What Is a Gospel?
Published on 28. April 2022
257 pages
978-1-4674-6489-5 (ISBN)
Description
When Christians speak of "the gospels" they're usually referring to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Other ancient writings about the life of Jesus are generally considered noncanonical or heretical. But what if these other gospel writings-including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, and the Protevangelium of James-aren't fundamentally different from the four canonical gospels? In this follow-up to Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective, noted biblical scholar Francis Watson makes the case that viewing early gospel literature as a unified genre-sharing significant similarities in sources, content, and goals-allows us to discern important interrelated aspects that are lost amid the usual categories. Watson's critical approach enables modern readers of the Bible to break free of fraught scholarly assumptions in order to better understand early Christian identity formation and beliefs.
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Francis Watson
What Is a Gospel?
Book
05/2022
William B Eerdmans Publishing Co
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Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- 1. What Is a Gospel?
- The Gospel Proclaimed and Written
- Defining the Gospel Genre
- 2. Seven Ways to Dispose of Judas Iscariot
- Judas and the Field of Blood (Gospel of Matthew)
- Judas Ruptured (Acts)
- Judas as Spectacle (Papias)
- Judas Harmonized (Apollinaris of Laodicea)
- Exit Judas (Gospel of John)
- No Judas (Gospel of Peter)
- Revelation and Exclusion (Gospel of Judas)
- 3. How Did Mark Survive?
- Mark as a Work in Progress
- Conserving Mark
- 4. Does Luke Need Q?
- A House Built on Sand?
- Luke and His Notebook
- Introducing the Inaugural Sermon
- 5. Q and the Logia
- Discovering the Logia
- Interpreting the Logia
- Competing Logia Theories
- The Politics of Q
- 6. Luke Rewriting and Rewritten
- The Rewritten Gospel (Luke)
- Rewriting as Displacement (Protevangelium of James)
- Rewriting as Falsification? (Marcion)
- Rewriting as Integration (Tatian)
- Rewriting as Coordination (Irenaeus)
- Divine Rewriting (Qur'an, Sura 3)
- 7. The Gospel of the Apostles
- The Epistula Apostolorum as Gospel
- The Gospel of the Apostles and the Gospel of John
- Redeploying Johannine Women
- Resolving Johannine Anomalies
- 8. Jesus versus the Lawgiver
- The Apocryphon of John
- The Acts of John
- The First Apocalypse of James
- The Marcionite Euangelion
- 9. Making Sense of the Betrayer
- The Confessor and the Opponent
- The Confessor as Opponent
- Judas's Passion
- 10. Reception as Corruption
- The Anonymous Gospel
- Tertullian's Failed Syllogism
- On the Originality (or Otherwise) of the Marcionite Gospel
- Appendix: Tertullian on Marcion's Antitheses
- 11. Toward a Redaction-Critical Reading of the Diatessaron Gospel
- Title and Sources
- The Gospel Prologue
- Zechariah the Priest
- Mary the Virgin
- 12. Lindisfarne and the Art of the Fourfold Gospel
- The Canon Tables
- Evangelist Portraits
- Cross Pages
- Incipits
- 13. Eschatology and the Twentieth Century
- Schweitzer's English Title
- Schweitzer and Weiss
- Schweitzer and "Modern Theology"
- Schweitzer and Wrede
- 14. A Reply to My Critics
- Was the Four-Gospel Collection Inevitable?
- Are Canonical Gospels Uniquely Biographical?
- Is There a Gospel Genre?
- Were Ancient Authors Capable of Complex Redactional Procedures?
- What Evaluative Criteria Should We Employ?
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
