The Gospels as Stories

A Narrative Approach to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

Brown, Jeannine K.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781493423552
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Popular writer and teacher Jeannine Brown shows how a narrative approach illuminates each of the Gospels, helping readers see the overarching stories. This book offers a corrective to tendencies to read the Gospels piecemeal, one story at a time. It is filled with numerous examples and visual aids that show how narrative criticism brings the text to life, making it an ideal supplementary textbook for courses on the Gospels. Readers will gain hands-on tools and perspectives to interpret the Gospels as whole stories.

Part One
Introduction

All narrative begins for me with listening. When I read, I listen. When I write, I listen—for silence, inflection, rhythm, rest.

Toni Morrison, The Measure of Our Lives

For me the Gospel of Mark is not a resource to be mined for historical nuggets or Christological jewels; it is the ground on which we walk.

Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, Mark’s Jesus

1
The Turn to Gospels as Stories

Narrative Criticism in Gospel Studies

We “get” stories. We are drawn into their plotlines. We identify deeply with their characters. We are captivated by their settings. And we intuitively understand what a story is “doing”—what themes it communicates, what morals it highlights, what other stories it evokes or undermines. Neurobiologists suggest that story is hardwired into us; we make sense of our reality by interpreting it and retelling it as story.

So wouldn’t coming to the Gospels in the New Testament be a relatively straightforward task? They are, after all, stories. They may be more than stories, but they certainly are not less.

Yet for all our comfort level with stories, we often do strange and odd things with the Gospels. In church contexts we chop them into very small pieces (single verses or individual episodes) and turn them into allegories for our own experiences. In the guild of biblical studies we have done things just as strange—at least if we consider that early church communities would have received and experienced a Gospel in its entirety, with large segments being read aloud in church gatherings.1 We should certainly recognize that the Gospel traditions predated the writing of the Gospels, and these traditions would have circulated as individual stories—a key tenet of form criticism.2 Yet the Gospel writers brought together these traditions in thoughtful and distinctive ways, and the early church would have experienced Mark’s Gospel, for example, as a unified work—as a story.

Such a holistic, storied reading is the focus of narrative criticism, a particular interpretive method used in Gospel studies. In this chapter, I describe narrative criticism as it has emerged over the last forty years or so, offering in the process a description of this method as well as its evolution into an eclectic and adaptable approach to reading the Gospels as stories.

Reading the Gospels: The Turn toward Narrative

To get a feel for how the Gospel narratives have been read by both church and academy, I’ll illustrate with the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea.”

The Princess and the Pea

Once upon a time there was a prince who wanted to marry a princess; but she would have to be a real princess. He travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted. There were princesses enough, but it was difficult to find out whether they were real ones. There was always something about them that was not as it should be. So he came home again and was sad, for he would have liked very much to have a real princess.

One evening a terrible storm came on; there was thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in torrents. Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.

It was a princess standing out there in front of the gate. But, good gracious! What a sight the rain and the wind had made her look. The water ran down from her hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real princess.

Well, we’ll soon find that out, thought the old queen. But she said nothing, went into the bedroom, took all the bedding off the bedstead, and laid a pea on the bottom; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the pea, and then twenty eider-down beds on top of the mattresses.

On this the princess had to lie all night. In the morning she was asked how she had slept.

“Oh, very badly!” said she. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night. Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!”

Now they knew that she was a real princess because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds.

Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.

So the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a real princess; and the pea was put in the museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it.

There, that is a true story.

This is the original version of the story written by its author, Hans Christian Andersen, in 1835. Let’s imagine, however, that we had this original telling of the story with two other versions on either side of it, without any notation about the date or origin of each.

Princess and the Pea (picture book)

“The Princess and the Pea” (as recorded above)

Once upon a Mattress (musical)

The first telling of the story is in storybook form with pictures, as well as a few more significant internal differences from the one recited above: (1) goose feathers instead of eiderdown, and (2) “if no one has stolen it” as the concluding line (i.e., missing the affirmation of its truth as a story).3 The second telling is the one recorded above. The third version is the musical Once upon a Mattress, which includes, among other additions, thirteen other supposed princesses who have been tested to see if they really are princesses before the main character appears—named in this version as Princess Winnifred the Woebegone.

Three versions, side by side, with no explicit indications of which came first. What might we do in response to this interesting mix of expressions of a single story?

Well, if we were like Gospels scholars of the nineteenth century, we might focus our attention on the historical question of which one came first and which others were derived from it. In this case, we might notice that the language of “eiderdown” is more obscure than the “goose feathers” of the storybook version and the “soft downy mattresses” of the musical. An eider is a large duck found in northern coastal regions, making this referent more (geographically) specific than “goose feathers” or “downy.” We might then surmise that the middle of these versions was the original, with the others being derivative, since that very specific detail of “eiderdown” has been made more transferrable to other contexts in the first and third versions. In this historical work, we would be doing source criticism, a methodology used by Gospels scholars to determine which Synoptic Gospel—Matthew, Mark, or Luke—came first, with the conclusion usually drawn that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke used Mark as they wrote their stories of Jesus.4

Say we then decided to look at each of the differences between the story presumed to be written first (the middle example above) and the other two renderings. In this comparison of versions, we might note that pictures were added in the storybook, which could give us insight into the purposes and audience of that version: children in a stage of early reading ability. To gauge what was added in the musical, we could note the shift from an unnamed princess in the original to a named princess—Princess Winnifred the Woebegone. And this rather whimsical name could indicate the comedic purposes of the musical version. This kind of comparative study is what in Gospels scholarship has been called redaction criticism, an approach that saw its heyday in the latter part of the twentieth century. Redaction criticism has been used to highlight the specific audience and purposes of Matthew and Luke when compared to their “redaction” or editing of their source, the Gospel of Mark.5

What do you notice about these various methods applied to “The Princess and the Pea”? What might become apparent is that these historical questions and methods have not yet addressed the stories themselves, although redaction criticism has begun to identify some of the more unique purposes of each telling (e.g., the comedic flavor of Once upon a Mattress). So, you might wonder, why not just study each story on its own terms? Doesn’t this seem like an obvious place to start?

The answer outside of our analogy—in the history of Gospels research—is both yes and no. Yes, because in this research there was ongoing interest in the Gospels at the level of the whole book. Examples include the comparison of the Gospels to the genre of Greco-Roman biography as well as attention given to the Gospels as wholes in later forms of redaction criticism (sometimes called...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Plot and Plotting
• Part Three: Character and Characterization
• Part Four: Intertextuality
• Part Five: Narrative Theology
• Part Six: Conclusion
• Recommended Resources
• Glossary
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover