How Do We Know How The Gospels Were Written?

A tremendous amount of historical, linguistic, literary, archeological and anthropological research has taken place in the last 150 years which has greatly expanded our understanding of the ancient world and the context in which the Gospels were written.

For example, we know more about the literature of the ancient world and have compared other surviving texts to what we find in the Bible. We know more about the languages and how they were used. We know more about the historical context in which they lived.

Using these tools, we can examine the Scriptural texts and see how they were constructed. We shouldn't be afraid to do this. If our discovery is not what we expected, it need not destroy our faith in the witness of the text. In fact, it may enhance it.

On Page Six of the handout is a copy of one page of a study text, called a Gospel parallel. If you examine it, you will see the following:

• Matthew depends on Mark's text, but doesn't use all of it.


• He omits Mark's emphasis on "don't tell." This is a very important motif in Mark, but not as important in the way Matthew tells the story.


• Matthew includes a reference to the Hebrew Scriptures, which neither Mark nor Luke have. Matthew makes such a point of connecting Jesus to the tradition that most scholars agree he was probably writing for a Jewish Christian community.


• You can see that in the next section, Luke continues to follow Mark, but Matthew has rearranged the order of the narrative. Mark and Luke set this scene very early in Jesus' ministry. Matthew has moved it to after the Sermon on the Mount.

This is just one small example of how scholars analyze the text to find clues as to how the evangelists composed them.

If you would like to explore more about how the church views these scholarly developments and uses them, you can access On the Historical Truth of the Gospels (1964) here and On the Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1994) here.