Gospels are not histories. Gospels are not factual presentations of events. Gospels are theological tracts, sermons. They tell a story to reveal a truth. They may touch on historical events, and they may just as likely “interpret” the event to fit the narrative.
We have four gospels in scripture and many more that did not pass the test. All of them tell the story of Jesus’ life and work, but it takes an enormous amount of twisting and turning to even try to make them agree on just about anything we might call a “history”. Mark’s Jesus is all about keeping his profile low and John’s Jesus tells us that if the crowds do not proclaim his identity, the very stones in the walls will shout it out. Are we dealing with the same Jesus? Matthew and Luke share the bulk of their words, yet in them Jesus, his travels and even the thrust of his message are not the same. We can take the four gospels apart line by line, theme by theme, word by word, parable by parable, miracle by miracle, and we will still end up with four very different stories, four very different visions of this one man and his work. That is not a problem as long as we realize we are not reading history but hearing about a vision, a mission, a quest, a spiritual journey. We are in the presence of meditations on how the holy incarnates itself into our world, how it transforms it, and how this power has been revealed in the life of this man, this Jesus.
Who is this Jesus? This is a question as old as Jesus. Because we have no biography, no historical mention of him, no bare facts, we cannot answer the question. We have only Jesus Christ object of faith, the Jesus proclaimed God’s Anointed, the Messiah. Scholars have tried to decipher bits and pieces here and there between the lines and letters of scripture, but there is little to gaze upon, little to find. The Jesus Seminar has done some interesting work trying to allocate exactly which words in scripture were actually once upon Jesus’ lips. Some think it all a waste of time because scripture asks us to look upon Jesus through the eyes of faith not through a microscope. Some look upon the gleaned bits and pieces and find a hallucinating religious fanatic bent on having himself killed to bring on the end of the world. Some look upon the bits and pieces and claim there is no evidence whatsoever that any historical figure named Jesus ever existed, that every tale in the gospels, canonical and otherwise, is a myth-narrative easily found in religions all over the ancient world. Tom Harpur was not the first one to claim this a few years ago. Bruno Bauer did it more than a hundred years before, and to one degree or another so did Strauss, Schweitzer, and Bultmann. And there were scholars in the ancient world of like mind, although their works survive only in bits and pieces because they were not on the winning team.
Scripture, even the so-called historical books, is not history in any sense we would apply to the term today; it is salvation-history. History is, admittedly, a gestalt of factual events interpreted from a certain viewpoint as a chain of actions and reactions, causes and effects. That concatenation is always open to the prejudice of the historian. The American version of the War of 1812 is not one and the same as the Canadian. The prejudice of the writers of scripture is neither nationalistic, nor ideological. It is not even “realistic” in the sense that its vantage point is not in this world. Scripture sculpts and manipulates events to present them from God’s view point. “History” as given in scripture is a record of divine action, and as such it is primarily an act of faith and not a presentation of empirical fact. It is the world seen from heaven by virtue of the divine gift of faith. It exists to make a point: we are not alone, we are not without vocation, purpose, freedom, responsibility, dignity, value, meaning. We are because we have been made. We are because we are valued. We are because time opens up to us and we can find within us a hope that in some way, in some form, it always will. And it makes that point in the idiomatic language of Jewish cultic practice.
We can twist our ability to see and hear and reason and take scripture literally, or we can open our minds with imagination, our hearts with love, our arms with hope, confess the visions are true, and peacefully allow all the words to dissolve in the light of that truth. That is faith. It is living, it is not a page of words, it is not a text. And so no more words here.