Richard Burridge, Four Gospels, One Jesus? Classic edition launch
King’s College London chapel, Tuesday 21 May 2013
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. 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 refer to it in classes, and I put it in class reading lists. It has also shaped
by own 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 and modify slightly the title of the established market
leader!
Steve has spoken about the scholarly merits of the book. I want to pay tribute to its
communicative qualities and its hermeneutical contribution.
Its Communicative Strengths
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 not writing to
you.
Richard writes with authority, but not as an expert talking down to you. He comes
over 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 my favourite of his illustrations also comes in the first chapter, where Richard
talks about the composition of the Gospels. Have you ever tried to teach the
Synoptic problem to first year students? One of the biggest challenges is to convey
to students just what the problem is, and why it is, well, so problematic. Well,
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. You will save
yourselves 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. 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 lat out a safe path
through what can often be threatening troubling theological terrain for Christians.
This brings me to:
Its Hermeneutical Contribution
Four Gospels, One Jesus? makes a tremendously valuable contribution to the
longstanding question the 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 shows how the four are united in their 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.
What Richard thus 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 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.
Conclusion
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 the super-classic edition.
Eddie Adams
May 2013