Four Gospels, One Jesus?
I am deeply honoured that Richard has asked me to speak tonight on the
occasion of the launch of Four Gospels, One Jesus? classic edition. With 50,000
copies sold and counting, Richard’s book is probably the most widely used
introduction to the four Gospels today. It is certainly the most accessible. It is
thus a privilege to be invited to speak about a modern classic in the field.
Richard’s book has meant a lot to me personally. I have used it in preparing
lectures and talks, I have referred to it in classes, and I have put it on class
reading lists. It has also shaped my approach to the Gospels. I have recently
written my own introduction to the Gospels, and my book is deeply influenced by
Richard’s. I’ve signaled my indebtedness to Richard’s book by giving my own the
subtitle: Four Gospels, One Story. This is also a marketing ploy. What better way
to generate sales than of your own book than to borrow (i.e., steal!) and modify
slightly the title of the established market leader! Steve has spoken about the
academic merits of the book. I want to pay tribute to its communicative qualities
and its hermeneutical contribution.
Reviews of Four Gospels, One Jesus? frequently mention its readability. For me,
this is one of the reasons for its success. The book is simply a great read from
start to finish. What makes it so engaging? Let me highlight a couple of things.
First, the book has an oral quality. Richard writes as if he’s speaking to you and
not writing to you. My wife, Ruth (before she was my wife), once picked my
copy of Four Gospels, One Jesus? and quickly devoured the first couple of
chapters. I made her give it back to me because I was using it to prepare a talk
(she never got to finish the book!). Some time later, she asked me if I could
remember a talk or sermon she thought we had attended together, the setting of
which she couldn’t quite recall, and she proceeded to sketch out the content of
Chapter One of Richard’s book! Her recollection was accurate, but she had
misremembered it as a speech and not something she had read! This testifies to
Richard’s oral style of writing. He writes, of course, with expertise on the
subject, but he does not come across as a condescending expert. He speaks to
you rather as a lover of the gospels gently inviting you to share his passion.
Second, Richard has loaded the book with great illustrations and analogies. It
begins with a tour of four differing pictures of Churchill, which brilliantly
illustrates and introduces Richard’s main thesis: that the Gospels offer different
biographical portraits of the one individual. Throughout the book, we find
Richard making a point about the Gospels and supporting it with an illustration
drawn from another sphere. One of my favourite of his illustrations comes early
in the book, where Richard talks about the composition of the Gospels. Have you
ever tried to teach the Synoptic problem to first year undergraduate students?
One of the biggest challenges is to convey to students just what the problem is,
and why it is, well, so problematic. Richard does it in a paragraph! He explains
the nature of the Synoptic problem by using the example of his own experience
of marking students’ essays. Let me tell you, you’ll save yourself a lot of
explanatory pain in the classroom if you use that analogy. Students immediately
get it!
Undoubtedly, the most impressive and effective use of analogy in the book is the
way that Richard takes up and runs with the traditional symbols of the Gospels
(based on the four living creatures of Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 1), a feature that
Steve has already spoken about. While the images have tended to be applied to
the evangelists, Richard, following, Irenaeus, relates them to the Gospel
Christologies. He does so in a way that is creative yet apposite, showing how
Jesus in Mark is like a bounding lion, how Matthew presents Jesus as the human
teacher, how Luke’s Jesus, like an ox, is the bearer of burdens, and how John’s
Jesus is the high-flying eagle. The symbolic approach to the different Gospel
Christologies, rooted in Christian tradition, enables Richard to lay out a safe path
through what can often be threatening theological terrain for Christians.
This brings me to the book’s hermeneutical value. Four Gospels, One Jesus?
makes a tremendously important contribution to the longstanding question of
how to navigate the four and the one. The Gospels are canonically designated as
four versions of a singular Gospel. For centuries, the church has wrestled with
the issue of how to read the Gospels as four yet one. Richard rightly rejects the
harmonizing approach, which amalgamates the Gospels and their distinct
Christologies, insisting that we must embrace the plurality of the Gospels. But he
also shows that despite their plurality, the Gospels show a fundamental unity: ‘all
four still tell essentially the same story’ (this insight is the basis for my own book
on the Gospels), and more importantly for Richard, ‘the four…confront us with
the one Jesus’. Richard demonstrates how the four, even with their
Christological differences, are united in their essential understanding of Jesus’
identity. Thus,
All four agree that in his deeds and words Jesus acts and speaks for God.
He is not just a prophet, nor even the human agent of the kingdom of God;
for the extraordinary response is that of worship, worship which may
only be given properly to God himself. There may be four gospels, but
there is only one Jesus, and he is God. (1994 edition p. 171)
What Richard offers in this book is a key to the problem of the four and one. He
does so by drawing a distinction between a biographical portrait and a
biographical subject, and by assigning to the plurality to the differing
biographical treatments the four Gospels give, and the unity to the basic story
they tell and the common biographical subject to whom they bear witness. And
he shows how it is to our benefit that we have not one but four biographical
portraits of the one Jesus.
In recent years, there has been renewed scholarly interest in the fourfold Gospel
as the context for reading and interpreting the individual Gospels. Richard has to
be given much of the credit for this important development.
I am delighted for Richard, as a colleague, friend, and mentor, that this book is
being formally recognized as the classic that it has become. I will not be
surprised if we have a similar gathering in ten years’ time to launch (probably
only as an e-book!) the super-classic edition.
Eddie Adams