The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ

Written by Martin Hengel Reviewed By Andrew Gregory

This is a wide-ranging work by one of the senior statesmen of NT scholarship. It draws on a lifetime’s work, although some of Hengel’s arguments are presented more cogently in his earlier writings to which he refers. Hengel’s main concern is to present his understanding of how four written Gospels came together in one collection, and how written biographical accounts of the activity of Jesus came to be known as ‘Gospels’ in the light of the earlier understanding of the term ‘Gospel’ as the proclamation of Jesus as Saviour. A final chapter, offered as a postscript, argues against too ready an acceptance of the Q hypothesis. Hengel claims not to dispute the existence of Q, ‘but only the possibility of demonstrating its unity and reconstructing it in any way which is at all reliable’. Elsewhere he refers to Q as ‘a modern pseudo-scientific “myth” ’. Closely related to this are his arguments that Luke is earlier than Matthew, and that the author of Matthew drew on Luke.

The book’s origin in an expansion of lectures has mixed consequences. The book reads easily, but there is repetition. So too Hengel offers controversial opinions on a number of disputed questions, but the text of the book seems at times to imply that these opinions may be taken as given. Thus the reader carried along by the text (207 pp.) may miss the further discussion in the lengthy endnotes. (113 pp.), although sometimes even in the notes Hengel simply lambasts rather than interacts with those who offer hypotheses different to his own.

Hengel’s discussion begins with the conundrum that there can only be one ‘Gospel’, the message of salvation through Jesus Christ, yet there are four ‘Gospels’, separate biographical narrative accounts concerning Jesus that are both rival and mutually supplementary. From this situation arise two questions. First, what is the relationship between the gospel preached by Paul and the account written by Mark, and how can each be given the same designation? Second, how is it that we have the narrative of Jesus’ activity in a fourfold and often contradictory form in the NT Canon, and how old are these Gospels?

Hengel’s answer to the first question, which stresses the essential continuity between Paul’s gospel and the accounts of the Evangelists, accounts for the bulk of the book. Mark, whose authority rests on that of Peter, wrote a narrative account of the life of Jesus. He called this work a Gospel, for it contains the account of the saving message of Jesus. It is a kerygmatic biography which takes its title from its opening, Mark 1:1, and which originated as a single Gospel codex. This codex was disseminated from Rome, and Luke drew on it as one of several sources which he combined with sayings-traditions. Matthew, who drew on both Markand Luke, took this process a stage further. Luke’s authority rested on his connection with Paul, whereas the later authors of Matthew and John needed to claim the authority of an apostle. The uniformity of the titles goes back to Mark’s title, and these titles allowed the different accounts of the life of Jesus to be distinguished from one another in the book cupboard where they were kept when not being read publicly in worship.

Hengel suggests that this development will have taken place in Rome by the late first or early second century, and he argues that the practice of reading the gospels alongside the OT derived from synagogue worship at an early stage, although the first description of such a practice is not found until the writings of Justin Martyr.

Hengel devotes less attention to the question of why the early church retained four authoritative accounts of the life of Jesus. He claims that the development of the fourfold gospel was presupposed rather than occasioned by Marcion. Thus Hengel argues that the decision to draw on four gospels, first defended explicitly in Irenaeus, was made at an early stage.

Hengel’s reconstructions are always possible and often plausible, but rarely are they either the necessary or the only possible or plausible reading of the evidence. Hengel notes that probably more than 85% of Christian texts from the second century have been lost, but this means that what extant evidence there is may be interpreted in more than one way. Therefore the last word is yet to be said on these questions. Hengel does well to question the sometimes dubious support for scholarly hypotheses that are sometimes taken as gtvens, but so too some aspects of his own reconstruction of the origin of the fourfold gospel should be seen as conjectural or hypothetical rather than as the assured results of scholarship.


Andrew Gregory

Oxford