Another view from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/gospels.html

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John Dominic Crossan:

Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies DePaul University

Did oral tradition play a part in preserving the traditions of the early movement?

Oral tradition is something that we have rather abused, I think, in scholarship. If you take, for example, the common material behind the Q gospel and the Gospel of Thomas, there's 37 sayings without any order so this is not a document of any type. Who is preserving it? The people who are living like Jesus, the itinerants who are trying to follow the life of Jesus. They are interested in these stories, not just because of oral tradition, but because it justifies their lifestyle. So whenever somebody says oral tradition, I want to say, "Could you show it to me? I know you can't show me oral tradition, but can you show it to me some way in the text, or at least, in the lifestyle of somebody who would have cared about it?" Otherwise we have a free-floating oral tradition that is becoming kind of meaningless.

Well, how do you think the Jesus traditions were preserved then?

I think the Jesus traditions were preserved by those who were trying to live them. Whence, for example, those who preserved, "Blessed are the destitute." They preserved it because they were destitute and they thought they were blessed. They had a vested interest in remembering that saying because it described them.

How do the four gospels evolve then?

The first gospel, Mark, is around the year 70. So within 70 and, say, 95, we have the four gospels. 25 years. But that leaves 70 to 30. 40 years before that. If you watch the creativity within that 25 year span, from Mark being copied into Matthew and Luke, possibly also by John, then you have to face the creativity of that 40 years, even when you don't have written gospels. And that may be equally intense.

And so you're making it sound as if the gospels are extremely unreliable as evidence.

The gospels are, first of all, extremely reliable historical documents for their own time and place. Mark tells us very much about, say, a community writing in the 70's. John, a community writing in the mid-90's. But, since we have four of them, we get four vectors, then, on the basic tradition that they're working with. What is common, we might be able to then work, by going back very carefully through those deliberate... what scholars call "redactional" elements in there. If Mark just made it up any old way, and Matthew did the same, we could not do anything historically with them.

What do the gospels have in common? Is it possible to say what they do share?

What the gospels do share, of course, is Jesus. But that is almost trivial to say that. Because they are interested in not simply repeating Jesus. They are interested in interpreting Jesus. Matthew, even when he has Mark in front of him, will change what Jesus says. And that's what's most important for me, to understand the mind of an evangelist. It is that Matthew is saying, "I will change Mark so that Mark's Jesus speaks to my people." Now, there's a logic to his change. He's not just changing it to be difficult. He will change Mark, but what Jesus says in Mark does not make sense to Matthew's people.... What is consistent about the gospels is that they change consistent with their own theology, with their own communities' needs. They do not change at random. If you begin to understand how Matthew changes Mark, you see it worked again and again and again. You don't have to make up a different reason for every change. Once you understand Matthew's theology, you can almost predict how he will change.

How significant and discrediting to belief are the differences between the four gospels?

For somebody who thinks the four gospels are like four witnesses in a court trying to tell exactly how the accident happened, as it were, this is extremely troubling. It is not at all troubling to me because they told me, quite honestly, that they were gospels. And a gospel is good news ... "good" and "news" ... updated interpretation. So when I went into Matthew, I did not expect journalism. I expected gospel. That's what I found. I have no problem with that.

So, in other words, they're doing what they set out to do, but it's not what we think they're setting out to do.

We have the problem, not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They do a superb job, or Christianity would not be still around, of doing what they had to do. We want them to be journalists and we're very unhappy with them.

Can you characterize the way Mark portrays Jesus and what kind of audience he's trying to play to?

Let me compare Mark with John to explain how two gospels do it differently in an episode we call "the agony in the garden". Now, there is no agony in John and there is no garden in Mark, but we call it the agony in the garden because we put them together. Mark tells the story in which Jesus, the night before he dies, is prostrate on the ground, begging God, "If this all could pass, but I will do what you want." And the disciples all flee. Now that's an awful picture. That makes sense to me because Mark is writing to a persecuted community who know what it's like to die. That's how you die, feeling abandoned by God.

Over to John. Jesus is not on the ground in John. The whole cohort of the Jerusalem forces come out - 600 troops come out to capture Jesus, and they end up with their faces on the ground in John. And Jesus says, "Of course I will do what the Father wants." And Jesus tells them to "Let my disciples go." He's in command of the whole operation. You have a Jesus out of control almost in Mark, a Jesus totally in control in John. Both gospel. Neither of them are historical. I don't think either of them know exactly what happened. Mark is writing to a persecuted church, "Here is how to die ... like Jesus." John is writing, I think, to a community that's hanging on by its fingernails. It's getting more and more marginalized. Its Jesus is getting more and more in control, in control of the passion, in control of Pilate. The more John's community is out of control, the more Jesus is in control. Both of that makes absolute sense to me. But both are gospel.

What's the significant difference between Matthew and Luke and Mark? What kind of differences do they bring in?

If you look at Luke 4, for example, the opening, almost paradigmatic, scene in Luke. Jesus goes into the synagogue. He takes the scroll of Isaiah. He is literate of course, he can read. And he's a scholar. He can find his way around an unpointed Hebrew scroll and find exactly the place he wants and reads it and comments on it. Jesus is a scholar. Jesus is rather like Luke, actually....

Luke gives us his big scene up front. Matthew does the same with the Sermon on the Mount. It's on a mountain, where else? Moses is on a mountain ... Sinai. Jesus is on a mountain saying, "You've heard what was said to them of old, what I say to you." I couldn't imagine Matthew starting off with something else. Jesus is a new Moses. All of that is coherent within the theology of each evangelist....

There is no Sermon on the Mount and there is no mountain to have a sermon on in Mark, and there is no scene in the synagogue at Nazareth where Jesus reads Isaiah and is almost killed. None of that is in Mark. One is in Matthew. The other is in Luke.

As we read John, what does it tell us about the direction the other church is taking?

As I read John, I come to two conclusions. One is that this is a Jewish group. If you want to call them Christians, they're Jewish Christians. They're one group within Judaism. The second conclusion is that they are being more and more marginalized. That is, their appeal to lead all of Judaism is becoming less and less likely. They're becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. And they can refer to their fellow Jews as "the Jews". They are feeling profoundly alienated from their own Judaism. In plain language, they're losing. And that means the language of invective gets nastier and nastier. It's the loser in political campaigns that calls names. So, Matthew is losing when he calls the Pharisees hypocrites and says "war to them." That warns me that he is losing out to the Pharisees as he sees it. John, he talks about "the Jews did this" or that awful statement about the Jews are born of the Devil. That tells me that this community is desperate. It's hanging on by its fingernails.