Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

by Craig L. Blomberg

Mark three...

Matthew's use of the term even more closely approaches the full-fledged divinity that later creeds and confessions make explicit.

But in several places the context suggests that Lord is the correct title for full-fledged disciples to use, particularly when they are in need of aid that only one who has divine power can supply (e.g., 8:2, 6, 25; 9:28).

Particularism and Universalism in the Gospel Offer according to the Scriptures.

Matthew's Gospel, is that Matthew is perhaps the most Jewish of all the Gospels,

Approximately twenty times Matthew cites a particular Scripture as fulfilled in the events of the life of Christ.

Or, in Schnackenburg's words, “Jesus proclaims a morality, made possible through God's boundless mercy, grounded in trust in his Father, and transcending legal prescriptions, that is directed to the love of God and reaches from love of siblings and love of neighbors all the way to love of enemies (5:43-48).”16

“kingdom of heaven,”

This expression appears thirty-three times in Matthew but nowhere else in the New Testament, and parallel passages in Mark and Luke regularly have “kingdom of God” instead.

At the same time it is only in Matthew that Gentile Magi come and worship the Christ Child (2:1-12) or that a series of three parables is found predicting the demise of the current Jewish leadership (21:18-22:14).

Only Matthew recounts Christ's “parable” of the sheep and the goats, with its emphasis on universal judgment of the world's peoples (25:31-46).

Only Matthew includes Jesus' Great Commission, commanding the Twelve to make disciples of all people groups (Gk. ethnē, the same term used in chap. 25).

ANY READER WHO has worked carefully through Matthew, Mark, and Luke is immediately struck by how different a Gospel John is.

entirely absent in John:

Jesus' baptism, the calling of the Twelve, the exorcisms, the Transfiguration, the parables, and the ins...

While the actual teachings of Jesus in John rarely repeat those of the Synoptics, the themes often dovetail closely:

Johannine parallels, almost every distinctive passage in John finds at least short conceptual counterparts in one or a handful of much shorter Synoptic sayings somewhere.

Can John be taken seriously as a historically trustworthy account of the life of Jesus in light of this combination of similarities and differences from the Synoptics?

First, one of the reasons John seems so different is because Matthew, Mark, and Luke are so similar to each other.

many things that, had four writers all written of him independently, their Gospels might all have produced books as different from each other as John is from the Synoptics.

kerygma

Synoptics can be explained on the basis of the different audiences within the Gospels’ narratives.

A “Q”-passage that discloses many marks of authenticity (Matt 11:25-27; Luke 10:21-22) has often been called the “Johannine thunderbolt” in the middle of the Synoptic tradition because of its similarities to otherwise distinctively Johannine language.

Tenth, several of John's longer sermons unique to his Gospel show signs of Jewish midrash—the homiletical development of Old Testament texts—characteristic of the rabbis of the day but not of early Christian preaching (see esp. John 6:26-5922).

Eleventh, John actually contains more details of time and place in the course of Jesus' ministry than do the Synoptics.

Twelfth, John is clearly contextualizing the gospel for an audience living under quite different circumstances than the communities to which Matthew, Mark, or Luke wrote.

but “eternal life” occurs seventeen times.

Thirteenth, we must avoid overestimating the differences.

John presents the trial and execution of Jesus, as he presents everything else in his record, in such a way as to enforce his theological Leitmotiv: Jesus is the incarnate Word, in whom the glory of God is revealed.

Like Mark, John falls into two “halves,” one stressing Jesus' mighty deeds (chaps. 1-11) and one reflecting the events leading up to and including his death and resurrection (chaps. 12-21).

Because 20:31 reads like a closing, many scholars have viewed chapter 21 as a later appendix added to a previous draft of the Gospel.

30 John 20:31 also makes the purpose of the Gospel clear: to promote belief in Jesus as the Christ (Messiah) and Son of God.

Within the first half of the Gospel, chapters 2-11 are dominated by seven miracles (John calls them “signs”) and seven major discourses of Jesus.

unit. Chapters 2-4 begin and end with miracles in Cana, the only two explicitly enumerated “signs” of Jesus in this Gospel (“first,” 2:11; “second” 4:54).

1)—the Christ and the Son of God.

for God gives the Spirit without limit.

Logos.

What all these and other uses have in common is that the logos was a widely used term to refer to the way God or the gods revealed themselves and communicated with humankind.

John may well be exploiting this diverse background to stress that Jesus is the way in which the true, living God reveals himself and communicates with his people.

Realized Eschatology. Whereas the Synoptics stress a future hope and the return of Christ, John defines eternal life and death as beginning now in this age, based on men's and women's responses to Jesus.

Miracles as Signs and Their Relation to Faith. In the Synoptic Gospels, whenever someone asks for a “sign” (Gk. sēmeion), Jesus uniformly refuses to give one (e.g., Matt 12:38-39; 16:1-4 pars.).

In John, however, “signs” function positively as reason to believe in Jesus (e.g., John 2:11; 4:53-54),44 although John's Jesus never performs a miracle “on demand” merely to satisfy a skeptic either.

The Holy Spirit as Paraclete. The Holy Spirit is even more prominent in John than in Luke. Wholly unparalleled elsewhere is John's use of the term paraklētos in the Farewell Discourse to refer to the Spirit.

Five discrete roles for the Paraclete emerge in John 14-16: helper (14:15-21), interpreter (14:25-31), witness (15:26-16:4), prosecutor (16:5-11), and revealer (16:12-16).

John points to the one central truth that ultimately all people will be judged by God and put into one of only two camps: those who have believed in Jesus and those who have not.

pre-70

Reasonably strong early church tradition, however, does date the Gospel to the end of the first century, probably during the reign of Domitian (81-96),

A few writers have argued for a pre-70 date, in part on the basis of present tense references to Jewish places destroyed in the war with Rome (e.g., John 5:2).

The traditional idea of a date in the 80s or 90s remains best.

With the “new look on John” recovering an emphasis on the Jewish roots of the Fourth Gospel, most commentators today agree that the author himself could well have been Jewish, and even originally from Israel.