Who Wrote the Gospels?

The names we associate with the Gospel writers are all second-century guesses. If this comes as a surprise, welcome to the cutting edge of modern biblical scholarship. There is a lot more to understanding and interpreting one of the most influential collection of works in Western history than the simple viewpoints we were taught as children. Nearly a century after the four Gospels were finished, Christians in the late second century, eager to give names to the anonymous manuscripts they possessed, selected traditional figures that they supposed should have written them — the Apostles Matthew and John, Luke the "beloved physician" of Paul (Col. 4:14), and John Mark of Jerusalem, the "son" of Peter (Acts 12:12; I Peter 5:13).According to Helms the gospels were written to convert or confirm their readers to Christianity (surely no shameful project); they are the highly colored arguments of powerful authors, not just transparent windows upon the historical Jesus. If we adjust our focus from the brilliant imaginative pictures to the imaginations that produced them, to the situations out of which they arose, we get to the point of this book — a study of the minds of the authors we call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

• Author
• Randel McCraw Helms

• Format
• hardcover

• Pages
• 178

• Publisher
• Millennium Press

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9780965504720

• Genres
• religion, history, research, christianity, biblical

• Release date
• 1997