The gospels are not biographies in the modern sense of the word. Rather, they are stories told in such a way as to evoke a certain image of Jesus for a particular audience. They're trying to convey a message about Jesus, about his significance to the audience and thus we we have to think of them as a kind of preaching, as well as story telling. That's what the gospel, The Good News, is really all about.

The four gospels that we find in the New Testament, are of course, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first three of these are usually referred to as the "synoptic gospels," because they look at things in a similar way, or they are similar in the way that they tell the story. Of these then, Mark is the earliest, probably written between 70 and 75. Matthew is next - written somewhere between 75 and about 85, maybe even a little later than that. Luke is a little later still, being written between 80 and maybe 90 or 95. And, John's gospel is the latest, usually dated around 95, although it may have been completed slightly later than that, as well.

The gospels are very peculiar types of literature. They're not biographies. I mean, there are all sorts of details about Jesus that they're simply not interested in giving us. They are a kind of religious advertisement. What they do is proclaim their individual author's interpretation of the Christian message through the device of using Jesus of Nazareth as a spokesperson for the evangelist's position. The evangelist is not an author of fiction. The evangelist has traditions that go back through the Greek to the spoken language of Jesus, which was probably Aramaic. In other words, I think there's some kind of continuity between what Jesus would have been saying to other Jews in 27 to 30 and what the Evangelists in Greek are saying to their own communities, that Jesus said. But, as historians, we have to sift, and go through and try to figure out what corresponds mostly to the period of the composition in Greek and what corresponds to the lifetime of the historical Jesus.

The gospel tradition divides into two streams. There's Mark and there's John. Mark is the earliest gospel written, probably, shortly after the war that destroyed the Temple, the war between Rome and Judea. And Mark presents one type of Jesus with a particular narrative where Jesus begins in the Galilee and he ends his life in Jerusalem. John, a gospel that we can't date at all, has Jesus really with the Jerusalem ministry. He's scarcely in Galilee at all. And he's really talking and preaching and doing in Jerusalem. It's a quite different story and a quite different personality. Matthew and Luke depend on Mark. Which is why those three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called the synoptic gospels. Because they can be understood together. But in terms of literary dependency, Matthew and Luke construct their story around the plot provided by Mark.

Well, there are what we might identify as contradictions in the account. Some of this has to do with our methodology. If we want to read the gospels as eye witness accounts, historical records and so on, then not only are we in for some tough going, I think there's evidence within the material itself that it's not intended to be read that way. I mean that there are certain concerns that are being addressed in this literature. And we become theologically and even historically tone deaf to those concerns, if we don't give them due consideration. It's now consensus in the New Testament scholarship to some extent [that]... in the gospels we're dealing with theologians, people who are reflecting theologically on Jesus already. And there's all indication that what we now refer to as theological reflection was there at the very beginning of things....

I think the historic story provides certain controls on our project of reconstruction. We just can't make Jesus anything that we want him to because we have certain historical constraints. Now, I also think that we're not the first people who have had these problems. I think these problems are very old. I think you start with the gospel writers, themselves.In other words, even though we're concerned about the gospel literature as being shot through with allkinds of tendencies and all kinds of biases and exaggerations and however we want to characterize these things, those guys who were responsible for that literature couldn't sit down and write anything that they wanted to about Jesus.... Among other things, they were writing for an audience, or audiences, who already knew something about Jesus; there was a market out there for their literature, and in order to engage that market, they really had to write about somebody that people knew about. They wanted to tell more about a figure about whom people already knew. And so they couldn't say any old thing.And furthermore -- and other scholars wiser and smarter than I kind of smoked these places out -- [there are points in] the text that indicate that the gospel writers themselves were dealing with certain traditions about which they may be ambivalent, but nevertheless had to do something with them. [In] a classic example, Luke tells us about the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. Now, if we read elsewhere in the Gospel of Luke [in]... the Acts of the Apostles, we see that Luke knows about the sect of John the Baptist. He knows that they preceded the Jesus movement and he also knows that there are some people in the Baptist Sect who insist on following the teachings of John the Baptist, even after Jesus has come on the scene, even after John is dead. And Luke doesn't like this....They were supposed to kind of get with the new franchise but they didn't.... He's concerned to show that even [though] John is a great guy, he's not greater than Jesus. But he knows that John baptized Jesus and that John was preaching of baptism of the repentance [of] sins. So, what does he do? ...In the third chapter of his gospel, he presents Jesus as coming to John the Baptist and then he says, "later John was put into prison." ... So, we get a notice that John was put in prison, and immediately following that notice, Jesus is baptized, it's in the passive, the verb's in the passive, with no mention of who baptized him. Now, we all know who baptized Jesus, and the smart money is that Luke knew who baptized Jesus but he didn't want to come right out and say, "John baptized him" because he doesn't like what that suggests, in the terms of the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus....

Most of the people in the early Christian movement couldn't read so they wouldn't have been reading the gospels.... Probably the greatest contact they would have had is hearing these read or preached in connection with church services. Certainly what we think of today as literal interpretation of the scripture would not really have been available in quite the same way to people in the ancient world. I think it's important to understand that what contemporary Americans, for example, think of as a literal reading of scripture is really a product of the late 19th and early 20th century, as development or part of fundamentalism's reaction to Biblical scholarship and Biblical criticism as it had developed in the 19th century.

Early Christians certainly read scripture allegorically, understanding it to refer to some kind of so-called higher realities that weren't really present in the text itself. They could interpret it morally, as giving advice for life. Very often in the 2nd and 3rd century, you find a kind of scriptural interpretation which we call "typological", and what that means is that events and details that are found in the Hebrew Bible are seen as types pointing ahead to the coming of Jesus. So that, for example, the scapegoat of the Book of Leviticus who bears off the sins of the Israelites is a type pointing ahead to Jesus and his bearing the sins of the world, according to Christian teaching....

Since the Chris