As I ended this article in the last issue, in the 90’s, but drawing on an earlier tradition related to John, a disciple of John produced a Gospel somewhat different from the three synoptic gospels. On the one hand, in John there were preserved historical reminiscences lost or over-simplified in the earlier Gospels; on the other hand, there was a truly profound theologizing of the words and deeds of Jesus.

One might ask these real questions: Why were these four Gospels ultimately accepted by the Church? Why was not only one of them selected? Or at least, why was Mark not set aside, since most of its material is preserved in Matthew and Luke?

This is all the more curious when we realize that the idea of there being only one Gospel was the primitive concept and the individual written Gospels were looked on as variations of the one basic Gospel.

There is not the slightest indication that any one of the four Evangelists expected his audience to read other Gospels; his was the Gospel for this particular community. One might have expected that only the longest or most informative Gospel would have survived, after the principle of the survival of the fittest. Or at least, one might have expected the Gospels to have been harmonized into one – a logical solution attempted by Tatian around the year 170 CE, which for a time replaced the four Gospels in Syrian church usage.
However, the Church at large took the peculiar solution of preserving the Gospel records from four very different communities, doing nothing to attempt to harmonize their differences.

This problem is closely related to the problem of the other gospels that ultimately were not accepted as canonical. Some scholars have held that four Gospels were preserved, rather than the others, because these four came down from apostles and apostolic men. Therefore the Church did not feel free to change them by adding, subtracting, or combining. This may well have been the spirit of the later Church, even though Tatian apparently was not regarded audacious in his project. However, it was not the attitude of the 1st century Church, if we can judge from the liberty with which the Evangelists like Luke and the author of Matthew handled the pre-Gospel sources (which had the best claim to being apostolic) and Mark. In particular, Luke corrected Mark’s Greek, changed his sequence, and added material. It should be noted that Papias knew the written Gospel and he was still anxious to improve upon them with oral material of an eyewitness pedigree.

Getting to know the New Testament!