Four Portraits, One Jesus

Why the Gospels are not simply different memories, but purposeful and profoundly different pictures of the same Savior

This past week, I spent some time in a few of the Bible classes at Northpointe Christian High School (always nice to see the Dreyers' grandsons too), and was asked to teach a bit on the Gospels with the juniors. Specifically, what's going on in each of these four portraits of the same Jesus?

Maybe you've wondered the same. You've noticed that each Gospel is a little different, and that John is really different from the other three, so there must be some explanation for all this.

An analogy some people have drawn is to imagine four witnesses to the same event. Suppose you interviewed four people who each attended the last Super Bowl the Lions played in. All four of them would be able to tell you the same general flow of the game as well as the outcome. At the same time, each one would remember the game a little differently, and certain plays would stand out more than others to each viewer, just as each one would focus on telling you what certain players did more than the others.

This analogy isn't actually very good, however, not least because the Lions have never made the Super Bowl, and neither were all of the Gospel accounts written by eyewitnesses (though each one does at least preserve the memories of those who had walked with Jesus).

But even more to the point, this analogy doesn't work very well because it doesn’t grasp just how closely similar some of the Gospels are—especially the first three—nor does it make much room for the many purposeful differences each Gospel adds.

Let’s start with the similarities. If we returned to the four people we interviewed, they may tell us many of the same facts, but it would be almost impossible for them to narrate what they saw in exactly the same words unless someone already heard what another said and decided to copy them…especially decades after the event. Yet this is exactly what we have in some of the Gospels.

When we say some of the Gospels, we really mean the three "Synoptics": Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The way I explained this term to my students is to imagine that someone took the words "synonym" and "optical" and smashed them together: in the same way that synonyms are words that mean virtually the same thing, the Synoptics can be “seen together” in virtually the same light.

But what makes them so Synoptic? Matthew, Mark, and Luke each contain many of the same stories and sayings. And not only that, much of their similarities are nearly (and sometimes exactly) word-for-word identical. Take Mark for example: roughly 95% of Mark can be found somewhere in either Matthew or Luke, and oftentimes both. To put it simply—and this is not a criticism of the Gospel authors—someone is copying someone.

We can gather this much by taking the Gospels at their word. Luke probably gives us the best example of this when he opens his Gospel saying, "Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account" (Luke 1:1-3). Luke was not an eyewitness, but he had a number of sources—some of which came from people who had direct contact with Jesus—that he used to write his Gospel, and Mark’s Gospel was almost certainly one of them. (Note that Mark was not an eyewitness either, though tradition holds that Mark's Gospel was written after extensive contact with Peter).

This idea of copying is not at all an insult. We need not try to avoid it either, because we would still be left with the fact that the Holy Spirit inspired three different authors to write many of the same stories and in nearly word-for-word identical prose. If anything, the fact that some Gospel authors copied others suggests that they confirm the reliability of the Gospels that were written before theirs. And these similarities actually make the differences between the three Synoptic Gospels all the more striking. The Gospels are not simply the work of different authors who remembered the same events slightly differently. The main point we want to consider here is the following: if large portions of the Synoptic Gospels are exactly the same between all three, and if it is next to impossible to have this level of similarity unless the authors purposefully copied one another, the differences have to be purposeful as well.

How can this be? Think about it. If all that the Gospel authors were doing was simply copying whoever wrote their Gospel first, each account would have no differences. But because there is so much material that is copied between them and a number of differences at key points as well, each difference represents a conscious decision of the author to move from simply copying to changing how the story is told.

Sometimes these changes are merely a matter of the author’s writing style, but oftentimes these changes shift the emphasis of the story as well. We should imagine something like this: one Gospel author (perhaps Mark) wrote his Gospel first, and the writers who came after him carefully followed his account as one of their sources, purposefully adding, removing, or changing the order of events and sayings to highlight different contours of Jesus's life and ministry that may receive less attention from the other authors.

And if many of these differences have a purpose to them, they probably serve to illustrate some big picture goal that each Gospel author has. For indeed, each of the Synoptic authors—and John along with them—wants to paint a different picture of the same Jesus.

Knowing what that picture is even before we read them will help us discern each Gospel author’s larger point within the stories of Jesus we encounter. So, now that we've laid that groundwork, let's press on to see how each of these pictures of Jesus addresses the real needs of God's people.

Have any questions? Shoot me an email!

Prev: It Might Be Both | Next: Four Portraits, One Jesus (Part Two)
Enjoy this blog? Share with a friend!
For more like this, click here.