The Origins of the Gospels

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We should not take anything for granted when investigating the beginnings of early Christian history. This includes our best source of information on Jesus’s life and teachings—the Gospels themselves.¹

Traditional academic approaches to the canonical Gospels—the New Testament books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—tend to emphasize that they were produced by and for specific Christian communities. References to the “Markan” or “Matthean” churches, for example, are commonplace. Differences between various gospels are often scrutinized as evidence for each group’s unique perspective or collective identity.

This understanding of Christian origins suggests that the gospel authors served as literate spokespersons tasked with recording oral stories that their fellow Christians had passed down over generations. While some scholars propose that the gospel writers may have read portions of one another’s work, others look to similarities between the Gospels as confirmation that there was a common source for these texts, if not in the historical Jesus, then perhaps in some long-lost, written collection of Jesus’s sayings.^a Still, the central focus of these studies is that the gospel writers served as documentarians for their respective Christian communities.

The trouble is that reconstructing these hypothesized early churches on the basis of clues in the Gospels alone is an incredibly fraught task. And no one can agree on what these communities actually looked like! We have little idea whether they were large or small, rich or poor.

Meanwhile, the authors themselves say next to nothing about their motivations for writing. Only Luke tells us that he was commissioned, like many others before him, by a wealthy patron to write a reliable version of Jesus’s life story (Luke 1:1-4). Although Luke’s preface may seem to offer a promising lead, it turns out that his explanation isn’t unique among first-century Greco-Roman authors.

Likewise, none of the Gospels looks all that different from other kinds of writing from the Roman imperial period. Yet no one seems to ascribe community authorship to writers such as Virgil, Philo, or Plutarch. The fact that the Gospels contain language and themes found in other writings of the time, including novels, philosophy, histories, and biographies, only further complicates matters.

Given this broader literary context, we can look at known conventions and constraints of authorship in the first and second centuries as a starting point for reconstructing the probable social worlds of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.^b

When we do, we quickly realize that the level of literate skill we find in the 063 Gospels was exceptionally rare in the ancient world. Moreover, given that so few people in the Greco-Roman period were literate or wealthy enough to write and publish, authors usually worked within small networks of fellow writers. These groups regularly circulated, discussed, and interpreted their writings much like contemporary authors do today. They were even known to compete openly with one another!

Authors might have revealed in their works certain aspects of shared language, culture, politics, and lived experience, but with respect to genre, content, and publication, they remained bound to the conventions of their craft in their historical moment. They often alluded to one another’s writings, to popular and canonical works, including Homer and Plato, or to sacred literature, such as the Hebrew Bible.

Although I don’t doubt that the gospel authors knew some fellow Christ-followers in their social circles, writing networks were a more formative influence on ancient writers in terms of determining the content and form of their narrative prose. The similarities—and differences—between the Gospels weren’t necessarily a function of preserving the oral speech of hypothesized early Christian groups, but possibly evidence of authors engaging with one another as they each wrote their own biographies about Jesus. There is also evidence that the Gospels were read outside of narrow Christian circles, including by satirists such as the author of the Satyricon, which contains, among other things, stories about funerary meals, anointings, crucifixions, empty tombs, and a number of other motifs found in the Gospels.

The Gospels should be viewed as writings not outside literate culture but at its center in the first centuries C.E. The Jesus of the Gospels can be fruitfully compared with the Cynics, Aesop, the pastoral heroes of the Greek novel, or witty underdogs in the biographical tradition. The gospel writers use references to common literary trends to convey Jesus’s special standing, but they do so through familiar literary allusions. The empty tomb, for instance, is found throughout Greek and Roman literature to indicate someone had risen to divine status (e.g., Plutarch discusses the motif at length, citing the missing Alcmene, Aristeas of Proconnesus, Cleomedes the Astypalaean, and Romulus, calling it an established mythic tale among writers and one that “all the Greeks tell” [Life of Romulus 28.4]).

So what does all of this mean for the “origins” of early Christianity and the early Christians?

We may need to recalibrate our expectations for what the Gospels represent as historical documents and what we assume about the social networks of those who wrote them. Instead of huddled masses of illiterate Christians seeking a spokesperson, we may have the creative reimaginings of Jesus’s life at the hands of skilled literate craftsmen, both using and inverting the expectations of ancient biography to tell the story of a remarkable and subversive teacher and miracle worker. That these writings were later taken up by certain Christian groups and leaders is a testimony to their success, and that literary success may, in fact, have been what attracted followers to the movement in the first place.

We should not take anything for granted when investigating the beginnings of early Christian history. This includes our best source of information on Jesus’s life and teachings—the Gospels themselves.1