The Gospels for All Christians (New Testament Studies) [Paperback]

This rather modest book, just 220 pages encompassing seven individual chapters by half a dozen British scholars, deftly challenges one of the central presuppositions underlying a vast mountain of New Testament scholarship for much of the past quarter century. Led by Richard Bauckham who teaches at St. Andrews in Scotland, these scholars quite literally pull the rug out from under prevailing work on the Gospels which almost universally assume that each individual Gospel was written for and intended only for an almost hermetically sealed "community" and that close reading of the texts gives us enough information to draw a fairly detailed picture of that same community. This assumption, Bauckham argues, despite the fact that it has become foundational to work in the field has really never been proven or even extensively argued as a theory with independent proof and testing. Like so many other "foundational" assumptions of recent New Testament scholarship, this structure upon which so many elaborate edifices have been attached rests not on the solid rock of historical or comparative literary evidence, but on sand.
Once Bauckham has cut through the knots of assumptions and the clumsy misuse of "social scientific" argument, an enormous stack of scholarship--commentaries, journal articles, Ph.D. theses, and monographs--suddenly seems to be standing on the shakiest of theoretical grounds.
For that reason, most New Testament scholars will either ignore, sniff, sneer, or simply brush aside this challenge. In fairness, no one who is thoroughly published on Gospel issues wants to have years or decades of their life's work challenged on foundational grounds.
The inimitable Loveday Alexander, adds an incisive chapter on book production and distribution in the Roman world, drawing on her extraordinary command of classic sources, and demonstrates that one did not tend to write a book in the Roman world unless that work was intended for what in those times counted as wide circulation. If one wanted only to communicate to a small, geographically fixed community one tended to use oral communication which was much more powerful and much more effective given the generally lower levels of literacy.

Richard Burridge of King's College London applies his well-developed thesis about gospel genre (see his erudite and comprehensive WHAT ARE THE GOSPELS?) to the question of who wrote the Gospels and why. Ever since Bultmann--the source of an almost endless series of utterly unfounded theories about the New Testament--the Gospels have be argued to be the products not so much of brilliant individuals but of "communities". (Having been a magazine and book editor for 25 years, I can hardly contain my astonishment when scholars point to a work that has stood for twenty centuries and argue that it was authored by some kind of committee.)Burridge addresses a series of these key questions in a powerful show of logic.

There is such a refreshing show of finely honed common sense and willingness to ask the most fundamental questions about matters that have become immutable articles of faith in the "scholarly guild" that the book is an exhilirating and heady read.

It is impossible to overrate the importance of this diamond-sharp gem of a book.

As the contributors to THE GOSPELS FOR ALL CHRISTIANS point out, there is a tendency to treat the Gospels as something like Paul's epistles. Just as Paul wrote to specific churches addressing specific problems, the evangelists are widely seen as writing for specific "churches" or "communities." So interpreting a Gospel becomes like interpreting a Pauline epistle - an endless quest for determining what that writer is responding to, turning the Gospels into allegories of church life and mirrors of communities. Such interpretations have a tendency to spin out of control, as in the case of Raymond Brown's oft-cited and occasionally ridiculed COMMUNITY OF THE BELOVED DISCIPLE where he argues that the John's Gospel went through a multiple-stage editing process, each stage corresponding to a different phase in the life of the community.

One problem is there is a general lack of proof for any such theories. And why couldn't an evangelist write his gospel over several years, traveling from city to city, and interacting with various problems and eventually publishing a gospel for the larger Christian community?

Richard Bauckham's introductory essay (which inspired the collection) sets the tone for the book. He argues persuasively that the idea that the gospels were written for general circulation and not specific communities. Based on what we know about the early Christians, they were interested in presenting the gospel message to the entire world. Bauckham's conclusion is a little sweeping and ignores some of the obvious signs that the gospel writers appear to have had a certain audience in mind. The later essays are a bit more restrained, arguing that the evangelists might have had a "target audience" in addition to the broader church. For example, Matthew might well have been written to Jewish Christians with a high regard for the law.

The essays are uniformly solid. One of the best is Richard Burridge's article on the genre of the Gospels. As he has argued in more detail in other works, their genre is similar to Greek and Roman biographies. Such works were generally addressed to the public and not just a specific school or community. Richard Thompson shows convincingly that travel and communication in the Roman world was quite developed and an author would likely assume that his works would have wide circulation.

This collection of essays is a generally outstanding contribution to New Testament studies. I recommend it highly.

As other reviews here make clear, this is a powerful book that demands a rethinking of the assumptions of some earlier scholars that the gospels were written for isolated communities. Bauckham's work calls these theories into question, and demonstrates that such theories are almost entirely speculative and do not rest on any kind of real proof. Unfortunately much of this earlier speculative scholarship has led mainstream readers to believe that the gospels are not reliable accounts of the life of Jesus and that they were indeed fakes. Bauckham urges a much more responsible approach to Gospel scholarship. Highly recommended, along with Bauckham's many other books.