IV. Jesus and the New Testament, General Notes1
Christology: Christology is that part of theology that concerns itself with Jesus of Nazareth, proclaimed
by believers to be the Christ (Christos/Messiah). A distinction is sometimes drawn between the
[historical] Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of Faith. It is the living Christ that is proclaimed by
Christianity, but obviously this person is also the same Jesus of Nazareth who lived in 1st c. Palestine.
The main question of Christianity (the Christological Question) has always been the question Jesus
asked of his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” (see Mk 8: 27-29, or Mt 16: 13-20, or Lk 9: 18-21).
Simon/Peter answered, “You are the Christ [Messiah]”. From that point on in Mt Simon becomes Peter
(the Rock). The reason Peter is “Peter” is because he had, or was given, that insight about Jesus being
the Messiah. Whatever the term ‘Rock’ truly signifies, Jesus said he would build his Church on it and
that the gates of hell would not prevail against it.
Already in the New Testament, the basic Christological question widened to include the question of
meaning: “What does it mean that Jesus is the Christ”? Beyond that “What did he do or accomplish?
Who was he that he could do what Christians believe he did? What does who he is mean about following
him? How does all of that together play out in history, or in a life? What does it mean today”? For twothousand years people have been asking questions like these. What we want to do at this point in the
course is to learn a little bit about the Jesus who was proclaimed Messiah, and the world he lived in, and
what he did and said, and what happened to him.
Christology starts with a profession of faith: that Jesus is somehow present, and can be present, and can
“give…the believer the transforming power to be more human”.
Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi (Lex Vivendi) is a classic maxim that tries to capture the relationship
between knowing Jesus and knowing about Jesus in Christology, and then living the Christian life. It
shows us what theology as an intellectual discipline is, relative to prayer and worship as ways of relating
to Christ. A translation of the maxim is, ‘The law prayer is the law of belief’(is the law of living). The
term prayer is taken in the broadest possible sense. It is the all-inclusive experience of the individual and
community and God. It is otherwise called worship, but not necessarily in anything like an official
sense. It could be prayer in a formal worship service, or walking across campus, or in doing something
with God in mind or because of God. It is sometimes just called the spiritual life. The maxim says that
this all-inclusive thing – prayer - is the main thing, the first thing, the starting point, and also the goal,
the ending point. The term belief (Latin credo) in the maxim refers to what is said to be believed by the
all-inclusive orandi (prayer) that is Christianity and the Christian life. The credendi, then, is like
theology as an intellectual enterprise. It is the best effort we can make to describe or articulate what is
going on in the orandi, in the prayer and worship – even while recognizing that capturing the orandi
completely in words is impossible, no more fully possible than it would be to completely capture your
best friend in words alone. The two things, the orandi and the credendi, relate to each other and feed
into each other. However, the orandi aspect establishes certain limits for the credendi aspect. It can’t
contradict the orandi or it contradicts itself.
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A good portion of the material is from Senior’s Jesus: A Gospel Portrait, but some of it is from other general NT works as
well.
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Take an example: In a church there are two people. One is an old woman. She has no formal education.
Her clothing was long ago out of fashion. She is not wealthy. She is not well-read. She’s had a good life,
and a hard life, and knows simple things. She is on her knees praying a rosary she has prayed 5000 times
in her life. The other person is a brilliant theologian. He or she is as smart as smart gets. They write
books and articles. They hold a prestigious position on a faculty somewhere. People love the spiritual
and theological insights they have. They are invited to address all kinds of church groups and gatherings.
Bishops occasionally ask for their help. If that theologian ever wrote a theology (a credendi) saying that
whatever the woman was doing was wrong, or misguided, or not fruitful, or not real - or anything like
that…then the theologian would be the one who is wrong. The theologian would be the truly ignorant
one in a certain way: he or she would have forgotten that everything about their own craft (theology)
came out of the orandi that precedes it and is its reason for its being anything in the first place. The
theologian never makes a final judgment about what is going on between a person and God. At their best
they try to describe a reality – God, Person, and God and Person together – and what that is, and what it
means, and never that it is not there. The relationship to God is the important thing. Theology does not
tell prayer what to do. Prayer tells theology what to do.
General overview of the Life of Jesus as presented in the gospels:
 (Birth)
 Public Ministry:
a) Baptism & Temptation Stories
b) Call of disciples
c) Healings and Works: Signs of Jesus’ identity and mission; reasons to believe
d) Teachings: Kingdom of God especially. It is inaugurated in Jesus; Repent.
 Rejection and Crucifixion: Recalls Passover. See also Ps 22 and Is 53 for interpretations of the
cross.
 Resurrection:
a) Empty Tomb, discovered by women.
b) A Resurrection ‘before end of time’ is a new thing.
c) The life of the Church, or mission, after the Resurrection
-----------------------------The Gospels and Christian Faith: There are a few non-Christian historical sources that refer to Jesus2,
but these give us relatively little information about him. For better or worse, what narrative information
we have about Jesus is found in the gospels. The gospels, however, are not biographies in the modern
sense of that term. To understand what a gospel is, we can begin by looking at how they came to be
written in the first place.
1. Senior’s “Three-Stage Process of the Coming to Be of the Gospels”.
a. Stage One: Jesus and the Disciples. This stage refers to the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth with
his disciples. This includes his actions, sayings, teachings, works, controversies, etc. up to his death
and resurrection. Jesus and the disciples belong together in this stage not only because a big part of
what Jesus was includes the fact that a central action of his was calling disciples, but also because
the disciples were in a sense a part of the whole action and mission of Jesus. He was not a lone
ranger by any means. He was a leader of a community of followers. He was a teacher of a
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Refer to Portier
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community of students. All of that pointed to the day when the followers would lead, and the
students would teach.
b. Stage Two: The Disciples and the Early Church. Before the gospels, there was already a tradition
and a church. Let’s say that Jesus died @ 30 AD. Paul’s first letters were written @ 50 AD. There
are already, then, roughly 20 years before there is any kind of writing that later becomes part of what
we call the New Testament, and this earliest writing was not a gospel, but a letter. The first gospel
(Mark) was written @ 70 AD. Therefore, there was a full generation (about 40 years) where people
were worshipping Jesus, spreading the good news about him, reflecting on who he was and what he
meant. There was a whole generation of being Christian and already a Christian community in the
world before a gospel was written, read, reflected upon, or called a Word of God or anything like
that. During this time a tradition about Jesus shaped, and was shaped by, the Christian community in
its various locations, each with its particular situation and concerns. Thus, there was also a selection
of material about Jesus going on (cf. redaction criticism from earlier notes) Some might emphasize
one aspect of the material available to them; others another aspect. Some would have emphasized
one aspect of the meaning of Jesus; others another aspect, and so on.
c. Stage Three: The Early Church and the Evangelists. Evangelist is from the Greek, Evangelion.
You can see the word angel in there. Angels announce things (angel in Greek is ‘messenger’). Ev is
really Eu, which in Greek is good. Evangelion then means Good News. And a gospel was named that
in the forst place because that it exactly the way it was meant to be delivered: Good news as in,
‘Have I got some news for you! Wait ‘till you hear this!’ When we use the term Evangelist in this
context we mean the people who actually wrote the Gospels. There are four evangelists: Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John. This stage, then, refers to the era when the four separate Gospels were
actually written. Scholars believe that Mark wrote the first Gospel, and essentially invented the
form/genre ‘gospel’. He opens his story with ‘This is the good news [gospel] about Jesus…’

The gospels are probably not eyewitness accounts. The best estimate of the approximate dates of
composition is as follows: Mk @70 AD, Mt/Lk @ 75-85, Jn @ 95-125).

The gospel writers’ sources were the Church, the Christian community and its variable tradition
of teaching about Jesus and explaining Jesus, and above all worshipping Jesus. One effect of
writing things down was to “fix” a more fluid oral (and possibly) liturgical tradition into a more
definite written form.

The evangelists can be understood as redactors (editors), or theologians in their own right. They
selected, constructed, and emphasized this or that aspect of the story from the various elements
of it that were available to them, each one of them writing to or from within a community that
had its own specific context and concerns. Mark’s community may have been suffering
persecution, and so he emphasizes the Suffering Messiah. Matthew may have been addressing a
community composed of Jews and Gentiles, and so he emphasizes Jesus’ universal mission to all
of humanity. He might also have to explain some Jewish terms that normally would not have to
be explained if the audience was all Jewish.

The gospels were written for the community of believers by fellow members of that community.
That is, they were written “from faith to faith”. Again, they are not neutral, distanced, or
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objective historical documents in the way we understand such things today. As “good news” a
gospel is closer to a preaching than it is to a history. In their origins, then, it can be said that the
Gospels “came out of the church”. There was a church before there was a gospel. The gospels
are in some sense the “Church’s Books”.
This is one aspect of the question about the relation between scripture and tradition. Scripture is
a norm for the church. It is the word of God, and as such a kind of way of life for the church. On
the other hand, there is a mutual interpretation between Scripture and Tradition: scripture
informs and interprets tradition, but tradition does the same thing for scripture. Which is more
important? Who finally gets to interpret scripture, to say what it means? Such things have been
issues from the beginning. The question about the relationship becomes vitally important at the
time of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic response to that. One reason that there are
different Christian denominations today is because people give different answers to the
questions.

Finally, Senior notes that we should not look in the gospels for something that is not there. What
is not there is “an account of Jesus separated from faith in Jesus”. We won’t find a Jesus
“separated from his church”, as if he was some kind of abstract and isolated world-historical
figure. There have been efforts in the last two centuries, for example, to locate a “Jesus of
History” separate from a “Christ of Faith”. It is not that such and effort is not valuable. The
problem is that to isolate some “Jesus of History” pulled out of the information put together in
the first place by a community that believed in and understood Jesus as the “Christ of Faith”, is
to think that a mere abstraction – a Jesus of History - is a concrete reality. According to the
Church, Jesus was never a lone, isolated, moral or ethical teacher of wisdom who somehow
appeared on earth as if he was a mythological demigod. That Jesus never existed. He is the man
who wasn’t there. A Jesus so-conceived is myth. The irony is that some modern writers whose
stated purpose is to de-mythologize Jesus have actually re-mythologized him instead, only from
another direction. They have created a myth of their own making, albeit using the tools of
modern scientific historical criticism, in thinking that they can call to life a Jesus separate from
his disciples and followers as if they were a skin he could shed. This is a bit like trying to
conceive of an historical George Washington divorced from the American Colonies he led in war
and the United States he served as President. The George Washington so isolated would be a
mythical figure who never existed.
2. Christians say that Jesus is “fully human, fully divine”3. This is the doctrine of the Incarnation. If
there is a central doctrine in Christianity, this is it. We are looking at Jesus after 2000 years of
history. In some respects, Christians ‘have the divinity part down’. We get that, or think we do.
However, there is a danger in not appreciating the humanity of Jesus. First, his full humanity is part
of the doctrine. To deny such implicitly or explicitly is to be in error. The incarnation is what the
church says about Jesus. Second, we won’t really understand the “divinity” aspect if we do not
understand that it shines through this humanity. Understanding the divine is nearly impossible just
by itself. The actual humanity of the actual person Jesus at least gives Christians an in-road into the
divine. If the question was, ‘What is God like?’ The answer is that ‘God is most like Jesus’, or
possibly the other way around. At that level, it works either way. It was Jesus who said, ‘The one
3
Sometimes also as “perfectly human, perfectly divine”: in the sense of being the perfect person, and as divine as divine gets.
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who has seen me has seen the Father’ [see Jn 12: 44-50]. His divinity, and so divinity itself, is
revealed, somehow, in his very humanity.
In taking this approach, we are really no different from the 1st disciples (before the resurrection?
perhaps.) They only knew the human Jesus. It was reflection on him and what happened to him that
led to the belief that this particular human being was worthy of worship, that this particular human
being revealed the divine in a unique and definitive way. But that came later, after the resurrection –
actually after the ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit. We want to be careful about a not
uncommon attitude towards Jesus that essentially denies his full humanity. There is a fine line
between believeing that Jesus is fully divine, the word made flesh, and seeing him as an essentially
un-human demigod who trod on earth for a time and then returned to heaven. That caricature (to be
sure) of an attitude would effectively deny or discount the humanity of Christ, and this we simply
cannot do and remain within the Christian horizon of understanding Jesus. For example, we simply
cannot assert that Jesus did not die. Many in the past did argue this, and there are some who hold this
as a matter of faith even today. Nor can we imagine that Jesus lived as if he had “two buttons”4
available to him: push one and he did divine things; push the other and he operates in human mode.
If there were such a being as that, it would not be a human being. The church teaches that Jesus was
a human being, ‘like us in all things save sin’ as Paul puts it. [Hb 4: 15]
-------------------------The Books of the NT
1. The NT contains 27 “books”. There are four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), one book
called the “Acts of the Apostles” (which is really part two of Luke’s gospel), an assortment of
“letters” (or epistles, mostly from Paul, and some of which are more like letters than others, which
read more like sermons), and an apocalyptic book called “Revelation” or “The Apocalypse” (the last
book in the NT “canon”. Apocalypse means “revelation” or “unveiling”).
2. The different parts of the NT were written at different times, to different audiences. The Church
says that somehow these are all the ‘Word of God’ – that God's Spirit or Voice is recognized in
them; that they are ‘Inspired’ in the way the church understands inspiration.
3. The books of the NT are all written in Greek. The oldest copies we have of the texts are in the form
of manuscripts (meaning hand-written documents). Each book takes a specific form, has various
sources, and is composed (redacted) with differing theological perspectives or points of emphasis.
(Nb: textual, source, form, redaction criticism). Besides the books as a whole, the individual gospels
or letters contain parts that can also be separately analyzed in terms of source, form, etc.
A. The Synoptic Gospels and the Two-Source Theory of the Synoptics.
1. The Synoptic Gospels are Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John is not one of the Synoptics, being
different from them in several respects. Synoptic is a Greek word that means “same vision” (synoptic), and Mt, Mk, and Lk are the synoptics because they tell the same basic story using the same
basic structure and flow of events. There are unique elements for each one. Not every story is told in
the same way or with the same detail, but in general the stories are very similar, the sayings and
miracles of Jesus are similar, etc.
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The term is from Edna Lyons’ (Jesus: self-portrait by God). He wrote about the “Two Button Trap” in considering Jesus.
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2. The question arose about the relationship between the 3 synoptic gospels, as to which came first, and
which depends on the other. There are never absolutely final and definitive answers in such things,
but scholars basically agree that Mark was the first gospel written (@ 70 AD). It seems that Matthew
came next (75-80?), and then Luke (@85?). John was the last gospel written, and scholars are still
arguing over the date (anywhere from 95-125 AD seems to be the consensus, lately favoring the
earlier date).
3. The Two-Source Theory of the Synoptics. It was noticed that most of the stories from Mk are also
contained in Mt and Lk. However, Mt and Lk add their own stories (ones not found in Mk), and they
also contain “sayings of Jesus” that Mk does not have. Thus, most scholars think that Mk was
written first, and that Mt and Lk had access to both Mk and also to a second source called “Q” (Q is
from the German quelle, which means “source”. It is sometimes also referred to as the “sayings
source”). Mk did not have access to Q, or if he did he does not seem to have used it. There are no
actual copies of Q. It is in that respect a theoretical source, although there is good reason to believe
that it was a real source (whether it was ever written or was always an oral source is, I think,
unknown).
The relationship between the sources is as follows (see diagram): 1) Mk is a source for both Mt and
Lk. 2) Q is a source for both Mt and Lk. 3) Q is not a source for Mk (and vice-versa). 4) In addition
to this, both Mt and Lk have some material that is neither in Mk nor in Q. These sources are
sometimes called the M and L sources respectively.
Mk
Q
↓ ↓
(L)  Lk
Mt  (M)
(Make sure to note the directions of the arrows. Each of them goes one way, and not the other.)
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