Ben Witherington - The Gospel of Jesus

THE GOSPEL OF JESUS

A TRUE STORY

BEN WITHERINGTON III

Copyright 2014 by Ben Witherington III

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permission, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

Scripture taken from the Common English Bible, CEB Copyright 2010,
2011 by Common English Bible. Used by permission.
All rights reserved worldwide.

Christus Paradox by Sylvia Dunstan
Copyright 1991 by GIA Publications, Inc. 7404 S. Mason Ave.,
Chicago, IL 60638, www.giamusic.com 800.442.1358. All rights reserved.
Used by permission.

Printed in the United States of America

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62824-071-9
Mobi ISBN: 978-1-62824-072-6
ePub ISBN: 978-1-62824-073-3
uPDF ISBN: 978-1-62824-074-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014931391

Cover illustration by Henryk Siemiradzki, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
Cover design by Sarah Immerfall
Page design by PerfecType, Nashville, Tennessee

SEEDBED PUBLISHING
Franklin, Tennessee
seedbed.com
Sowing for a Great Awakening

This book is dedicated to my Nashville friend, A. J.,
who probably understands the most misunderstood Jew
better than I do.
Someday I hope to see him fully with your eyes,
or maybe we will get to do that together in the Kingdom.
I hope so.

He came incognito,

A thinly veiled disguise.

The not-so-subtle Son of Man,

A human with Gods eyes.

The messianic secret

Left many unawares

That God had walked upon the earth

And shared our human cares.

We did not see his glory,

At least not at first glimpse.

It took an Easter wake-up call,

Before it all made sense.

The truth of Incarnation,

Of dwelling within flesh,

Shows goodness in creation,

And Word of God made fresh.

Standing on the boundary

Twixt earth and heaven above,

A Jew who hailed from Nazareth,

But came from Gods great love.

Born of humble parents,

Laid down inside a stall,

This king required no entourage,

No pomp or folderol.

No person was beneath him,

No angel oer his head.

He came to serve the human race,

To raise it from the dead.

His death a great conundrum:

How can the Deathless die?

But if he had not bowed his head,

Life would have passed us by.

Though we are dying to be loved,

And long for endless life,

He was dying in his love,

And thereby ending strife.

Perhaps the incognito

Belongs instead to us,

Who play at being human,

And fail to be gold dust.

But there was once a God-man

Who played the humans part,

And lived and died and rose again,

Made sin and death depart.

Yet now through a glass dimly,

We see the visage royal,

And feebly honor his great worth

And his atoning toil.

We cannot see his Spirit,

But moved by its effects,

We are inspired to praise his worth

And pay our last respects.

Yet, that too brings him glory.

That too makes a start.

The journey of a million miles

Begins within ones heart.

And someday we shall see him

And fully praise his grace;

Someday when heaven and earth collide

And we see face-to-face.

He comes in blinding brilliance,

A not-so-veiled disguise;

The not-so-subtle Son of God,

A God with human eyes.
Ben Witherington III

BEFORE THERE WERE four written Gospels, there was the single oral telling of the good news. The world of Jesus was an oral culture. The apostle Paul, for example, uses the phrase Gods word (singular) in 1 Thessalonians 2:13 to refer to the oral proclamation of this singular story of Jesus that changed their lives so radicallyone story, not two, or four, or ten. So what was the story of Jesus that was told around the fire at night, and in the synagogues on Shabbat, and by wells as people drew water, long before the four Gospels were written down in the last third of the first century AD? My hope is that this book will give you a sense of that story. But, I imagine some readers might ask, Why do we need such a harmony of the Gospels? There are several good reasons that come immediately to mind.

To begin with, it is high time we did a better job of looking at things from what we know of the first-century Christian perspective, and not the fourth-century perspective (when the canon of the New Testament was settled). I have heard evangelical and other orthodox Christians say that they want to be more like the earliest Christians; well, its time to live into that in the twenty-first century, especially when it comes to Jesus. The original story that went out from Jerusalem did not come pre-packaged as the four artful and different Gospels that we have in our Bibles. That was a development of the later first century AD. And when the Gospels were finally written, at least two of them were not written by eyewitnesses. I do not say this to critique our Gospels. I love the fact that we have four versions of Jesus story. Jesus is a man who fits no one portraithe is too big and complex a historical figure. I simply say this to point out that there was a singular history and a single story of Jesus that existed before there were written Gospels, and subsequently to ask, What did that story sound like? I hope this book will give you a glimpse of that story.

Next, we live in the age of atomization and sound bites, and it happens to the good news in church buildings almost every Sunday. We often cannot see the forest for focusing on the individual (albeit very interesting) trees. And when you look in detail at particular Gospel passages, what you discover is a very telescopic, bare bones treatment of Jesus words and deeds. Doubtless this was originally due, in part, to the need to confine the whole story to one papyrus roll. But even in the case of Lukes Gospel, which is the longest and could just barely be squeezed onto one papyrus roll, we are still left wanting moremore description, more context, more background to the individual stories that make up the one story of Jesus.

What would a more contextual chronicling of Jesus life, with more historical detail and comment, have looked like? In this book I seek to begin to answer that question. I dont think there should be any tension over this; we need to see the grand sweep of the unified story and we need the perspective that the four portraits of the Gospels offer. Just now, it is the former that is neglected again and again in a church which preaches single words, or salient ideas, or tiny passages, and which uses lectionary readings, which means some passages are never heard. There is a need for an overview like this to put the various Gospel pieces together; not to supplant the four portraits of the Gospels, but to scrape off some of the dust that has accumulated on them over the centuries, and allow you to see the vibrant colors in which they were originally painted. What is especially needed is an attempt to show how the Synoptic Gospel portraits (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) fit together with Johns portrait of Jesus.

Imagine for a moment that you could hear the story from someone who has heard Jesus tell the story. Wouldnt we want to hear that just as much as we love to hear the later tellings by the evangelists? Who wouldnt pay good money to have been in on that Emmaus road Bible study led by Jesus, where he went through the Hebrew Bible and showed where it referred to him? My point is simple: a good critical probing and blending of the story is as close as we can get to what actually happened back then as a single storyline. Why wouldnt we want to try to do that as a faith venture, not to supplant the four Gospels, but to enhance our understanding of the history behind the four accounts of the one story?