Psychology of the Gospels

‘No one should pretend to understand what one does not.

Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.’[a]

With all the hype of Christianity to be an authentic religion, Jesus as God in the form of human, and the salvific/redeeming power of his message every one attends to gospels one time or another in his/her life time. Despite nearly two thousand years of scholarship, research and study of the Bible especially the Second Testament (NT), the text remains vulnerable in the hands of the ignorant readers. We swing between two extremes from reducing it to a mythical genre of ancient literature filled with spectacular events, extraterrestrial beings, miracles (supernatural actions) and morals to treating it like any other modern biography of a spiritual person gifted with extra ordinary powers. This may seem exaggerated, however is convincing as we examine our attitude towards gospels in this case the whole Bible. Blinded by the modern jacket on the one hand, the gossips of antiquity on the other we usually fail to discern the authentic nature of the gospels, ‘the psychology of the gospels’, thus ending up with the distortion of its message. One can find numerous evidences of such distortions at different levels and at different times in history inside and outside Christianity.

The gospels contain data concentrated on ‘the message/good news i.e. Jesus of Nazareth’ of the first quarter of the first century AD, as it has been handed down by traditions (apostolic tradition). At the death of Jesus of Nazareth, the followers of Jesus who have seen, lived, heard him kept alive the memory of this founder through word of mouth in preaching, teaching and worship. C.H. Dodd names them as ‘living voice’. We may become apprehensive of oral tradition as the vehicle of the message, as it is liable to many slips between hearing a thing and repeating it to another person.  True, but the early followers of Jesus were Jews. Among Jews of that time there was a custom that the disciple was responsible for remembering and faithfully handing on the teaching of his master. The disciples of Jesus however, would not have given a word-for-word repetition as in the Jewish schools. They were practical teachers concerned to carry the meaning across to their hearers. In all probability, they would have recasted sayings, inserted an explanatory comment, to make it more applicable to the existing situation as the message was carried across borders and cultures; or, introduced an unbalanced elaboration of certain aspects of the sayings of Jesus, provoked by the debates against non-Christian public or even within Christian community, so much on the conscious side. With the growing understanding of the unceasing impact of the unconscious mind in our thoughts and actions, contemporary scholars unearth numerous biases that run undercurrent in the Jesus material of the gospels.  We have evidences of such inclusions. Moreover, the hypothesis is reasonable.

With the years, they became traditions; some took the written form as collections of sayings of the Lord, collections of miracles, and collections of infancy and passion narratives. Scholars contend Paul, who was not part of the inner-circle of Jesus, to have known Jesus’ sayings from the oral tradition, and used the authourity of the body of material circulated under the title ‘collection of sayings of the Lord’ to communicate the message in his letters.

At some point, the early Christians combined the sayings and other traditions to form a larger composition of the life of Jesus. Far from presenting mere historical facts, the writers intended them to be a written record of the living voice (tradition) as passed on to them by the early missionaries.[1]  In the traditions and written documents, as a result we find a double strain: a report of certain happenings, together and inseparably interwoven with an interpretation of these happenings, in other words ‘fact’ plus ‘interpretation’. They were reports of the faith of the early church, illumined by the risen-Jesus-experience.  Such an ‘enlightened memory’ was the ‘Jesus-material’, the reservoir at the disposal of evangelists inside early church. Luke writes in his dedicatory: “Many writers have undertaken to draw up an account of the events that have happened among us, following the traditions handed down to us by the original eye-witnesses and servants of the gospel [the umbrella term for the latter group is ‘early missionaries’].” (Lk 1.1) One such written document at hand is the Gospel of Mark,[2] the earliest canonical gospel (65-70 CE), which echoes the living voice telling the story than other gospels.    

Gospels of Mathew, Luke and John are an elaborate account of the message/goodness in style based on these materials. Mark, as mentioned above is more a compiler than an author. He reproduced what had come from traditions and other written documents with little attempt to write them in his own way, unlike Luke, Mathew and John who present them in chorological, pedagogical, and theological characters respectively. Moreover, the substantial unity in Mathew, Mark and Luke proves in all probability that Mark has been a basis of narrative for Mathew and Luke. This however does not deny their use of other Jesus material, which is obvious in their content. Gospel of John of course, has been a fruit of another tradition, quite different from the rest. Adapting himself to the pattern of Greek-speaking east – Ephesus, his work abounds with sophisticated theology, symbolism and Imagery. In gist, the canonical gospels communicate facts with the intention of bringing out as forcibly as possible the central belief, the belief in risen Jesus. To this end, they seek the aid of symbolism and imagery present in Jewish poetry and prophecy.

The fourth gospel, for example tells the readers “you will see heaven wide open, and God’s angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (Jn 1.51) as it is about to begin its account of the public career of Jesus. This does not mean that the gospel intends to describe the scene with winged beings visibly flying up and down. Instead, it meant that with his unique career, Jesus brings God and man, heaven and earth together as never before. This imagery is also present in the account of baptism - the beginning of his public ministry – in other gospels. It would be idle to ask what actually happened instead, to realize that the text presents something very important, a historic occasion, and a turning point in the career of Jesus. Its profound significance could not but be suggested only by the use of such solemn and impressive imagery.

Symbols and imagery thickly crowd the infancy narratives of Mathew and Luke, which is their prelude to the account of the public career of Jesus: ‘visit of angels, prophetic dreams, the marvelous star in the east, miraculous birth greeted with songs from the heavenly choir, all the appealing incidents noted in the Christmas carol and nativity play’. Again, they stand together to make clear that the birth of Jesus was a decisive moment in history, the beginning of something genuinely new. Such use of symbolism, as Dodd writes, is poetical. It means that the facts are viewed in depth as laden with implicit meanings. It also applies to miracle stories - the signs and symbols intended to affirm the fact that wherever Jesus was they experienced the presence and the power of God. These stories are therefore, the gripping power of the spiritual renewal, which the first Christians found in their encounter with Jesus. The question of their factual accuracy or possibility misses the purpose of its inception. Miracles (understood as a breach of the laws of nature) do not happen,[3] however the whole point of the gospel is that the circumstances were far from ordinary, in the presence of Jesus Christ. They are supposed to have felt the power of God in his presence.

At times, the scholars quote miracles and infancy narratives to prove the gospels as spiritual fabrication of the life of Jesus. But, we have made it clear that gospels were not meant to be pure historical narratives. They are content communicating the faith in history. Another proof of such hypothesis is the disproportionate space allotted to the last stages of the life of Jesus: ‘the arrest, trial and execution of Jesus and the events immediately preceding and following it’. The events have had such an impression on those involved and witnessed all the writers invariably go into details. Another reason most probably is the fact of its importance as the death and resurrection of Jesus was perceived as the final conflict between the power of evil and God for our salvation.

Gospels therefore, are neither biography nor spiritual fiction, sayings, book of miracles instead a text that expounds the living faith of the people who lived with Jesus and his disciples. Accordingly it sheds insights on Jesus, his life and mission and through him the manifestation of the love of God in our lives.

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             [a] Adapted from Antony Chekhov (1860-1904), Russian playwright and master of the modern short story. 

                  [1] The early missionaries proclaimed the fulfillment of the divine revelation in Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah and the beginning of a new era in which offered forgiveness for the past, spiritual power for the present and hope for the future.

                [2] Speaking about it, Dodd notes, “[i]n Mark, within a very broad general scheme, there is a certain freedom and looseness of arrangement, and in his rather rough and informal style we seem often to overhear the tones of the living voice telling a story. We are probably near to the ‘original eyewitnesses and servants of the Gospel’ to whom Luke refers.” (pg. 36)

                  [3] Science is yet to understand the dynamics of matter.

Biblio:

Dodd, C.H. Founder of Christianity. London: Harper Collins. 

Brown, Raymond E. Introduction to the New Testament. London: Yale University Press, 2007.