I’m a big picture guy. I like high-level concepts and foundational level premises. I also love narrative. In fact, my entire theological method is built on synthesis. So, it seems only natural that I would be a person who is predisposed to preferring Gospel harmonies.
But I don’t.
Sure, I think they’re useful for getting a fuller picture of the events in the life of Christ. In fact, I’ve spent countless hours creating and teaching through harmonized versions of the Bible! So, I certainly see their worth.
Moreover, harmonies aren’t new. The first harmony that we know of came from Tatian in the Second Century and was called the Diatessaron, and throughout Church history there have been many harmonies.
However, there was an explosion in the importance and theological significance of harmonies with the advent of Higher Criticism, the rise of Modernism, and the minimalism of Liberal Christianity. These schools of thought attempted to try to stop seeing the forest and look at the individual trees in the hopes of understanding the “Historical Jesus” – which, probably, isn’t what you think it is. The Historical Jesus sounds innocuous, it sounds like you mean, “what can history teach us about who Jesus was”. But that’s not what the “Historical Jesus” is. It would take too long, and it’s beyond the scope of this blog to discuss the various problems with the Quests for the Historical Jesus. But, suffice to say, that these quests presupposed that the Gospels were not historically reliable foundations upon which to build Historical knowledge of Jesus.
And the 19th and 20th Century proliferation of Gospel harmonies and “Life of Christ”s came from an attempt to demythologize, redefine, and contemporize Jesus – or to refute those claims. A notable example of a faith based “Life of Christ”/ Gospel harmony is Edershiem’s magnum opus The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. Indeed, Modernism and its methodologies became so prevalent among Christian thinkers, that many lost the ability to think of the Gospels in OTHER than a harmonized sense. Fundamentalists and Evangelicals were so prepared to defend against purported chronological crises and continuity errors that all our thinking was placed in a harmonized framework. Bible teachers, when charitable, began to think of the 4 Gospels as 4 Divine Puzzle Pieces that the Christian was to fit together, perfectly, to give us the REAL picture of Jesus. Less charitably, and likely less consciously, Christians began to see the 4 Gospels as incomplete and poorly written biographies of Jesus that have been just waiting for two millennia for people as smart as us to correct and make whole. As though Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were too inept to say what they wanted to say to whom they wanted to say it, and they need us to, somehow, pick up the pieces and give the Gospel the way the Holy Spirit should have inspired it.
Please bear in mind, I’m not against harmonies, per se. I am against the presupposition that effectively preaching a Gospel text requires us to try to fill in the supposed lacunae of one Gospel with the material of another to satisfy our own desire to make the Gospels conform to our demands on the structure and function of literature.
But, first, let’s take an example from modern film and then let’s look at a textbook Bible example of where Harmonizing goes wrong.
Imagine, if you will, that you were watching the newest Robin Hood movie, the one where Jamie Foxx isn’t Robin Hood (even though he’s the best actor on screen). And you’re trying to figure out who Robin Hood really was and what Robin Hood really did, and how the story of Robin Hood SHOULD be told. And so, you try to fill in what you think are plot-holes with material from Russel Crowe’s version. But to deal with the problems of Russel Crowe just scowling all the time, even though he’s the leader of the Merry Men, you try to use Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood to add some dialogue and swashbuckling roguery. And add some Cary Elwes, a whole bunch of Kevin Costner, and some of the vulpine vivacity, vim, and vigor of the Disney cartoon version. In the end, if you try to “harmonize” the Robin Hood movies you’re going to end up with an incomprehensible mishmash of clichés and the lowest common denominator of the sundry narratives. If you try to create a composite of all the Robin Hood movies you’re either going to have something so incomprehensibly complex, or so reductionistically simple, that really all you’ll have left is England, Archery, and Robin and the Sheriff.
We don’t do that with film, because we understand that film is storytelling, it’s narrative. Unless, of course the film is based upon a book, and then any deviation from canon is considered blasphemous heresy (but that’s another blog post for another day). We understand that every movie stands as its own creation and every film has to tell its own story, because, even if unconsciously, we understand that all art is an attempt to convey a message through a medium.
We don’t try to harmonize film because we understand that it’s silly.
So why do we do it with the Gospels? As I’ve begun preaching through Mark and reading Markan commentaries, I’ve been astounded with how quickly these commentaries quickly rush to explain away what they perceive to be inadequate information in Mark with material from Matthew, Luke, and John. In fact, just this past Sunday, I came across a perfect example of this kind of Harmonysplaining of Mark.
In Mark 1 we are presented with the introduction to the Gospel and Jesus’ baptism. Mark, unlike Matthew, does not relate John the Baptists protestations. Mark, like Luke, gives a straightforward presentation of Jesus’ Baptism. Yet, this leaves the Commentators clutching their pearls in the dread fear that, perhaps, maybe, possibly, somehow, one might have the mistaken notion that Jesus somehow was sinful and was actually repenting of sins he may have committed! And so to dispel this notion, those commenting and those preaching rush to Matthew for evidence and proof that Jesus wasn’t a sinner and didn’t, in fact, need to be baptized, at all – as though anyone actually believes that Jesus NEEDED to do anything!
This kind of preaching and teaching is the kind of theological overreaction which has frustrated me for years, and actually UNDERMINES people’s confidence in the Bible. In the attempt to prevent any kind of Christological crisis, the commentators and educators dismiss the sufficiency of Mark and instead foist upon their congregations a false notion that the Gospel’s are not trustworthy and reliable accounts of the Good News in their own rights.
Indeed, while no one intentionally does this, the fear-driven response to come and rescue Mark with Matthew, leads people in the pews to ponder whether Mark really has anything to say?
And Evangelicals do this all the time. Instead of dealing with Soteriological tension when it appears in the Gospels, conservative preachers and teachers rush headlong into Paul to somehow prevent John and Luke from being heretics. So afraid are they that someone will think that salvation can be lost that they don’t allow the DIVINELY INSPIRED TEXT to say what it wishes to say. In their fear of falling into the ditch of Arianism or Legalism, Evangelicals deliberately choose to do a cannonball into the ditch of Biblical Imperspicuity. Basically, Matthew cannot be trusted to tell us what the Kingdom is – we need Paul to fix Matthew’s sloppy writing. Mark can’t be trusted to teach us Christology, we need Matthew to fix Mark’s incomplete narrative.
This is a deeply, though unconsciously, damaging philosophy!
And more troubling for those who hold to the Plenary Verbal Inspiration of the Bible – it is a slap in the face to the Holy Spirit and His ability to Inspire a text which is capable of teaching truth.
Thankfully, more and more preachers and teachers are attempting to show due deference to the 4 Gospels as independent works with integrity and coherence. Surely, the rise of Narrative Criticism is going to come with its own set of errors and over-corrections. And, certainly, we must never abandon the desire to systematize KNOWLEDGE. But if this new wave of scholarship is able to disabuse us of the notion that we need to systematize the NARRATIVES to get at true knowledge, we will be making a step towards undoing the errors of the past.
Let me clarify. We need to systematize KNOWLEDGE. But we do this by gaining what knowledge we can, first and foremost, from the Divinely Inspired works, as independent, coherent, and integrous works that deserve to be studied in their own rights as such. The knowledge gained from this first step allows to gather the requisite Biblical data which we can systematize into a Biblical Theology, which can later be systematized along with all other knowledge from all other sources, into a Systematic Theology.
What we don’t do is try to begin from our Systematic framework and use this to reinterpret the Biblical Text for the purpose of drawing the conclusion we wish. This is eisegesis. Or as Sherlock Holmes would say, we would be “twist[ing] facts to suit theories.”
In conclusion, if we really wish to treat the Biblical text with the dignity that it deserves, we need to stop rushing in to save it every time we think it’s in trouble. Mark omitted John’s protestation because Mark wants you to sit with that question of whether Jesus was a sinner or not (although all one has to do is read John the Baptist’s testimony about Messiah – and God the Father’s to have one’s fears allayed). Mark is a master of understatement and he has faith in his audience, that when the story is completed that they will understand that Jesus was sinless. Mark trusts us. Maybe it’s time pastors and scholars began trusting our audiences. Maybe it’s time we return the trust given us by the Biblical authors by trusting them to tell the story they wanted to tell the way they wanted to tell it.