Gospels for All Christians

by Richard Bauckham

Argues from a wide range of evidence that the Gospels were not written each for a specific church or community, but were intended for general circulation throughout all the early churches.

Genres: Theology, Biblical Studies, New Testament, Church History, History

226 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Richard Bauckham (PhD, University of Cambridge) is senior scholar at Ridley Hall, Cambridge University, in Cambridge, England, where he teaches for the Cambridge Federation of Theological Colleges. He is also a visiting professor at St. Mellitus College, London, and emeritus professor of New Testament at the University of St. Andrews. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the author of numerous books.

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the time of its publication, this book represented a highly "unorthodox" thesis in Gospel studies: that the Gospels were written not just for a particular, geographically limited community, but for Christians and perhaps even non-Christians over a wide geographic spread. For most readers of the gospels this may seem an obvious or irrelevant point, but for most Gospel scholarship in the 20th century, it was all but obvious, and how scholars conceived of the audiences of the gospels often deeply affected their exegesis. Differences in the gospels were read as reflecting radically different understandings of Jesus which in turn reflected communities of radically different confessional character. At other times, the gospels were read as allegorical histories of the communities themselves-communal biographies thinly veiled as biographies of Jesus, but saying little or nothing about Jesus himself. The essays in this book each contribute in some way to the thesis that the Gospels were written, at least potentially, for many, most, or even all Christians.
Bauckham's opening essay, one of the strongest in the volume, first provides a brief account of how the "community" hypothesis came to be dominant 20th-century scholarship and then proceeds to clearly and concisely set out many basic arguments for the "all Christians" hypothesis. Here I will briefly state a couple of these arguments. First, most gospel scholars believe that shortly after Mark's gospel was written, Matthew and Luke each acquired and used it as a source for writing their own gospels, so Mark's gospel must have circulated at least far enough for two separate authors to make use of it. Second, a point mentioned by several contributors, if a Christian leader or teacher needed to write something to a particular community, to address a squabble, for example, the epistolary genre would be the most intuitive tool for the task, and a biography of Jesus a very unintuitive one. In fact, what would be the point of writing a gospel to a particular community?
Following Bauckham's essay is Michael B. Thompson's The Holy Internet: Communication Between Churches in the First Christian Generation, which shows, conclusively, I believe, that not only was transportation and travel available to the first Christians, but also that they, in fact, made frequent use of their mobility for teaching and other purposes. Paul obviously had a high degree of mobility and was known to have his letters distributed beyond their original destination (2 Cor 1:1; cf. 1 Pet 1:1). The Didache, arguably from the 1st century, encourages its readers to provide lodging for traveling teachers, and so does Paul expect of the church in Rome for Phoebe, so that we are warranted in imagining a kind of hospitality network for teachers and authority figures. Thompson provides many more illustrations of the networked connectedness of early Christianity.
My personal favorite chapter is Loveday Alexander's Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels, in which she argues that the very act of writing something down usually entailed an intention for distribution. The two means of publishing books were 1) oral performance, and 2) commercial and private copying. As she writes, "the crossing of the oral/written boundary is often connected in the ancient world with an extension of the audience beyond the limits of the primary oral situation." (p. 90) Ancient scholars, whether connected by a formal 'school' or merely by common occupation, would share with each other literature relevant to their field. Rhetoricians would often write out notes to aid them in delivering a speech, but later develop them into a publishable script. Occasionally, a student might take down notes from his/her teacher's lecture and begin distributing them before the teacher was ready to publish the material. Finally, the oral/written boundary may be crossed at the prompting of a literary patron or "investor" who intends to gain honor by commissioning a work for broad distribution (cf. Luke's prologue). In all these cases, the act of writing something down entails an extension of its audience, so we have to ask: if the authors of the gospels intended to share their message with only their community, why on earth would they have written it down? On the other hand, if the authors of the gospels intended to extend their audience by distributing their message in literary form, then we have exactly what we should expect.
Richard Burridge demonstrated, practically single-handedly, in his What are the Gospels that the genre of the gospels is ancient biography. Like ancient biography they consist of continuous prose narrative approximately the length of a single parchment scroll (10-20k words), they have a bare chronology which emphasizes the public life of the subject, but may include some genealogy and childhood anecdotes, and, unlike modern biography, they do not make psychological speculation or emphasize the internal development of their subject. The hermeneutical consequence of this is that the gospels have to be read as being not about their audience, but about their single protagonist, Jesus. Of course, every biography is written because it is or could be significant to some demographic, but the concerns of that demographic are not determinative of the author's literary goals. What we ought to ask of every piece of the gospels is "what this story or incident is designed to tell us about the author's understanding of Jesus." (124) Biographies were generally written for anyone who might be interested in their subject.
Bauckham's second contribution "John for Readers of Mark" endeavors to show that several parenthetical or explanatory notes in John's gospel only make sense as aids to readers who are familiar with Mark and encountering John for the first time. This is the most detailed argument of the book, so I won't recount it here, but hopefully, it suffices to say that Bauckham's purpose is to show that Mark has reached not Matthew and Luke, but also John and that John assumes the wide readership of both Mark's and his own gospel. Additionally, Bacukham proposes that John conceived of his gospel as largely complementary to Mark's, rather than as a replacement.
In ch. 6, Stephen Barton draws together a variety of arguments about the state of gospel scholarship and the question of identifying their audiences. He successfully demonstrates that trying to extract information about any particular community from the gospels is a hermeneutical dead end, and has not brought any clarity to gospel scholarship.
Finally, Francis Watson argues in his contribution Toward a Literal Reading of the Gospels that the community hypothesis, though historical in nature, is based upon Bultmannian theological ideas. Bultmann conceived of form criticism as a way of uncovering the history of a Christian community's belief, a belief founded not upon their memories of Jesus of Nazareth, but upon their ongoing mystical encounter with the risen Christ. In other words, Bultmann claimed that the stories and sayings of Jesus that we have in the gospels were the results of Christians receiving visions or prophetic oracles from Christ; if they tell us anything about the historical Jesus, we cannot possibly know what that is. The gospels were then read by Bultmann and many others as revealing primarily the religious experience of Christian communities so that each narrative could be corresponded to a communal need or crisis or event. Watson encourages in place of this quasi-allegorical method of reading the gospels, a literal reading of the gospels, that is, a reading of the gospels which understands that their subject is Jesus. Watson's essay contributes somewhat less directly to the "all Christians" hypothesis, as far as I can tell.
20 years after its publication, I think it is fair to say that the book has been successful in making scholars rethink the issue, and its thesis has won many able proponents as well as many detractors. Michael F. Bird, for example, has defended Bauckham's thesis on several occasions. Bauckham himself continues to make waves in gospel research, especially now with the recent publication of the 2nd edition of his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.
I would highly recommend this volume to those who are seriously interested in the gospels or New Testament studies more generally. I have to say that I might not recommend the final 3 essays unilaterally, as they did little, for me anyway, to enhance the plausibility of the central thesis.

[Ryan Lian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good read - turns out the gospels weren’t written for one particular audience but for wide circulation.

Must admit parts of it were totally unintelligible to me, but Bauckham’s chapters really shone through and made up for it!

[Jeff Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super interesting collection of essays from different authors. At the time of release it took on the prevailing scholarly thesis that the Gospels were written specifically for the communities the authors were in.

The first essay from Richard Bauckham really takes on this thesis and provides a lot of evidence against this idea. But what makes these essays so interning is how everything is framed and helps you think about the audiences of the Gospels and the communications between the early Christian communities. They were not separate islands, but communities that shared a lot of information using the capabilities of the time. It is interesting that despite the slowness of communications of the time - that it was fairly capable of keeping communities in contact. This enables both the good and bad of all communication.

Also interesting was a look at how the codex became the dominant use among these communities and how it overtook the use of scrolls then in use by most and for quite a time after. I knew some of this regarding codexes, but this provided much more detail regarding whey this was so.

[G0thamite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this book was first published in 1998, it deserves a second look by anyone interested in the interpretation of the gospels in recent history. It is a thorough critique of form and redaction critical approaches to the study of the gospels. It takes particular aim at the so-called "consensus" view (less of one now, hopefully) that the each gospel was composed by an author directed to a specific church situation (the Markan "community" for example). Rather, the authors (Bauckham is the editor) show the flaws in this approach and revive the idea that the gospels were meant for a wide general audience. Wholeheartedly recommended !

[Mu-tien Chiou · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thesis is creative and overall convincing at the time of its publication, balancing the scholarly pendulum once swung too slanted toward "a particularist approach" and form criticism of the gospels. Some chapters are better than others, nonetheless, as often is the case in such edited works that involve multiple contributors. The point is that Dr. Bauckham's opening chapter does not let down and sets forth the standard value of this book.

[Kendall Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellently argued contributions that have wide-reaching relevance. The essays by Alexander and Watson in particular are absolute gems.

[Sonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A major assumption of Gospel scholarship over the last half-century is the idea that each Gospel was written for a specific Christian audience, either a church or group of churches, and especially for the “communities” in which the evangelists resided. Gospel study therefore has focused on the distinguishing characteristics of these unmentioned communities to which each of the Gospels was supposedly addressed, with the assumption that these audiences are key to understanding the Gospels. Richard Bauckham’s book, The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences, is a groundbreaking collection of essays that challenges these deeply rooted assumptions.

The authors contend that the Gospel writers expected their works to circulate among the churches and therefore had no specific Christian audience in mind. Bauckham’s essay leads off the book, stressing the sheer lack of evidence for the theory that the Gospels were addressed to specific Christian communities. He cites six reasons for rejecting this model, most notably that the early Christian communities were highly mobile groups that often transcended the local church, that maintained active communication networks over a broad are of the Mediterranean world, and engaged in the practice of sending letters to other churches.

The essay that makes up the second chapter highlights the importance of hospitality in the early church and the relative speed with which early Christian documents would have been circulated. The third chapter describes ancient book making and the commercial book trade. The fourth chapter describes the Gospels as biographies. In an excellent chapter, Bauckham’s essay in the fifth chapter describes how the Gospel of John seems to assume that his audience is familiar with details in the Gospel of Mark. The final chapter by Francis Watson will present some difficulty for many lay readers.

It is incredible that the assumptions arising from form-criticism and redaction-criticism have gone unchallenged for so long, especially since these same assumptions created a whole range of problems. This book persuasively argues that the Gospels were written for “all Christians,” and helps to overcome these unsolved problems. The discussion, however, is complex and may be more suitable for the scholar, academic or student, and not for the average lay person. Yet Bauckham’s arguments have led to much-needed debate, even if the answers can’t be easily reached. After all, who can know the mind of the authors?

[Stewie · Rating 5 out of 5]

While taking a biblical studies course this odd idea was quite often assumed: each gospel was written to a select and isolated community who had their own struggles and conflicts which these gospels dealt with through the teachings and actions of Jesus. The absurdity (at least to me) that this remained most unchallenged and assumed left me looking for answers. This is the book I was directed to. It is both thorough and thought provoking. The thesis that John knew Mark is worth the price of admission! It's both controversial and worthy of strong consideration. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Gospel studies.

[Steven Koster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another excellent Bauckham book, bringing some sanity to the world of early church history and New Testament development. The premise of this one seems obvious and simple--the gospels were written with the intention of being widely read. But that upsets decades of recent biblical studies and notions of isolated disparate communities transmitting oral stories for decades and centuries. If taken seriously, this should be an earthquake in the field.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the Introduction, Bauckham's piece "John for Readers of Mark" and Francis Watson's piece "Toward a Literal Reading of the Gospels." To be honest, I had to read "John.." About three times before I could begin to actually synthesize the information. This is too advanced for where I currently am, but Bill is working on a project that I said I would help with so I'm forging ahead.

[Rob Dalrymple · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent

[Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book that encounters the community thesis and it's variants. Bauckham is at times too broad, but overall his argument is sound.

[Dancingfoolvb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Addresses the perspective that the Gospels were written only for specific groups, rather than for general consumption. But could have had more about circulation and transmission of texts.

[Tommi Karjalainen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some articles were not so clear. The overall argument is persuasive.