John's Gospel is designed to bring you to your knees in wonder, love and praise. Luke's is meant to make you sit up and think hard about Jesus as Lord of the whole world. Matthew's is like a beautifully bound book which the Christian must study and ponder at leisure. Mark's is like a hastilly printed revolutionary tract, read by torchlight, and whispered to one's co-conspirators.
(Original Jesus, 144)
Remarkably we know frustratingly little about how or when the Gospels were written. Scholars have their theories, their ways of dating the Gospels, but none know for certain when the Gospels were actually authored. We also know very little about the evangelists themselves.
That's OK. The historical authenticity and accuracy of the Gospels have little to do with their dating or even their author; it depends on us constructing the juxtaposed puzzle of Christianity and Judaism with Jesus straddling both. The question isn't who wrote the accounts and when...but (based on what we know of this world) are the accounts historically plausible? And, more importantly, why exactly was each of them written?
Wright offers some helpful suggestions for our study of the Gospels. Read them cover to cover....
... struggling to make more and more sense of exactly who Jesus was.
... struggling with each book to what each evangelist is saying as a whole
... asking how people, today, can retell the story so that the world gets the message?
... putting yourself inside the story (in the crowd, among the disciples or Pharisees or lepars) and paying attention to what it does to you.
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