Reading Scripture with the Church: Toward a Hermeneutic for Theological Interpretation by A. K. M. Adam & Stephen E. Fowl & Kevin J. Vanhoozer & Francis Watson

Author:A. K. M. Adam & Stephen E. Fowl & Kevin J. Vanhoozer & Francis Watson [Adam, A. K. M.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2006-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

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Are There Still Four Gospels?

A Study in Theological Hermeneutics

FRANCIS WATSON

Who is Jesus Christ? The answer to that question comprehends Christian faith in its entirety. An assertion is recognizably Christian only if it also entails an answer to the question of Jesus’s identity. Christian talk about God is Christian only if God is understood in relation to Jesus, and Jesus in relation to God. Christian talk about the world is Christian only if the world is understood in its relation to Jesus and to the God whose triune being Jesus discloses. For Christian faith, the question of Jesus’s identity is the question of all questions, on which all else hangs.

Bound up in it are the all-comprehending questions of the identity of God and of the world. Yet talk about Jesus refers us not to an abstract generalization but to a concrete particular. If Jesus represents the point at which the relation between God and the world is revealed and determined, that point still takes the form of a contingent historical existence, known to us like other historical contingencies in the traces it has left behind. These traces include written texts, notably the four parallel narrations of Jesus’s ministry and its outcome known since early times as “gospels.” If there is a comprehensive answer to the question of Jesus’s identity, there is also a particular one, and this answer is very simple. Who is Jesus Christ? Answer: he is the protagonist of the fourfold gospel narration that bears the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For Christian faith, Jesus is not encountered directly but is mediated through texts. Not only through texts, but also through community, through the neighbor, through bread and wine. Yet it is the texts themselves that specify these nontextual mediations. It is the evangelists’ Jesus who promises his presence where two or three are gathered in his name; who identifies himself with the hungry and thirsty, with strangers and prisoners; and who gives his own body and blood in the forms of bread and wine. The canonical Gospels are not just a resource for the Christian community, highly valued but in the last resort dispensable or replaceable. On the contrary, they are fundamental to the church’s existence.1 If replaced by other texts, the outcome would be not only another Jesus but also another community. The community that sees God and the world in relation to Jesus is bound to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Why these four? Why not the Gospel of Thomas or Q or the Protevangelium of James, an appealing second-century text in which the birth of Jesus is set in the context of the birth and childhood of Mary, his mother? Why not the Gospel of Mary, a text in which the possibility that the Savior’s profoundest revelations might be communicated through a woman is asserted and defended against the objections of patriarchal orthodoxy?

If the Christian community learned to embrace such texts, it would no doubt be changed by them. But perhaps that would be

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