This would seem an obvious point, but not to all. Some believe that the Gospels were later developments of the Christian movement--late enough to incorporate new ideas of Jesus not held by the earliest Christians. New ideas regarding his pre-existence, his divinity, his virgin birth, his redemptive death, and his vindicating resurrection.
One very helpful resource to challenge this erroneous view of history is Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. I’m committing several posts to blog through Hurtado’s 750-page book since the subject is so important for our conversations about Jesus in Austin. My first three installments can be found here, here, and here.
Hurtado contends that a virtual “big bang” of devotion to Jesus as divine erupted suddenly and quickly and widely, not gradually and late and in select locales.
His largest section of the book, at about 170 pages, is dedicated to introducing the picture of Jesus that emerges from the four New Testament Gospels.
The Gospels appeared anywhere from 30 to 65 years after the death of Jesus, but Hurtado contends that the four Gospels were not so much an innovation in theology as they were an innovation in literature. In other words, they did not present new views of Jesus but "literaturized" prior oral discourse and written expressions about Jesus. There was written material of at least some of Jesus' sayings and deeds prior to the four Gospels (Luke's statement that "many others" had written accounts of "the things that have been fulfilled among us" in Luke 1:1 says as much). And there were formulatic statements in earliest Christianity indicating that Jesus' words and deeds were passed along orally (For example, 1 Cor. 15:1-11). And, as we've already covered in Hurtado's overview of Paul's writings, we don't have to wait until the Gospels appeared in the mid first century to find the view of Jesus as fully divine and fully human whose death was redemptive. But organizing all this into a narration of Jesus' life and putting it down in written form was a new development. Hurtado:
These authors saw their writings as part of the larger early Christian activities of proclamation, consolidation of converts, defense of faith, and formation of group identity. These wider and prior activities are the immediate context and the particular impetus of the canonical Gospels.
Hurtado supplies an overview of each Gospel, with an eye to how the gospel writers presented Jesus as divine, and as the centerpiece of what God is doing in the world.
Next Up: Nonbiblical Jesus Books
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