The Case of the Four Gospels: Only One Jesus

Behold the man

Happy Easter, all! I apologize for the lateness of this post. I had intended to prepare it by Easter Sunday, but the weekend slipped away. Hopefully most of you had someone to spend it with. Fortunately, the Easter season is just getting started, so we can still consider this an Easter Substack.

I’m normally better about posting profound Passion/Easter reflections on schedule, but as you can tell, my inspiration was running a bit low this year. So instead, I thought I would revisit my ongoing series about the historicity of the gospels, where I put together some of the research I’ve found most compelling in a hopefully accessible way, hopefully inspiring you to read further. I’ve been reserving most of that series for paying readers, but I’ve been feeling a nudge to make them all free. So as of today, they are now unlocked for everyone’s browsing pleasure here, here, and here. As I’ve been working through topics like undesigned coincidences, external confirmations, and other subtle marks of authenticity in the documents, there’s one topic I kept putting off, because it’s my favorite: the unity of Jesus’ character.

I’ve attended a couple of funerals this year, one for a beloved scholar in my home town, the other for my great-uncle. Two fine men, with very different professions and personalities and social status, but both able to fill churches full of good people grateful for their lives. As family and friends gave their eulogies, I enjoyed hearing them peel back all the different layers of these men, their lovable foibles and eccentricities, none of which manifested in exactly the same way to any two people. But you could hear the accumulation of stories around each man and recognize the same personality shining through them all. I believe it’s the same way with the four gospels, which are evenly split between records claiming to be written by witnesses (Matthew, John) and claiming to be based on witness testimony (Mark, Luke). While there’s generous overlap among the Synoptics, each gospel has some unique material, a mark of independent sourcing. As we cross-compare Jesus’ words and actions, a remarkable portrait emerges, circumstantially varying but substantially unified.

An interesting point my mother makes in her book Testimonies to the Truth is that this sort of organic unity is hard to reproduce when building fictional worlds. You can see this in some TV shows or book series where multiple writers are involved, or even sometimes when it’s just one writer. A character will say or do something that makes the dedicated fan think, “Wait, he wouldn’t say/do that, that’s not what he’s like,” because the portrayal is less than consistent. In one episode of Monk, Monk coolly cracks a case like a modern Sherlock. In a later episode, he bumbles and fumbles around until the solution delivers itself to him by accident. In Magnum P.I., Magnum is either a cynical playboy or a one-woman man, depending on the season. If the gospels were similarly composed as fiction by committee, one would expect similar kinds of lapses in the portrayal of Jesus. Yet one doesn’t find them.

This is inconvenient for certain scholars of New Testament studies, who like many scholars must publish lest they perish and have therefore put a great deal of effort into “finding” a great many things that don’t exist. The stock story about the evolution of Jesus’ character goes something like this: In the beginning, Jesus was vulnerable and human and ordinary, just like us. But over time, as the legends and tall tales around him grew, he became less human and more divine. By the time the Gospel of John was written, the Jesus of legend had grown so far beyond the Jesus of history that he didn’t even suffer on the cross. It’s common for scholars to refer to “John’s Jesus” and “the Synoptic Jesus” as if they’re speaking about two different entities. Even scholars like Craig Evans, considered to be on the “evangelical” side, will casually say in conversation with Bart Ehrman that there is “virtually nothing” in the Synoptics, barring a few verses in Matthew (the so-called “Johannine thunderbolt”), which look and sound like “Jesus in the Gospel of John.” “So, we have to ask as historians, at this point, is there just some other Jesus we just didn’t know about? … Or, is it a lot more due to the way the Evangelist chooses to write the story?”

As is typical with these things, this just-so tale falls apart on some careful examination of the documents themselves. One could begin most simply with passages where Jesus delivers some of the same sayings in new settings. Naturally, it’s assumed that John has simply borrowed these from the Synoptics and written different scenes around them, but this is straightforward question-begging. Real people, especially real teachers, can and do say similar things on different occasions. However, there are even deeper and subtler points of commonality to draw out. Let’s look at some examples.

One of Jesus’ signature qualities as a teacher was his use of object lessons, spontaneously using concrete things at hand to illustrate a point. In Matthew and Mark, there’s an incident where the disciples forget to bring bread, and Jesus takes the moment to warn them about the “leaven” (false teaching) of the Pharisees and Sadducees. As is typical for the disciples, they don’t realize what he’s doing at first, and he has to reexplain it, ending with a reminder that he can create bread any time. Jesus also uses bread as a theological teaching hook in John 6, after the feeding of five thousand, when he explains that he in his own person provides spiritual bread. Similarly, in John 4, he tells the woman at the well that he can provide living water. He repeats this a few chapters later during the Feast of Tabernacles, which involved an elaborate water-drawing ceremony. (My last entry, on the gospels’ unnecessary details, talked about how odd this obscure reference would have been in a fictionalized work.) And in John 9, when Jesus heals the blind man, he proclaims himself as the light of the world.

We also see this technique in Jesus’ much-loved and memorable interactions with children, recorded in the Synoptics. Mark uniquely tells the “Let the little children come to me” story. After rebuking the disciples for trying to send the children away, Jesus flows seamlessly into a teaching moment about how one must receive the kingdom like a little child. He makes a similar point in Matthew, but in a different context, at Peter’s house. On the way, the disciples had been having one of their arguments about who would be the greatest in the kingdom, and Jesus picks up a child (probably Peter’s) to emphasize the point that whoever wishes to be the greatest must humble himself like one of these.

Jesus also emerges as a man with an unnerving quickness of mind—clever, witty, and sometimes savagely sarcastic. This too is a quality we observe across all four gospels. There’s an especially neat cross-comparison that comes out of Luke 13, where Jesus heals a crippled woman on the Sabbath, and John 7, where he spars with the Jewish leaders over another Sabbath healing (the crippled man by the Pool of Siloam). These healings were seen as “work” on the Jewish day of rest, provoking considerable backlash. In Luke, Jesus rebuffs it with the observation that even the Pharisees make an exception for untying and watering their farm animals. So why should he not unbind the woman crippled for eighteen years? We’re told this was a hit with the watching crowd, who no doubt relished the play on words between “untying” and “unbinding.” Now turn to the clash in John and look at how Jesus hoists them on their own petard with a comparison to circumcision, another exception for Sabbath “work” if a baby boy’s eighth day happens to fall on a Saturday. You’ll allow this exception to cut off a vestigial bit of a boy’s body, he’s saying, but I made a man’s whole body well, and you’re rebuking me? The context is different, but this is unmistakably the same mind we see playing cat and mouse with the religious leaders in Luke.

These sparring contests also yield the best of “sarcastic Jesus.” In Matthew 23, he mocks the scribes and Pharisees for imagining that “If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.” He knows perfectly well that as he speaks, they are deep in cahoots with the Sadducees to kill him, the prophet of their own age. In Luke 13, some Pharisees deliver a warning that Herod wants Jesus dead. Jesus tells them to “Go tell that fox, ‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.’” He needs to get to Jerusalem soon, because “surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!” Ah, Jerusalem, where all the prophets go to die.

And indeed, John records that it is in Jerusalem where Jesus makes his most shocking claim yet, the claim of oneness with the Father, at which the leaders threaten to stone him for blasphemy. “I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?”

Jesus remains sarcastic to the bitter end, even as he allows them to capture him in Gethsemane. He was in the temple every day, he reminds them, so why didn’t they take him then? This is wonderfully alluded to in Ezra Pound’s poem “The Ballad of the Goodly Fere”:

Aye he sent us out through the crossed high spears
And the scorn of his laugh rang free,
"Why took ye not me when I walked about
Alone in the town?" says he.

(Side plug: Go read my friend Nathan Nadeau’s excellent Easter analysis of this poem, interwoven with some commentary on the gospels’ authentic texture.)

Yet this same scathing, savage Jesus is the Jesus who cries out in Matthew 23, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Luke, in his telling, adds that Jesus “wept over” the city.

And here we see the lonely Jesus, the Jesus who takes rejection and betrayal deep inside himself and favors it like a wound. This extends to the disciples as well, especially Judas, whose treason he bitterly predicts and grieves in John 6. This comes just after he’s repulsed the crowd by saying they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. With a kind of wistfulness, he turns and asks the disciples if they will also leave him now. Peter makes one of his emphatic declarations of loyalty, but the master won’t be comforted. After all, he can see Peter’s future too. “Simon, Simon,” he sighs in Luke, telling how he has been praying for the impetuous disciple, knowing what’s coming. (A small side note on Jesus’ diction: Repeating a name like this seems to have been a habit, also seen in the story where he chides Martha for demanding that Mary help her in the kitchen. “Martha, Martha…”)

Mark records Jesus’ profound weariness on finding the disciples asleep in the garden after he expressly asked them to keep watch. They couldn’t do even this for him, these friends with whom he had “earnestly desired” to share one last meal. And it is also in Mark that Jesus expresses the ultimate cry of loneliness on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This cry is missing from John, which scholars have latched onto as part of the elaborate argument that Jesus is more human in the Synoptics, more stoic and other-worldly in John. But of course, John records that “Jesus wept” at the grave of Lazarus, perfectly consistent with the Jesus who weeps over Jerusalem in Luke. John also reports that as he looked ahead to his crucifixion, Jesus described his soul as “troubled” with the coming of his “hour.”

A quote from C. S. Lewis’s letters is apt here:

God c[ould], had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. …[Otherwise] [w]e should…have missed the all important help of knowing that He has faced all that the weakest of us face, has shared not only the strength of our nature but every weakness of it except sin. If He had been incarnate in a man of immense natural courage, that w[ould] have been for many of us almost the same as His not being incarnate at all.

It’s worth noting that the gospels’ unadorned narration doesn’t describe Jesus’ physical pain on the cross. They simply lay out the brutal details of the death, systematically, matter-of-factly. The writers are speaking to an audience who already knows what crucifixion looks like, what it does to a man’s body, and how it was designed to inflict maximal shame. The one explicit, haunting clue of what this physically cost Jesus is a single mention in John—simple, human, moving—that Jesus thirsted. (A verse some scholars have tried to argue is a “dynamic equivalent” translation of “My God, my God,” an ingenious solution to the puzzle of why a crucified man would say he was thirsty.)

I’ll close with some reflections on the disconcerting Jesus. I’ve written before that I’m not a great fan of the TV series The Chosen, and among the many reasons why is the fact that the writers are strenuously working to make Jesus seem friendly and likeable at all times. That is not the Jesus I find in the pages of the gospels, nor did Lewis. (In another letter, he writes, “Everyone told me that there I should find a figure whom I couldn’t help loving. Well, I could.”) Jesus is certainly magnetic, compelling, certainly capable of tenderness and humor. But he is also capable of brusqueness to the point of rudeness. He speaks cryptically and expects the disciples to keep up. He approaches the paralyzed man on a bier and, instead of healing him immediately, informs him that his sins are forgiven. I also love the encounter after the Pool of Siloam healing in John 5, when he finds the once-crippled man now freely walking about the temple. Of all the things we might imagine Jesus would say in this moment, we aren’t expecting what he actually says: “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” Here one might also think of his “Go and sin no more” to the woman caught in adultery, not original to the earliest texts of John, but certainly consistent with the picture we have elsewhere.

The calling of Nathanael under the fig tree in John 1, unique to John, is another passage where Jesus seems to enjoy, shall we say, flexing his superhuman powers of perception. Hearing about Jesus, Nathanael has scoffed at the idea that any good thing could come out of Nazareth. Jesus doesn’t directly embarrass Nathanael by mentioning this. All he needs to say is “I saw you under the fig tree.” This shocks Nathanael into awe and worship. Jesus sounds a bit amused as he says, “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You will see greater things than that.” One can well imagine why the disciples are so often nervous as they quietly wonder among themselves what the rabbi is talking about now, whether they should ask him to clarify or not. Jesus also seems to derive some entertainment from overhearing or mind-reading them in these moments, as if to say, “You know I can hear you, right?”

Even after Jesus’ resurrection, he remains disconcerting. In John 21, when he pardons and restores Peter, he is tender yet exacting, uncomfortably reminding Peter of his boast that he loved Jesus more than the other disciples. (This, by the way, is an undesigned coincidence, since that boast is recorded in the Synoptics, not John.) Peter is becoming distressed as Jesus keeps pressing and repeating the question, “Do you love me?” “You know that I love you,” he answers, wondering why the rabbi is pouring salt in the wound like this. Of course, there is a purpose in this gentle wounding. It is precisely because Jesus especially loves Peter that he pushes him so hard.

In their joint paper on the probability of Jesus’ resurrection, my folks reflect that “…[T]he personality attributed to a post-resurrection Jesus is not inspiring, kindly, and helpful. On the contrary, he is portrayed as being very much the sort of person he always was, and no more comfortable a companion than ever: Patient but sometimes caustic, commanding and compelling but unnerving and unpredictable, a superb teacher but one not inclined to answer questions he considers impertinent or unnecessary.” When he appears to Doubting Thomas, he quotes Thomas’s demand nearly verbatim back to him: “Reach here your finger, and see my hands; and reach here your hand, and put it into my side, and be not unbelieving, but believing.”

“Who or What is this?” This is the first question Lewis tells us the gospels should raise for the fresh reader. It is a question we hardly dare to approach. The answer is too terrifying to contemplate. We fear what might happen if we consider it too long. We fear we might be unmade. And we fear rightly. But whom else shall we turn to? Where else shall we go?