The Four Gospels

By tradition this Gospel is the work of Matthew, also called Levi, the tax collector Jesus called up from his booth to follow him. The early bishop Papias remembered him “compiling the sayings” of the Lord. He writes for a community of Jewish Christians — most likely somewhere like Antioch in the decades after the resurrection — people who knew the Hebrew Scriptures by heart and needed to see that following Jesus was not a break with Israel’s faith but its flowering.

That is why his signature note is fulfillment. A dozen times he stops the action to say, in effect, “all this happened so that what the Lord had spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled.” He opens with a genealogy, carefully arranged in three sets of fourteen, running from Abraham through David the king to the exile and on to Christ — Jesus rooted in the whole family of God’s promises. In the infancy story that follows, wise men come from the east; Joseph, warned in a dream, slips the holy family away into Egypt; a jealous Herod, seeing he has been outwitted, slaughters the children of Bethlehem; and in time God calls the family back out of Egypt: Jesus quietly reliving Israel’s own exodus, a new Moses down to the king who kills the infants. And Matthew gives him the name he will keep to the last verse — Emmanuel, “God with us” (1:23).

Matthew’s other great move is to gather Jesus’ teaching into five long sermons, each closed with the same formula, “when Jesus had finished these words” — five books of the new Moses to stand beside the five of the old. The first and greatest is the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7): the Beatitudes, “you have heard it said… but I say to you,” the Lord’s Prayer, the lilies of the field, the wise and foolish builders. The rest send out the Twelve (10), unfold the kingdom in parables (13), order life together in the community (18), and end with the warnings and the last judgment — the sheep and the goats (25). He calls it the “kingdom of heaven,” a reverent Jewish way of saying the kingdom of God, and he alone records Jesus speaking of the “church”: Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi — “you are Peter, and upon this rock” (16) — and the words on forgiveness and correction (18).

It all closes on a mountain in Galilee with the Great Commission: “Go, therefore, and teach all nations… and behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (28). The promise of chapter one — God with us — is now sent out to the whole world. The Church’s symbol for Matthew is a man, because he begins with Jesus’ human family tree. Read Matthew when you want Jesus’ teaching gathered and ordered, and read the Sermon on the Mount the slowest of all — a few lines at a time. It rewards a lifetime.

Mark is the shortest of the four and, most scholars believe, the first to be written — likely from Rome in the late 60s, as Nero’s persecution and the war in Judea closed in on a frightened church. Tradition, again through Papias, names its author John Mark and ties him to Peter: Mark set down, “accurately though not in order,” what he had heard the apostle preach. That would explain the crowd of small, vivid details no one else records — the cushion in the stern of the boat, the green grass on the hillside, the young man who slips out of his clothes and runs off naked into the night when Jesus is arrested — the kind of thing an eyewitness remembers.

Everything here moves at a run. Mark’s favorite word is “immediately”; he uses it more than forty times, hurrying from scene to scene, often in the present tense, as though it were unfolding in front of you. There is little long teaching. Instead we watch Jesus act — healing, freeing the possessed, stilling a storm, reaching out to touch a leper — with an authority that leaves the crowds asking, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

The Gospel turns on a single question at its center. For eight chapters people wonder who he is while Jesus hushes those who guess too soon — the strange “messianic secret,” where demons and healed men are told to keep quiet. Then at Caesarea Philippi Peter finally says it: “You are the Christ” (8:29). And at once Jesus begins to teach the thing no one wants to hear — that the Christ must suffer, be killed, and after three days rise. From there the road runs straight to Jerusalem, marked by three plain predictions of his death and by disciples who keep missing the point, arguing about who is greatest while their Master walks toward a cross. To follow him, Mark insists again and again, is to take up a cross of your own.

So Mark’s Jesus is the mighty Son of God who turns out to be the Servant of Isaiah — the one who “came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (10:45). Peter names him rightly at Caesarea Philippi — “You are the Christ” — but then recoils the moment Jesus speaks of the cross; no human voice in the whole book calls him Son of God until the very end, when a Roman centurion looks up at a dead man on a cross and says, “Truly this man was the Son of God” (15:39) — the exact title Mark gave in his opening line, now understood only at the foot of the cross. The oldest manuscripts even break off at the empty tomb with the women fleeing in fear and wonder, leaving you to finish the sentence yourself. His symbol is the lion, roaring in from the wilderness where his Gospel begins. Read Mark first, and read it fast — in a sitting or two if you can. Its speed is the point: it wants you standing with Peter at Caesarea Philippi, and then with the centurion at the cross, made to answer who you think this is.

Luke wrote the longest Gospel, and it is only half his work: it is the first volume of a two-part history that continues in the Acts of the Apostles, the two together the largest single contribution to the New Testament. He begins like a careful historian, dedicating the book to a certain Theophilus and promising an “orderly account” drawn from eyewitnesses and diligent research (1:1–4). By tradition he is Luke, “the beloved physician” and a companion of Paul — a Gentile writing, it seems, for Gentiles.

Where Matthew traces Jesus back to Abraham, Luke traces him all the way to Adam (3:38): this Savior belongs not to one nation but to the whole human race. That reach shapes everything he chooses to tell. Luke keeps turning the camera toward the people the world edits out — shepherds are the first to hear of the birth, a despised Samaritan is the hero of a parable, tax collectors and sinners are welcomed to the table, and women appear at nearly every turn, from Mary and Elizabeth to the friends who fund the mission and stand by the cross. It is Luke who preserves the parables we could least do without: the Good Samaritan (10), the Prodigal Son and his sulking older brother (15), the rich man and Lazarus, the Pharisee and the tax collector at prayer in the temple. Mercy is his great note. On the cross, only Luke records Jesus praying “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (23:34) and promising the repentant criminal beside him, “today you will be with me in Paradise” (23:43).

Two more threads run all through it. Luke’s Jesus is forever at prayer — before every turning point he slips away to be alone with the Father, and he teaches his friends to pray and not lose heart. And the Gospel sings: it opens with a cluster of canticles the Church still prays every day — Mary’s Magnificat, Zechariah’s Benedictus, the angels’ Gloria, old Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis — and it rings from end to end with the Holy Spirit and with joy, the gladness of heaven over one sinner who finds the way home. Luke’s symbol is the ox, the animal of sacrifice, because his Gospel opens in the temple with the priest Zechariah. Read Luke when you want the whole story told warmly and at length, and when you need reminding that you were never once outside the circle he is writing for.

John is so unlike the other three that the early Church called it the “spiritual Gospel.” Perhaps nine-tenths of its content is found nowhere else: no parables, no casting out of demons, no birth at Bethlehem, but instead long, unhurried conversations and a handful of towering scenes. Tradition assigns it to John the son of Zebedee, the disciple “whom Jesus loved,” and dates it late — near the end of the first century, turned over in prayer for decades before it was ever set down.

It opens not in Bethlehem, nor even with Abraham, but before the beginning of everything: “In the beginning was the Word” — the Logos, through whom all things were made, who was with God and was God. Then comes the sentence the whole book exists to say: “And the Word became flesh, and lived among us” (1:14). This is the highest vision of Jesus anywhere in the New Testament — God himself, come among us in a body you could touch. John then builds his Gospel around seven signs — he never calls them mere miracles, because each one points past itself to who Jesus is: water into wine, an official’s dying son, a paralytic at the pool, five thousand fed on a hillside, a walk across the sea, a man born blind given sight, and Lazarus called out of his tomb four days dead.

Around the signs cluster the seven great “I am” sayings — the bread of life, the light of the world, the gate for the sheep, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, the way and the truth and the life, the true vine — and once, dangerously, the divine name itself: “before Abraham was, I am” (8:58). Halfway through, the signs give way to what John calls “the hour.” At the Last Supper Jesus kneels to wash his friends’ feet, gives them a “new commandment” to love one another as he has loved them, promises the Spirit — the Advocate who will not leave them as orphans — and prays over them at length before going out to be arrested. John sees the cross itself as a lifting-up onto a throne of glory; “It is finished” (19:30) is spoken not in defeat but as a work completed.

He tells you outright why he wrote: “these things are written, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, in believing, you may have life in his name” (20:31). John’s symbol is the eagle, for the height of his gaze. Read John slowly, and more than once. It is less a report to get through than a pool to sit beside — shallow enough for a child to wade in, deep enough that no one has ever touched the bottom.

Set side by side, the first three Gospels overlap so closely — often word for word — that they plainly stand in some relationship; most scholars think Mark came first, and that Matthew and Luke each built on him while adding material of their own. John goes his own way entirely. But the early Church never tried to melt them down into a single story. Around the year 170 a teacher named Tatian stitched all four into one seamless narrative, the Diatessaron, and for a while some churches read it — but in the end the Church set it aside and kept the four, differences and all.

Around that same time, Irenaeus of Lyons argued that there could be neither more nor fewer than four Gospels, as fixed as the four winds and the four corners of the earth. Beneath the poetry the reasoning is sound: four witnesses, each true and each partial, tell you more together than any one could alone. Where their details differ — the order of events, the exact words spoken from the cross — that is simply the texture of real testimony, not a flaw to be sanded smooth. Harmonize them into one and you lose the very thing that makes them trustworthy.

From early on Christians recognized the four in Scripture’s living creatures — the four faces Ezekiel saw on each creature by the river (a man, a lion, an ox, an eagle), and the four creatures around God’s throne in Revelation, each with a likeness of its own. The tradition gave one to each evangelist: a man for Matthew, who opens with Jesus’ human family; a lion for Mark, roaring from the wilderness; an ox, the beast of sacrifice, for Luke, whose Gospel begins in the temple; and an eagle for John, who fixes his gaze on heaven. Four faces, one Lord.

So where should you begin? Not, usually, at Matthew simply because it comes first. Start with Mark to get the whole story quickly, or Luke to hear it told warmly and at length; come to John when you want to sit and pray rather than move; and turn to Matthew when you’re ready for Jesus’ teaching gathered and ordered. Read one Gospel all the way through before you start jumping between them, a chapter at a time and unhurried — the way our guide to Lectio Divina describes. The Gospels were written to be believed, and the only way to test that claim is to open one and read.