Inter-Varsity Press

PREFACE

WRITTEN ABOUT two thousand years ago in Greek, the four Gospels are our primary sources of information about the life of Jesus Christ, the most extraordinary person to have ever lived. These authoritative accounts endorsed by the early Christians reveal who Jesus Christ truly is. With good reason, the four Gospels have been highly valued by his followers in every age.

Yet, in spite of this, most Christians do not have a particularly clear understanding of them. Two factors possibly explain this. First, the contents of Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap considerably. This makes distinguishing between them difficult, and for many Christians, these Gospels tend to blur together. Only John’s Gospel stands apart as being noticeably different. Second, the Gospels are often read in piecemeal fashion. Short passages are taken from here and there, without any meaningful attempt being made to see them within the context of a whole Gospel. As a result, exceptionally few Christians, even among those who are educated theologically, are able to describe with certainty the distinctive features and themes of each Gospel.

If you think this is an overstatement, test yourself and your Christian friends with a few questions: How do the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke differ from each other? What is distinctive about each? How does Mark’s picture of Jesus differ from that of Matthew (or Luke, or John)? Why is John’s Gospel quite unlike the others? Even mature Christians will struggle to answer these questions.

This very basic lack of knowledge about the Gospels is extremely disturbing, especially given their importance as key witnesses to Jesus Christ. As an attempt to address this problem, this short book provides an opportunity to explore the four Gospels and compare their contents in a largely nontechnical way. The approach adopted is designed to enable ordinary Bible readers to appreciate how the Gospels portray Jesus in four distinctive but complementary ways.

Hopefully, by bringing clarity where there is confusion, this book will help you, the reader, to understand how the four Gospels present Jesus respectively as:

• The son of David who establishes the kingdom of heaven

• The Son of God who suffers to ransom others

• The Savior of the world who seeks the lost

• The Lamb of God who brings eternal life through a new exodus

At a time in history when many well-educated people have only a passing knowledge of what the Bible has to say about Jesus, this introductory guide will enable modern readers to see Jesus through the eyes of his earliest followers. Experiencing Jesus in this way undoubtedly enriches our understanding of who he is, what he has done, and what he continues to do.

The contents of this book first took shape through a course on the Gospels that I taught on several occasions at Union Theological College, Belfast, for church members. The contents have been reworked since then with the hope of making the course materials more widely available, possibly for use in small groups. To prompt discussion and further reflection, questions have been added at the end of each chapter.

It is my hope that this short introduction to the Gospels will prove stimulating, enabling ordinary readers to understand better why the earliest communities of Jesus’ followers embraced four accounts of his life. By appreciating the distinctive contribution that each Gospel makes to our understanding of Jesus, we, too, can begin to derive a much richer picture of who he is.