Jonathan T. Pennington - Reading the Gospels Wisely: A Narrative and Theological Introduction

So much has been written about the Gospels that no one could ever read more than a fraction of it. But anyone who begins to read what scholars have been writing about the Gospels soon discovers that there are many different sorts of important questions one can ask about the Gospels and that most of them have received many different answers. It can be daunting and confusing.

Not so long ago nearly all Gospels scholars would have said, very confidently, that the Gospels are not biographies of Jesus. Now, however, many would say that is precisely what they are, though with the qualification that they are the sort of biography people wrote at that time. But does that make them reliable history, or are they more like legend or myth or novels or propaganda? A lot of the scholarly literature is engaged in the quest for the historical Jesus, attempting to get back behind the Gospels to what the historical Jesus was really like before the early Christians started the process of interpretation that gave us the Gospels. Refined tools of historical method have been developed for studying the Gospels in this way, but the tools and their use are debatable. Furthermore, the results of the quest are so varied and contradictory as to throw the feasibility of the whole enterprise into doubt.

Does any of this matter for Christian faith or for Christian theology? Those questions too have been debated. How are faith and history related? Some would say that the quest for the historical Jesus is necessary for faith and discipleship today; others would say that it is irrelevant or even dangerous. Should Christian faith and theology buy into the Enlightenment notion of history, as the quest has generally done, or question it? While much of Gospels scholarship has been concerned with historical questions, theological questions also loom large. Should we not, after all, be reading the Gospels primarily as Scripture, with the whole canon of Scripture as their principal context of meaning? This is how the church has usually read them, and there are those who now advocate strongly that we should return to the traditional ecclesial practices of reading the Gospels from which modern historical preoccupations have distracted us. And then there is hermeneutics, the science of interpreting texts, which has its own large literature, some of it philosophical and very technical. This in turn interacts with other questions about the Gospels and generates its own kinds of enquiries. Daunting and confusing?

But here is a book about these questions that is neither daunting nor confusing. Jonathan Pennington is familiar with all the questions, has read widely, and has thought hard about them. His concern is with helping Christians read the Gospels in a way that is faithful to the sort of texts they are. With this concern to guide him (and his readers) he is able to distill from the scholarly discussions what matters most for this task. He does so with admirable clarity and coherence, and, notably, he achieves clarity and coherence without being reductionist. He does not cast aside most of the Gospel texts in a minimalist search for the historical Jesus, but nor does he leave history aside in favor of canon or theology alone. He invites us to read the four Gospels as history and theologyeach as a narrative whole in its own right, as the climax of the great scriptural metanarrative, and as the keystone in the archway of the whole canon of Scripture. What is perhaps most distinctive in his approach is his concern for Christian virtue and discipleship. The sort of literature the Gospels are is not sufficiently defined by saying that they are historical and theological. They are also literature that aims to make a difference to the lives of their readers. They are virtue-forming. They call their readers to following Jesus in a way that is transformative.

I have been impressed by Jonathan Penningtons work since he worked on a PhD under my supervision at St. Andrews. I am very happy to commend this book. Reading the Gospels wisely is one of the most important things Christians can do, and I hope this book will help many to do just that.

Richard Bauckham
Ridley Hall, Cambridge