The primary focus of this article is the Gospels

Transcription

1 The Gospels from a Global Perspective Ralph D. Winter The primary focus of this article is the Gospels from a global perspective. In a way, we are also looking back at the four Gospels because this is a strategic time in the course. This is a thrilling moment, because we have accumulated information, and we want to somehow digest various ideas and get an overall picture. It is amazing the extent to which the Bible has been grandly misunderstood by practically everybody. We have to go very cautiously because of the many, many misunderstandings in past history and in our own lives. The point is that very few people understand what the Bible is really all about; therefore, they misunderstand it when they open it. Unfortunately, the fact is that some people treat the Bible as a medicine chest. They rush to the Bible to find the answer to their problem, or their divorce, or their loss of a child or something. It is that; it does help us solve problems. The Gideon Bibles have a whole list of problems: Look on page such and such if this is your problem. Other people look at the Bible as a source of inspiration, of blessings. This view is sort of like a refrigerator. Go to the refrigerator and take something out that is good to eat. Like sermons picked up here and there, it is a source of ammunition for making people happy, or something like that. One Bible, supposedly, has been tinted in on all the blessing verses so you can just page through and read about the blessings. Others, of course, look at the Bible as a crystal ball that is going to tell them about the future. There are many uses, you might say misuses, of the Bible. How electrifying to try to see the Bible for what it really is. What is it? You may wonder, for example (before you really look at them closely), why we have four different Gospels. Why not have just one? Well, you could ask the other question: What would we lose if we lost one of the four Gospels? Then you stop to realize that we would be losing something very, very important. For example, Mark is the Gospel that does not have very much in it that is not in one of the other Gospels. We could easily get rid of Mark! Really? Mark is the Gospel that puts in all the adjectives, especially the derogatory adjectives, when it comes to the disciples. None of the other Gospels is as hard on the disciples. But to say that Mark is hard on the disciples is probably to misstate the situation. The disciples are the ones being hard on the disciples. We do not know precisely how Mark came into being. Peter may have written it, or maybe Peter edited it, or possibly the disciples, looking back with tremendous repentance and humility, said, we ve got to tell it like it really was not smooth over anything. Now, some scholars say, Well, Luke and Matthew tone down the criticisms. Maybe the disciples toned up the criticisms. In any case, Mark is an astoundingly different Gospel than the other three, even though the subjects it covers are covered (in a slightly different cast) in the other Gospels. For example, as you page through Mark, you see a shattering divergence between the person of Christ and the impulses, the expectations, the hopes, the ideas of the disciples. It is as if they are always at odds. This is the disciples own confession really, basically, rather than somebody saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah! You went wrong here. It s the disciples who produced this Gospel, apparently. So, when Jesus is interested in a sick person, the disciples say, Don t bother with these sick people. You know, they re not going to be part of your constituency. They re not going to give you a lot of votes. I mean, you can ignore these people! Adapted with permission from Winter, Ralph D., ed., et al. (2006) Global Civilization, Classical World: Lesson Overviews, Fifth Edition. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, pp

2 102 The Gospels from a Global Perspective Well, it was the healing of a sick person that was the first great splash of awareness of the difference of who Jesus was. He was interested in the poor people. He was interested in the children. He was interested in the women. The disciples said, Hey, Jesus, this lady is a Greek. Can t you tell? Well, he was interested in the Greeks. The whole thing is just such a shattering divergence between what they would expect and what he is. Probably the most graphic of all is the one where the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue like the mayor of the town is in need (Mark 5:21 43). So off he goes. Then there s this little old woman who s supposed to be outside the city limits because of her condition (Mark 5: 24 34). She was untouchable. And here she was, right in the middle of the crowd. And I can just hear the disciples and see them tearing out their hair, furious with Jesus! Jesus says, Well, now, who touched me? They are furious! Can t you see that this crowd is all around you? What do you mean, who touched you? Lots of people were touching you! They were really upset, and they portray themselves as Dr. Osborne suggested in an earlier article as dim-witted. That is a charitable statement. Scholars tend to say, They didn t catch on. But you know, when we don t catch on, it may not be that we re dim-witted, but dim-hearted. In fact, Jesus himself said that they were slow of heart to believe. He did not say they were dumb. They did not say that they were slow to catch on in an intellectual sense. They caught on to all the little novelties and nuances that had to do with their self-interest. But they were very slow of heart to understand what God s interests were. What about Luke? Luke also portrays them as dim-witted or, worse still, slow of heart to believe (Luke 24:25). In the last chapter of Luke, these two disciples (maybe not two of the Twelve, but two of the Seventy) are portrayed in a shatteringly different light from what you would hope they would have been. It is not their moral breakdown so much that is highlighted here although in Mark you see the self-interests of the disciples in chapters 8 10, where Jesus talks about his death. They do not just resist the thought; they ignore the thought. They were going to win! Anticipating going places with Jesus, they argue bout who is going to be the first to sit next to him and all that sort of thing. Luke, on the other hand, shows how drastically different their expectations of what he was up to really were. They thought he was going to come and rescue them as a nation. Christ had larger thoughts in mind. Oh, this is a shattering critique, too! Luke has this huge section, chapters 9 19, where there is this resolute trip back to Jerusalem. If we did not have Luke, we miss that insight. We would not have it so graphically pointed out that at Nazareth he was rejected and they attempted to kill him because he was talking about the Gentiles. That is very clear in Luke. But then, there is Matthew. Matthew is so different from all the others. It bonds itself with the Old Testament. Quotes are included from the Old Testament, and Matthew bonds with Moses and the Law. But it says, If you fulfill the Law externally, you go through the motions, but that is not good enough (see Matt. 23). That tended to be what some of the Pharisees had fallen into in their zeal and many of them were very fine people to study the Bible, to understand it and to fulfill it. They ended up, to some great extent, simply doing things in the proper way rather than becoming the proper people. And so Matthew is very different. Matthew has the five discourses that compare to the five books of the Torah. There is this very clear attempt to provide a parallel. But Matthew has three parables that clearly talk about the Gentiles. Yet, you know, our modern scholars and readers and we ourselves may have misunderstood these parables. When the people come late in the day to work and they get paid the same amount, it is a perfectly obvious reference to the Gentiles coming in late and getting the same basic blessings of a relationship to the living God; and the Jews did not think that was fair Matthew 20:1-16). But in Matthew, which is beamed to Jews, both believing and unbelieving Jews, this is an impelling parable to explain how it is that the Gentiles are coming in late. There are a number of parables that have that missiological twist to them. Now, let us consider the book of John. John is enormously different from all of the other Gospels. Mark may have very little that is not in the other Gospels. John has very little that is in the other Gospels. It is perfectly obvious that John is coming along in his old age perhaps his vocabulary has drifted due to his associations in the Greek world more than ever before and he is reflecting. John is deliberately adding what was not there already. It is hard to believe that he did not have access to the other Gospels and was not deliberately adding on. And John does! The Upper Room Discourses my, what we would miss! In John, he is far enough away from Palestine at this point, apparently, so that he can

3 Ralph D. Winter 103 refer to the Jews as Jews. The other Gospels do not. Behind all this, we may have the thought that maybe the New Testament is unfair in its criticism of Jews. But is the Bible unfair? I mean, John comes right out in John 1:10, that the people the Jews did not understand the living God. When his Son came, he came to his own people, but his own people did not receive him. The fact that they did not receive him is not probably as important as that they did not know who he was. They were not close enough to God. But, is this an outside criticism of the Jews? This is a Jew speaking! And it is not just in the New Testament; the Old Testament is at least as critical of the Jewish people. But then, we get into Paul s letters. In Romans, for example, Paul says, Now wait just a minute, you Gentiles! If you have been artificially grafted into this true vine or branch or root, don t suppose that if God can cut out the real branches that you can t be cut out. So there is not the slightest implication in the Bible that the Jews are worse than anyone else. The Bible itself is talking in critical terms; but it is the Jewish people themselves commenting. This is not the harsh, unfair, outside anti-semitism of some other group. This is the honest, spiritual confession of people about themselves. Of course, it also incriminates those who are unwilling to be implicated. As you go into these Gospels, from now on til the rest of your life, realize how easy it is for the Jews to misunderstand, for the disciples to misunderstand, and for us to misunderstand in every single case because of self-interest rather than God s interest. So take care! We are walking on holy ground. Reflections Reflection #1: What kinds of massive misunderstandings appear as we look at the four Gospels from a global perspective? I think we have to realize that our job in understanding the Bible is not to get little tidbits of deeper understanding here and there, although that s all to the good. For example, Jesus saying if you re slapped on the cheek, turn the other cheek: it s more likely in the Middle Eastern culture that any violation of another person s physical being, just touching a person on the cheek, is challenging to a duel. Jesus was getting at the whole question of dueling, for example, not so much slapping people. Those are little tidbits. But if we don t go behind those meanings, getting into the larger misunderstandings, we will still be like an ant walking on a picture, seeing every little part of the picture, but not seeing the picture itself. We need to look at the larger picture. Earlier I referred to what I called Mickey Mouse interpretations. For example, the idea that each of the four Gospels portrays Jesus with different clothing. As if the Gospel writers felt it incumbent upon themselves to do what they were doing in order to present Jesus in a slightly different light. Jesus does get presented in a slightly different light. But these authors had more dynamic and pragmatic purposes in mind. These perceptions of the Gospels each focusing on prophet, priest, king, or man, or the four horsemen of the Apocalypse (that s a neat categorization) are descriptors not so much erroneous as superficial. We need to get into the deeper and more practical reasons for the Gospels and their existence. Otherwise this constitutes a massive misunderstanding. Examples of massive misunderstandings that we have referred to in the past, include the triumphal entry. You know the Hosanna statement: Save us now! Now is the time to save us! Their agenda was very different from God s agenda. Sometimes in our Easter period celebrations, we take very superficially the apparent meaning of the triumphal entry, not realizing that most of the people who were heralding Jesus entry were confused about what he was going to do. Their hopes were discordant with his. We need to understand that. Or take, for instance, the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). We mentioned that earlier. The Pharisees were saying, Why are you mixing with sinners and low caste people? Jesus tells them (Luke 15), Look, if you had one sheep that was lost, wouldn t you look for the one sheep? Or if a woman lost her engagement ring down the trap, wouldn t she take the whole trap off to find it? That s the equivalent of the woman cleaning up the whole house to find something. It wasn t just that she lost a dime; she lost something that had marital significance. Then he says, What about a son? They re following him, and it is pretty logical. But then it s like a left-curve to the jaw he comes in with the older brother. All of a sudden, the Pharisees realize he is making them out to be the older brother who begrudges the interest in the younger son. By extension, this clearly puts the entire Jewish nation into those shoes, as they looked askance at the thought of the Gentiles being brought in. There are many wonderful lessons in the parable of the prodigal son. But we need to get the overall, entire New Testament into the picture to understand it.

4 104 The Gospels from a Global Perspective Take the parable of the four soils (Matt. 13:1-23). Talk about misunderstanding! I have never heard anybody interpret the parable in a strategic sense. This may be an interesting catalog of the different kinds of responses that preachers or evangelists get. People can ask, am I in category 1, 2, or 3? There is a lot of discussion about which of these people are really saved. What about the people who were temporarily saved and then the sun came out? Were they ever really saved? Will they make it to heaven? We go off into all kinds of extraneous questions. Actually this parable in all of the three Synoptic Gospels occurs exactly at the point where Jesus shifts strategically from a public ministry to a private ministry, to the training of the twelve. Now, that could have been superficially considered as a mistake. Why did Christ not stay with the crowds? Should he not have tried to influence the whole world? Well, he did influence the whole world, by a multiplying process. And this parable explains how this works. You can go on broadcasting the seed all over the place, but the wise farmer puts the precious seed that he has in the ground that will reproduce. That is what Jesus set out to do. Paul repeated it to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2. This strategic reason for explaining the four soils, explaining his shifting from a public to a private ministry, could easily be lost. Misunderstandings abound if we are not careful. Reflection #2: The Gospel of John is the different Gospel. The only Gospel not written within the Palestinian setting, it is the odd man out. Luke, of course, came from outside Palestine. You would think Luke would have been written with a different perspective. But probably most of Luke was put together when Paul was in prison. Luke was just travelling around, staying close by, picking up oral tradition, recording things, and producing the Lucan narrative. This was a remarkable piece of work, being the first half of what goes on into the book of Acts. You know, there s more in the New Testament from Luke than from any other writer. In any case, even John s vocabulary is different. Written many years later, completely outside of Palestine, now the missionary significance is partly the fact that he is both subconsciously and consciously employing the vocabulary of the world in which he finds himself. For example, Jesus never refers to himself as the logos. John picks this up because it is meaningful and arrests the attention of the Hellenistic world to use that phrase. This liberates us to do that in missions. It frees us to use the vocabulary of the people, the similes, the metaphors, the proverbs, and so forth, in order to convey the essential meaning of what is being talked about. It is very significant! There are many marvelous, strange, wonderful things about John. I would just like to read this one verse here: He who has my commandments that means you ve got something already but then: and keeps them ( John 14:21). This phrase, keeps them, I ll come back to that in a second. He it is who loves me. Love is very important. The worst thing he says about the Jews: I know you; you do not have the love of God in you. He says that to these people who are glaring at him with hate and with plots against him. He just discloses exactly who they are in a single sentence: You do not love. The connection between love, and believing, and information that you already have, is manifestly demonstrated in this book in this verse. He who keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me shall be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and, listen to this, I will disclose myself to him. This is very significant in the book of John, because again and again in John, in 6:69 and 10:38, he talks about believing in order to know. Now, we would think you have got to know in order to believe. That is also true. But the precious thing is that the very process of believing leads us into knowledge. Incidentally, John is the book that throws into parallel the words believe and obey. Look for the verse which says: If you believe, and as you go on, obeying is a synonym for the word believe in that case. We see also in the Gospel of John that John is no longer thinking in terms of the sacred land. He is not thinking in terms of the Gentiles land, either. His focus is on the world. Not the world in a geographical sense, but the world in the sense of humanity. Constantly, John is thinking about God and the world. A global picture is evident at every point in John, and that is a very significant contribution to the mission movement. I went to a school called Cal Tech (the California Institute of Technology). Over the portal there it says: The truth shall make you free. That s an absolutely correct statement. The question is, How do you get the truth? For instance, when the Hubble telescope reveals a few more things they never knew before, apparently a lot of additional confusion is brought into the picture. For every time we learn something more, we learn a lot more about what we do not know. The Hubble telescope

5 Ralph D. Winter 105 is not only revealing more that we can understand, but much more that we do not understand. If you go back in John to that phrase, the truth shall make you free ( John 8:31,32), notice the linkage. If you abide in my word, then you are truly disciples of mine. As a result, you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. Truth is not just something you grab hold of, or discover, and it makes you free. Truth comes as a result of believing. This is John s great emphasis. Some years ago, I wrote in the margin of my Bible by this verse soak, submit, seek, celebrate! Soak yourself in his word, submit to his will, seek his purposes, and celebrate the glory that comes from that. John is a marvelous addition! What if we did not have John? Yet where did John find all this additional information that is not in the other Gospels? He himself says, Look, I don t even have space to put in all the stuff that I know. Many other things happened which are not written in this book. He probably refers to the existing Gospels, but also to other things. Because the very last verse (21:25) of the whole book is, There are also many other things Jesus did which if they were written (he s not referring to what s already written, but if these other things we know about were written) I suppose that not even the world itself could contain the books. So obviously he is not inventing or scrounging for things to add. He is flooded with a world of possibilities! John just selects the rich and powerful aspects for us to consider. Reflection #3: Although we only have abbreviated space to reflect on Jesus being mentioned outside the Bible, this is really very interesting. This article (Document and explain) is very powerful in explaining that no Christian could have ever concocted this material because it is not put in the right vocabulary or the right perspective. A much more powerful testimony is evident in this article by Josephus, even though it does not correspond precisely to what we know to be true. This writing refers to Jesus and refers to John the Baptist. Josephus is quite a politician sort of guy, who would write anything in order to please. Political correctness would be perfectly acceptable to him so we cannot believe everything he writes. But these begrudging references certainly tell the story. Let me finish with this thought: these four Gospels with their wealth of information (obviously not written in the same room at the same time, or there would be much more precise correspondence) are independent witnesses that are so detailed and so complete, you can no longer imagine them being invented. Ultimately it is the Bible that sits in judgment on Josephus, rather than Josephus on the Bible. The Bible is a much more thorough, accurate, dependable source of information than any other book or any other source of information, not just about Jesus and John, but all back down through history. Ultimately, scholars somewhat grudgingly admit that the Bible really is the thing that judges other books. We rest our case there.