Hearing the New Testament Quotes

“Implicit in the enterprise of traditio-historical criticism is the understanding that the NT texts—and specifically the Gospels—are not simply play-by-play accounts of the ministry of the historical Jesus. It was not the intention of the Gospel writers, for instance, to give a complete, unbiased, or even journalistic view of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, as with all historical documents on some level, their contents are selected, ordered, and emphasized based on the—in these cases, especially theological and christological—agenda of the authors and their communities.2 Thus, the Gospels should be regarded as documents derived from a variety of traditions and narrating a story of Jesus that has been shaped by the early church community.3 The NT texts as we now have them, then, are not regarded as purely historical (as we typically use the term today). Rather, they are narratives whose backgrounds are formed by oral traditions that take as their starting point the life of the historical Jesus. This, however, does not mark these traditions as unreliable accounts of Jesus. This issue of the reliability of early—particularly oral—traditions will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.”
― Joel B. Green, Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for Interpretation