The most influential study of Q in recent years has been that of John Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q. Kloppenborg's analysis of the ‘sapiential speeches in Q’ leads him to the conclusion that ‘a collection of sapiential speeches and admonitions was the formative element in Q’, a collection ‘subsequently augmented by the addition and interpolation of apophthegms and prophetic words which pronounced doom over impenitent Israel’. This ‘formative stratum’, which can be conveniently designated Q1, consists of six ‘wisdom speeches’, ‘united not by the themes typical of the main redaction [Q2], but by paraenetic, hortatory, and instructional concerns’. The six ‘wisdom speeches’ he lists as:

1. Q 6.20b–23b, 27–35, 36–45, 46–9;

2. Q 9.57–60, (61–2); 10.2–11, 16, (23–4?);

3. Q 11.2–4, 9–13;

4. Q 12.2–7, 11–12;

5. Q 12.22b–31, 33–4 (13.18–19, 20–1?); and probably

6. Q 13.24; 14.26–7; 17.33; 14.34–5.

Kloppenborg is clear that ‘tradition-history is not convertible with literary history’, and that his concern is only with the latter; the judgment that material is redactional, secondary, is a literary judgment and need not imply anything about the historical origin or emergence of the tradition in view. So he certainly does not wish his analysis necessarily to imply that redactional material from the secondary compositional phase cannot be dominical.

Ours is an era saturated in commentaries. By one rough measure of counting, the world's libraries now hold over 120,000 different volumes associated with that genre. The classics of Scriptural and other ancient literature have long since been strip-mined to a point where it goes without saying that, as a famous critic wryly noted three centuries ago, ‘learned commentators view / in Homer more than Homer knew’. This is true of the gospels, as of other New Testament writings; today's commentaries, indeed, seem at times to encourage a kind of tertiary scholarship that subsists in texts about meta-texts.

But how and where did it all begin? Drowning as we are in modern biblical commentary, it may be easy to forget that there was a time before commentaries. It was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid twentieth century that established an exciting and fertile new starting point of the genre in the form of several running expositions of prophetic books in eschatological terms. The history of biblical commentary thus finds a particular focus in the late second century bc, when these running expositions of the prophets first emerged, fully formed and seemingly without precedent, from the pen of monastic scribes in the Judaean wilderness.

This chapter will begin by reviewing the origins of biblical commentary against the background of ancient Graeco-Roman antecedents, before turning to the earliest commentaries on the gospels.

The existence and use of multiple sources of tradition about Jesus in the first and second centuries ce has been clearly demonstrated in the earlier chapters of this volume. Few scholars would be so bold as to claim that an accurate inventory of such sources can actually be compiled today, but this is because many such sources failed to be preserved. Furthermore, a continuing oral tradition is likely to have existed alongside written ‘gospels’ and other documents incorporating Jesus tradition. Even if some such sources circulated widely amongst Christians in the ancient Mediterranean, it is probable that particular groups or networks of Christians adopted favourite sources of tradition. Insofar as this was the case, the sources of Jesus tradition may not have been merely complementary to one another, but may actually have been in competition with one another.

Yet by the latter half of the second century, Irenaeus argued forcefully for a fourfold gospel, consisting of the four gospels widely recognized as ‘canonical’ today. How did the choice of these four (the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) achieve clear support at such an early stage? We shall see that there were many reasons for leaders in the early church to be concerned about the Jesus tradition being used for purposes that they considered theologically suspect. These concerns resulted in efforts to exercise some control over groups or networks choosing their own ‘favourites’ and over the multiplication of new authoritative sources of Jesus tradition.

In recent years, New Testament scholars have become increasingly aware of the significance of beginnings and endings for their understanding of the Gospels. The beginning and ending of any literary composition are both important – not simply because the beginning provides a way of attracting the reader's attention, the ending a way of rounding things off – but because each provides important clues about the meaning of the material that lies in between. If these clues were, for many centuries, for the most part ignored, this was largely because the Gospels tended to be broken up into lectionary readings, rather than being read as wholes. Short passages read in this way make a very different impact from that which they have when read as part of a larger story: heard out of the context given them by the evangelist, they become once again independent pericopes, functioning as entities rather than as elements of something larger.

The Gospels are themselves part of something larger, however. Unlike the so-called ‘Gospel of Thomas’, which is a collection of sayings, our canonical Gospels are all narratives, and all narratives have to begin and end in particular places and at specific moments in time. Beginnings and endings provide ways of getting into and out of a sequence of events that begins long before and continues long after the story that is being told.

For the last several decades, Graham Stanton has worked primarily in Gospels and Jesus research. Following in his footsteps, these reflections concentrate on how the ‘history of Jesus’, of which we have only fragmentary knowledge, is related to the four Gospels as the oldest narrative reports about him.

In studies of the Gospels, one often reads that they were not concerned to be ‘historical narratives’ (let alone ‘biographies’) but above all witnesses of faith and means of proclamation, so that questions of historicity completely miss their intention. As a result of this judgment, Protestant Synoptic exegesis since ca. 1920 followed by its Catholic counterpart since ca. 1960 suffered a certain loss of historical interest; the individual Synoptic texts were often questioned only about the theology of their author or their narrative strategy and historical studies were often discredited as ‘naïve historicism’. The one-sided flood of redaction-critical, linguistic, narrative and socio-rhetorical studies in recent decades has its source here. In reality, however, the Synoptic Gospels consciously intend to narrate a temporally removed event of the past, i.e., Jesus' unique history, which, of course, has fundamental significance for the present time of the evangelists and the communities addressed through them, indeed for all humanity, since what is narrated is already for Mark euangelion which wishes to convey saving faith in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God. The closing statement of John 20.31 basically applies to all four Gospels.

A link between the Jews of ancient Judaea and the Christian use of euangelizein or euangelizesthai, ‘to announce’, with the cognate noun euangelion, has regularly been postulated through comparison of the New Testament with the Old. These Greek words in their New Testament contexts have been perceived, through the LXX and the Vulgate, as sharing a good part of the semantic range of the Hebrew verb lebasser, ‘to announce’, and its cognate noun besorah, in the Old Testament. A signpost in the general direction of this view is formed by Heb 4.2 (cf. 4.6), ‘we have been evangelized (euēngelismenoi) just as they’ – the generation of the exodus – ‘had been’.

The Epistle to the Hebrews here implicitly classifies as evangel the message of election, victory, and settlement to come which was conveyed through Moses, for example from the divine messenger (in Greek, angelos) at Exod 3.2–14, but was disregarded by the people and their princes other than Caleb, as shown above all in Num 13–14; cf. Ps 95.11. Of special note for scholarly assessment of the New Testament euangelizesthai, however, were a series of verses in the psalms and prophets which use the verb lebasser and its participle mebasser, rendered in the LXX by euangelizesthai and euangelizomenos, respectively, to speak expressly of the announcement and announcers of good tidings (Pss. 40.10; 68.12; Isa 40.9; 41.27; 52.7 (parallel with Nah 2.1 (1.15)); 61.1).

Round about 175 ce, an otherwise unknown Platonist philosopher named Celsus wrote a hard-hitting polemical tract against the Christians which he modestly entitled The True Logos. Whether Celsus' polemic had any impact on pagan opinion is unclear. But it must have survived, and worried at least some Christians enough to consider that it needed answering, because some seventy years later Origen was asked to provide a systematic refutation of Celsus' tract; and it is because of this that Celsus' polemic survives, in the form of embedded quotations within Origen's reply. In this chapter, I shall focus largely on pagan reception of the gospel story up to and including Celsus, concluding with a brief survey of third- and fourth-century developments in the pagan–Christian conversation. Since my concern here is with pagan reception of the gospels, I have not included writers like Pliny, Fronto or Suetonius, who deal with Christianity as a social phenomenon. Nor have I sought to unravel the pagan testimony to the historical Jesus, which raises a different set of questions. Instead, I have tried to build up a picture of the gospel story as viewed by second-century pagans, asking the question, What did pagans know of the Christian story of Jesus, and when and how did they know it?

Celsus' polemic marks a watershed in the process of pagan engagement with the gospels.

This chapter is concerned with how the Marcan evangelist wrote, not what he wrote. The distinction is important. I am not directly concerned with genre, though the chapter may well have implications for understanding the genre of Mark. Rather, we are interested in the way that the evangelist puts his materials together, contextualizing them, and why – if it can be discerned – he did what he did. But our approach is limited, for we do not possess Mark's sources (as we do for Matthew and Luke), and so we often cannot distinguish between the evangelist's source and his redaction.

The primary focus of this chapter is on how the evangelist arranges his material, especially that intriguing feature variously described as intercalation or ‘sandwich’. A few other aspects of the evangelist's habits of arrangement will also be taken into account. The chapter is developed in three parts: (1) aspects of Marcan style, (2) the function of digressions and sandwiches, and (3) a proposal regarding Mark's bipartite structure.

ASPECTS OF MARCAN STYLE

Much has been said about Marcan style (Elliott 1993b; Turner 1976:11–30). It is Semitic. It is unpolished. It is stylistically and grammatically flawed. We find examples of parataxis (as seen especially in frequent usage of kai), redundancies (e.g., 1.28, 32, 35; 4.2, 39; 5.15, 19; 6.25; 7.33; 12.44; 14.61), pleonasm, and the historical present (some 150 in all), and on occasion use of the wrong word (e.g., paiein in 14.47, which should be patassein).

THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE TASK

Attempts to reconstruct Jewish opinion about Christianity in antiquity are dogged by a number of problems. These mainly arise from the character of the available sources. On the one hand we lack any substantial Jewish source on Christianity, and the fragmentary extant material is not without difficulty. On the other hand the Christian sources which apparently give us Jewish opinion about Christians are polemical in tone, and often repetitive and stereotypical in content. It has long been noted that to read off Jewish opinion from such texts is either misguided (see Taylor 1995) or at best a complex and nuanced task, involving the realization that such sources contain a difficult-to-decipher mixture of image and reality (see Lieu 1996).

These remarks are obviously relevant to the subject of this chapter, the Jewish knowledge of and interaction with the canonical Gospels. In this more limited context there are grounds both for pessimism and for optimism. Pessimism emerges from the limited character of the source material available. Interestingly, if we examine the Christian material which is termed ‘adversus Judaeos’, it is striking that it concerns itself much more with arguments about the scriptural (in Christian language, Old Testament) justification for Christian claims than with a defence of ‘ad hominem’ assertions against the figure of Jesus as he is recorded in the canonical Gospels. Why this might have been the case will be examined briefly below. On the other hand there are grounds for some optimism.

Clement was not the first to recognize the distinctive character of the Fourth Gospel: his words were designed to set at rest the anxieties of those for whom that distinctiveness threatened to split the harmony of the Gospel witness: properly understood, he suggests, the four Gospels, John included, speak with a single voice, inspired by the Spirit and by the consensus of apostolic testimony. Yet, it may be said, the dilemma he betrays and the answer he gives have continued to dog the Gospel throughout its subsequent history. Clement's claim, then, and specifically the epithet ‘spiritual’, may still provide a guide for asking ‘how John writes’.

We may begin by asking whether ‘spiritual’ is a description of Johannine distinctiveness or an explanation. As a description it might be replaced by other terms; so, some have held the Gospel to be more ‘theological’, perhaps an epithet supported by the title ‘the theologian’, which at an early date was bestowed upon its putative author, the apostle John.

The four gospels in the NT have always received special attention, partly by virtue of being canonized as part of Christian scripture. Yet it is clear that these four are part of a much wider corpus of texts, either claiming the name of ‘gospel’ for themselves or being described by others (past or present) as ‘gospels’. It is with these ‘other’ gospels, i.e. gospels other than the canonical gospels of the NT, that this essay is concerned.

These ‘other’ gospels vary very considerably in scope, content and (probably) genre. The question ‘What is a gospel?’ is well known as a problem which is by no means simple when applied to the canonical gospels of the NT (cf. Talbert 1977; Burridge 1992). The same question applied to the mass of other writings which have at various times been called ‘gospels’ is infinitely more complex to try to answer: these writings vary so much that it is hard, if not impossible, to find common denominators in all of them.

MANUSCRIPT EVIDENCE

Such variation applies even at the mundane level of our knowledge of their text, their extent etc. In the case of the canonical gospels, the huge range of MSS available to us for all four of these gospels means that the broad contours of both their extent and their content are not generally in doubt. The situation is very different in relation to the non-canonical gospels.