Bible

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Gospels

A gospel (from the Old English godspel, meaning “good news”) is not a biography, although it bears some resemblance to biographies of heroes, human and divine, in the Graeco-Roman world. A gospel is a series of individual accounts of acts or sayings, each having a kind of completeness, but arranged to create a cumulative effect. The writers of the Gospels apparently had some interest in chronological order, but that was not primary. Theological concerns and readers' needs strongly influenced arrangement of materials. One would expect, therefore, that even though all four New Testament Gospels centre on Jesus of Nazareth and all four are gospels in literary form, differences would still exist among them. And that is the case. Apart from the accounts of Jesus' arrest, trial, death, and Resurrection, which are strikingly similar in all four, the Gospels differ in important details, perspectives, and accents of interpretation.

In all these ways, the Gospel of John stands most noticeably apart from the others. In this Gospel, Jesus Christ is portrayed more obviously as divine, all-knowing, all-controlling, and “from above”. The other three are called synoptic (viewed together) Gospels because, despite differences, they can be viewed together. Placed in parallel columns, Matthew, Mark, and Luke impress the reader with such similarities that they have spawned many theories about their relationships. The most widely held scholarly opinion is that Mark was the earliest written and became a source for Matthew and Luke. Most likely, Matthew and Luke each had other sources as well as a common source, a conjecture made on the basis of much shared material not found in Mark. This theorized but as yet unidentified source has simply been called Q, or Quelle (German, “source”). In a preface, the author of the Gospel of Luke speaks of having researched many narratives about Jesus (see Luke 1:1-4).

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History

Historical narrative is best represented in the New Testament by the Acts of the Apostles, which is the second of two volumes (sometimes called Luke-Acts) ascribed to St Luke. These two books tell the story of Jesus and the Church that arose in his name as one continuous narrative, set in the history of Israel and of the Roman Empire. The history is theologically presented; that is, it interprets what God is doing in this event or with that person. Acts is unique in the New Testament in its use of historical narrative for purposes of proclamation.

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Epistles

The epistle or letter in the Graeco-Roman world was a fairly standardized literary form consisting of signature, address, greeting, eulogy or thanksgiving, message, and farewell. St Paul found this form congenial to his relation to the churches he had established and convenient for an itinerant apostle. The form became widely accepted in the Christian community and was used by other Church leaders and writers. The epistles that they wrote, some of which appear in the New Testament, are really sermons, exhortations, or treatises thinly disguised as epistles.

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Apocalyptic Writing

Apocalyptic writing appears throughout the New Testament but is most extensive in the Book of Revelation. Apocalypses are usually written in times of severe crisis for a community, times in which people look beyond the present and beyond human sources for help and hope. This literature is highly visionary, symbolic, pessimistic about world conditions, and hopeful only in terms of the invisible beyond the visible and the victory beyond history. Just retribution and reward characterize the visions of the end of the world. Apparently, Revelation was written during the persecution of Christians under the Roman Emperor Domitian, who reigned from 81 to 96. See Apocalyptic Writings.

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Literary Forms

Within these four major types of literature, many forms appear: poems, hymns, confessional formulas, proverbs, miracle stories, beatitudes, diatribes, lists of duties, parables, and others. Recent scholarship has given a great deal of attention to literary form not only as necessary in understanding content but also as a vehicle by which the reader can share the experience created in a given passage. Forms have the power to create worlds and to define relationships; they are not mere accessories to content.

In the writings of biblical scholars, much attention in the past was focused on the parable, which for centuries was regarded as an allegory. At the close of the last century, the German biblical scholar Adolph Jülicher took a new direction in the interpretation of parables. He insisted that the New Testament parables be understood as real similes, rather than as allegories. Thus, he held that Jesus' stories should be understood as illustrations, the meanings of which could be restated in single themes or propositions.

More recently, parables have been respected as works of literary art, having a force and function similar to poetry, and therefore not to be destroyed by paraphrase or summary or propositional digest. As literary art, a parable does not simply make its point, but it does its work on the reader—creating, altering, or even shattering a particular view of life and reality. Scholarly explorations into other literary forms in the New Testament are also under way.