have constituted a trustworthy record of the memories of Jesus as preserved in the Christian communities of the 50’s, but scarcely a verbatim report of what had been said and done in the 20’s.

The canonical Gospels were written in the period 60-100 CE, with probably only Mark to be dated in the 60’s. In them, the pre-Gospel written tradition was systematized along both chronological and theological lines. In Mark, the material to be narrated was fitted into a simplified sequence of the public ministry of Jesus (baptism, ministry in Galilee, ministry outside Galilee, journey to Jerusalem, passion, death and resurrection), with the Evangelist inserting incidents where they seemed logically to fit – not necessarily on the basis of a correct historical chronology. The choice of the material to be incorporated and the orientation given to it were determined by the Evangelist’s theological outlook and by the needs of the community for which the Gospel was being written.
In the 70’s, or more likely in the 80’s, an unknown Christian wrote the Gospel that has come down to us as the Gospel according to Matthew, perhaps because the Evangelist was a disciple of Matthew, or drew on the earlier collection of sayings written by Matthew. Probably, also in the 80’s, Luke undertook a more elaborate project that produced not only a Gospel which had more formal historical pretensions but also a history of the origin and spread of Christianity in the post-resurrectional period (i.e., ACTS). The theological orientation is far more pronounced in Matthew and Luke than it is in Mark. In the 90’s, but drawing on an earlier tradition related to John son of Zebedee, a disciple of John produced a Gospel somewhat different from the others.
More to follow!