so, not all scholars agree on this sequence of Mark,
Matthew,Luke, and John: some suggest, for example,
thatMatthewandMarkwere written much closer to
each other in time, perhaps even at the same time; others
contend that Matthewmight even have been written
beforeMark.
(6) If the relative dating of the gospels is hotly debated,
then any attempt to date them precisely is even more
perilous. Much depends, for example, on the assump-
tion that prophecies about future events ascribed to
Jesus in the gospels are nothing of the sort, and are
actually references to events that had already happened
by the time a particular gospel was written. Thus Jesus’
prophecy in Matthew that the Jewish temple in
Jerusalem would be destroyed and that the city’s popu-
lation would be scattered to the mountains (24.15–16)
could be a reference written afterjust such circum-
stances had come to pass with the sack of Jerusalem by
the Romans in 70.I have barely touched on the complex debates here, but I hope
to have said enough to show that there are serious problems in
any attempt to use the gospels as ‘historical’ texts. Most modern
scholars would agree that they are not transparent narratives,
through which we can access the events of Jesus’ life and times.
Instead they present carefully crafted accounts of Jesus’ life,
death, and miraculous resurrection. Jesus was regarded by the
authors of the gospels as the Messiah (‘the anointed one’ in
Hebrew, rendered in Greek as Christos, from which we get the
English term ‘Christ’) whose coming had been foretold in the
prophecies contained in the Hebrew scriptures that came to con-
stitute the Christian Old Testament. Hence the authors of the
gospels are concerned at every turn to show how Jesus’ ministry
complied with Old Testament prophecy.
In short, the gospels are not so much narratives as argu-
ments in support of particular images of Jesus. Similar features,
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