Gospels

Being grounded in the Gospel message

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I get a lot of comments on the name I have chosen for this website. A few weeks ago I went over why I chose evangelist and barefoot, but the comments keep coming. The online ones focus on “evangelist”, and given the all too frequent negative use of that term, I am not the least bit surprised.

In real life, however, it’s the ‘barefoot’ part of worship leadership that keeps getting people’s attention. That is especially true as the weather turns colder here in Canada. Aren’t you cold, I’m asked on a regular basis. Yes… yes I am, to tell you the truth. Especially when I step outside of church after service on to the cold stones or concrete. I don’t feel it when I’m leading worship – I move around too much – but I feel it when I stop.

There is a long line of Canadian women who felt more comfortable, more approachable by performing barefoot. Women like Anne Murray, Rita MacNeil and k.d. lang all performed barefoot, and if anyone was asked today what they remember about any of these women’s performances, it would probably be that they felt real.

Although the barefoot part gets attention when I’m leading worship, I don’t do it for that purpose. It’s a fun ice breaker, arguably, but this preference tells a larger truth – my desire to be grounded in what I am doing and saying.

Making the Gospel feel real to folks living 2000 years after the writers wrote it and the people lived it, is no easy task. The differences in cultural context alone make things confusing, and reading any of the Bible thinking it all makes sense dropped into our modern culture is a recipe for disaster, no matter who tries to do it that way.

One thing we can count on once cultural and historical context is explained, is the through line of social justice. The early church was never meant to be a religion. The earliest followers of Jesus were quite at home in their Hebrew tradition, they just saw where adjustments and changes needed to happen. Their focus was not on creating structure – that came later with Rome’s take over of the faith – the focus of the first centuries was on making life better and equal for everyone.

When we read the words of the Magnificat, we have to recognize how powerful it is to hear that the powerful are brought down and the weak are raised up. There is no changing places as so many in power fear, there is merely an equaling of places in society.

By grounding ourselves in the Gospel, we can see where change needs to happen. It helps us avoid the superficiality of salvation-behaviour encouraged in so many places, and it allows us to focus on the social Gospel that Jesus preached. Change, inclusion, social equality, mutual dependence, shared abundance… those are all Gospel ideals.

Want to read the Bible? Start with Luke.

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We’ve all seen them, even those who are not interested in reading the Bible… those “Read the Bible in a Year” web lists and apps. I tried following one list once, and I could not get through it. And this was after I had one Master degree in Christianity (my Master of Divinity) under my belt and had experience in ministry.

The reason most people, me included, struggle and fail in this attempt is usually Numbers. Genesis is fine, lots of adventure, interesting characters. Exodus, story of this guy Moses, also a lot happening. Leviticus is judgy, lots of rules, and people certainly talk about it.

And then Numbers…. the most boring books in the Bible.

The thing is, the Bible is not a book in itself, it is a library. We have it in one collection with a different number of books depending on if you pick up a Protestant Bible, a Catholic Bible or an Orthodox Bible (I’ll explore those differences another time). But, the Bible is not something designed for you to read from cover to cover. Eventually it would be great if you get to reading it all, and certainly don’t do it without a guide of some kind, but reading it like a book will make you miss the entire point.

The Bible is a group of books written over hundreds of years, gathered and approved by different groups of people, and put in one place – known as a Codex – for ease of use, not because they tell a story front to back like a novel.

So why start with Luke? Of all the books in the Bible, Luke is the easiest to understand.

Luke is the social justice Gospel, the one that has instructions and stories of what to do to follow God’s desire that we help each other. Luke does not get spiritual or confusing like John, or overly poetic like Matthew. And it has more to it than Mark. It doesn’t have a secondary agenda like Revelation, nor is it answering questions like the letters of Paul – and we never got those questions to start. It’s not repeating the history and culture of a people so they won’t forget who they are, like the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament if that is how you were taught to identify it). Luke is simply plain old Social Gospel, and the book that reminds us that Jesus did things for others, so we should too.

Some of it will be confusing without the help of interpreters, after all it was written 2000 years ago and we have lost a lot of the cultural understanding from those days. But it is still the most plain language book in the Bible.

Why ‘barefoot’ and ‘evangelist’?

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I often get questions about why I chose the title Barefoot Evangelist for my website. The questions are mostly about the ‘evangelist’ part, if we are being honest.

The ‘barefoot’ is pretty straight forward. I prefer preaching in my bare feet, and once overheard a person in a church I preached at referring to me saying “you know, the one who preaches barefoot”. I liked it, and it was honest. There were already about eight “barefoot preachers” on social media at the time – most from Canada, interestingly enough – so I went with something else.

Evangelist…

I have had people not want to visit my website because they thought ‘evangelist’ automatically meant it was narrow minded, rightwing, conservative, and spoke of a doctrine of hate. A friend of mine said she encountered that when she recommended my website, and she quickly corrected their assumption. To the best of my knowledge that person listened, watched, and signed up to follow shortly afterwards.

Evangelist, evangelical, and evangelism are Christian words. It is unfortunate that these days they are associated with only one way of behaving that has nothing to do with the way people expect Jesus’ followers to act. Some who have never experienced people who are genuine Jesus followers assume that all Christians fall into that category, and that is both unfortunate and inaccurate.

There are many communities calling themselves Evangelical, and use the words evangelical and evangelism, who understand the historic meaning and therefore are using the word accurately.

Simply put, it means “Tellers of the story of Jesus” or “Tellers of the Good News”. That’s it.

Traditionally the assumed writers of the four Gospels have been referred to as Evangelists. Those who were travelling missionaries in the earliest days were also known as ‘evangelists’ because the task they took up was to share the story of Jesus and encourage people to follow Jesus’ teachings. The word appears in the Bible associated with certain people. In Acts 21:8 it is associated with a man named Phillip. In Ephesians 4:11, we read that with Ascension the Holy Spirit gave the gift of being an evangelist to some people. And in 2 Timothy 4:5, the writer told people to carry on with the work of being an evangelist even when the world was more interested in other teaching that ‘suited their own desires’.

To tell the story of Jesus makes us evangelists. Some of us do it casually, some of us more formally. But all of us who share the Good News of Jesus are by default, Evangelists.

Who wrote the Gospels?

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After last week’s blog post I got to thinking about how much people know about the Gospels in general. Sunday School education really doesn’t get into it, and most Sunday School teachers have never been taught the differences and assumed histories of the four Gospels in the first place.

We have four Gospels in the New Testament, or Christian Scriptures canon. We can only assume why these four were chosen while so many others were not, because the criteria has been lost to time. This is a good place to look if you want to see many of the other writings in Early Church history, including what was known as Gnostic writings (not all books or letters excluded from the Christian canon are considered Gnostic).

The four Gospels were written anonymously. We can only guess at who the writer, or writers, based on how they wrote, the words and language they used, and any historic or geographical references we might be able to identify. That is not a lot to go on, so most Christian scholars today stick with the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, names that were assigned by the early church.

Matthew was named after the disciple Matthew who was described as a wealthy Hebrew who was once a tax collector, Matthew 9:9, 10:3. This fits with the Gospel of Matthew having the most references to the Hebraic tradition and language. It is believed this scripture was written for the Hebraic-Christian community in Antioch, around 80 CE (Common Era). They would have been a small but wealthy group of early followers living in a large Hellenistic city. Matthew is the first Gospel we see because of its length, not because it was written first or is the most accurate or important.

Mark is named for a companion of Paul who also knew Peter, and travelled with Paul on his early missionary trips. His name pops up in several places in Paul’s letters, or the letters people assume Paul wrote. {Colossians (4:10), Philemon (1:24), and potentially 2 Timothy (4:11)} This makes Mark one of the first known people to share the word of Jesus outside of Peter and Paul, which would fit as the writer of the first Gospel. This Gospel was probably written in Rome, around 60-70 CE, just before or just after the Roman government destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem and kicked all the Hebrews out of that territory. What makes Mark unique is that it is styled after a Greek play that assumed the audience would respond to the open-endedness of the play by deciding their own conclusions.

Luke was originally named after a reference in pseudo-Pauline letter Colossians (meaning people thought Paul wrote it, but scholars today do not agree). The reference was to a physician named Luke, Colossians 4:14. They thought it had to be Luke because of all the stories about healings, but today scholars are no longer convinced of that. They think it is more likely that Luke was just a very well educated Greek convert to Christianity, because the Gospel is written in very advance Greek, and he would be considered the first historian of the church. The writer of Luke also wrote the Book of Acts. Scholars can’t agree about where Luke was written, but they do agree it was in a very wealthy Hellenistic centre within easy travel to Jerusalem, around 90 CE.

John has a slightly different story. Throughout the Gospel of John, we read about the Beloved Disciple, but there is no name attached. Then at the crucifixion Jesus tells John to take care of his mother, Mary, when he sees her standing beside the “Beloved Disciple”, John 19:26-27. Modern feminist scholars think putting John in that story came afterwards and that the Beloved Disciple was in fact Mary Magdalene. There are a number of reasons to think this might be the case, given books outside the Christian canon that highlight Jesus and Mary of Magdalene’s close relationship (and no, I do not think they were married or in a romantic relationship, I think Mary of Magdalene was old enough to be his mother). Also, how full her story is at Resurrection, and that there was a final chapter added after the book was completed that highlighted Peter, a disciple who was known to have issues with Jesus’ close relationship with Mary Magdalene. This Gospel was believed to be written in Ephesus, around 100 CE.

None of this is absolute history, but rather conjecture based on how each book was written. Scholars hope that someday there will be more discoveries of ancient texts that will give us more information.

Are the Scriptures lying to us?

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In the first few centuries, those in educational leadership in the church tried to conflate or harmonize the Scriptures. In this past century Biblical scholars have been trying to untie those assumptions. So what does that really mean?

I was chatting with someone this week who asked why in the Gospel of John, John the Baptist pretended to not know Jesus, when we all know he was Jesus’ cousin. Interesting question, and takes a little bit to unpack. This blog post will only look at one of many characters than need attention, however, the first answer is no, the Scriptures are not lying to us.

The early church tried to line up all the Gospels, and where they did not line up well, they were forced to line up so the same story was assumed across all four Gospels. The problem is, all four Gospels were written by different people – unknown to us, and only given names because of this harmonizing process by the early church – and were written in different locations around Galilee and Israel in the first century of the Common Era (CE).

Mark was first, written around the time of the destruction of the second temple, so either just before or just after 70 CE (I am more convinced of the argument that it was just before). He was telling a narrative in the Greek tradition of playwriting that expected the audience to complete the final act either in their imagination or through action. If you look at the end of Mark you can see the story just stops, but at two different times others tried to add on endings, one to mirror Luke, and another that has confused scholars ever since.

Matthew came next, somewhere around 80 CE, and he was raised in the Hebrew tradition. No other Gospel has as many references to Hebrew Scriptures or practices as Matthew.

Luke followed around 90 CE. He was once considered to be a doctor because of all the healing stories included. Modern scholars have decided he was not a doctor, but was probably the earliest historian of Jesus, at a time when no one was really an historian like we understand them today, Luke just used better material to tell his story. Luke is written in the most elevated Greek, which suggests he might have been a convert to Christianity.

These three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are known as the Synoptic Gospels or storytelling Gospels. They have many stories in common, but each is told with differing details. Even the story of the nativity, which today is told as one story, is told differently in the Gospels. Mark doesn’t have it, Matthew had the wisemen and star, and Luke had the angels and shepherds.

The Gospel of John is completely different. While the Synoptic Gospels gradually reveal that Jesus was the Messiah, John comes out of the gate proclaiming this truth, and then spends the entirety of the Gospel proving it like Jesus was on trial. Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus is big and bold and never hides, unlike the Synoptics where Jesus is always trying to slip away or go unnoticed.

If we prioritize Luke, John the Baptist and Jesus were cousins. But that is the only Gospel that tells us they are related. In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist had never met Jesus but he did have a conversion experience and then became a messenger of God. Mark and Matthew have John the Baptist as the wild man living in the desert, a reference to Isaiah’s prophecy.

Same person, three different backstories, all telling us about a person who told others to prepare, Jesus was coming.

So are the Scriptures lying? No. We have to look at each Gospel as a stand alone story.

Teen Time: If Jesus has one message to us, why are their four Gospels? (August 8th)

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Jesus taught us to love one another, to love God above all else, and to love ourselves. That message is the same across all Gospels.

Mark was the first Gospel written around 60 CE. The format of Mark is like a Greek play where we are both spectator and participant, and in the end we are supposed to finish the story. Even though we know from the beginning about Jesus, the characters in the Gospel don’t and they try to stop him before something bad happens.

Matthew was written around 80 CE. It is the first Gospel in the Bible because it is the longest and considered the most beautiful. Matthew was writing for people with a strong Hebrew tradition so they could see Jesus fulfilling the promises of Moses and the prophets. Matthew was concerned with people making sure their own behaviour was what Jesus would want before they started sharing their faith with others.

Luke is the ‘social justice’ gospel, and written around 90 CE. People used to assume Luke was a doctor because there were so many healing stories in that Gospel, but now the writer of Luke is seen as an historian. Luke is more interested in the actions of faith, and there is almost always a man’s story and woman’s story together, showing that Jesus came for everyone.

John was written around 100 CE, and is different from the other Gospels in that the stories are episodes of Jesus ministry, not a continuum from the beginning to the end of Jesus’ ministry. It is considered the most theological Gospel. Unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke, the Jesus we meet in John knows exactly who he is and what he has to do.