Review for Restoration Quarterly

On occasion there appear books or articles which are truly ground-breaing or paradigm shifting. One thinks, for instance, of J. Louis Martyn’s History and Theology of the Fourth Gospel, or E. P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism. These books set the stage for subsequent scholarship, redirecting the emphasis and providing a fertile ground for research and argumentation. The collection of essays in The Gospels for All Christians, edited by Richard Bauckham, is in my opinion one of these foundational works. It will be cited and referred to extensively in the years to come because of the far-reaching implications of its simple thesis. It is a book every student of the gospels should read.

The heart of the book is contained in the lead essay by Bauckham, entitled "For Whom Were the Gospels Written?" The thesis of the article and book is that the gospels were intended for a universal audience and were in fact broadly distributed almost immediately.

The revolutionary aspect of this thesis must be seen against the virtually ubiquitous assumption of modern gospel scholarship. This assumption is that the gospels were written for, and often from within, fairly self-contained groups of Christians. One assumes, then, a geographical and social distance between the groups that produced distinctively different gospels, which are themselves, then, responses to the special situations that have arisen within each group. This was the thesis of B. H. Streeter, and it has maintained a major influence on gospel criticism since then.

One can see the influence the current view of gospel audience has had on a major strain of gospel criticism: the attempt to locate the meaning of the gospels in terms of understanding the special social circumstances within localized communities. Thus critics have sought to identify the local communities in which the gospels have arisen, and then used these reconstructed communities as a basis to understand the special contingencies and particularities that produced the gospels. Certainly the interest in social scientific criticism, not to mention the strong paradigm of Pauline studies, has helped to drive this approach.

Bauckham, however, raises serious questions about the whole enterprise. He begins by examining the basis for the assumptions and develops a history of recent gospel scholarship to support the view that this is a largely unexamined and uncritical starting point. He proceeds to question whether the assumption that the gospels were written in and for separate communities has been useful in providing a clearer picture of the purpose of the gospels. His overview of current scholarship raises serious questions about the usefulness of this approach – there is little consensus about the nature of the communities or the purpose of the gospels, a surprising result if the gospels were written for and in localized communities.

Bauckham proceeds in the latter part of his essay to develop cogent reasons to suppose that the gospels were indeed written for very broad audiences. I will briefly touch on two of these arguments. The first is that the very nature of written communication was most frequently to present information to individuals who were separated in time or distance from the writer. The primacy of oral communication in antiquity would tend to value speaking as the primary basis of transmitting information. Why would a gospel writer have written, then, to his or her own community? Bauckham concludes that it is more likely that gospel writers would have written to groups separated from the writers, not one’s own community. Secondly, Bauckham emphasizes the remarkable mobility of early Christian leaders, seen in Paul’s letters and the book of Acts. This mobility in the early church undercuts the importance of the localized and separate nature of Christian communities. Moreover, the mobility of early Christians would provide a ready means of communication and transmission of written documents over extensive geographical distance.

In addition to Bauckham’s lead essay, there are a number of significant supporting articles that are independently important, but which also undergird the major thesis of the book. Michael Thompson, in a chapter entitled "The Holy Internet," explores the nature of travel and communication in the first century church, and concludes that communication was extensive and relatively quick. The data on travel times in the first century alone is worth a close look. Loveday Alexander presents a very thoughtful article, "Ancient Book Production and the Gospels," on the nature of early book production and its relationship to the spread and transmission of texts. In particular, drawing heavily on Harry Gamble’s recent book, Books and Readers in the Early Church, Alexander examines the particular role of the codex in antiquity and its unique place in the early church. More importantly, Alexander notes the informal nature of much of early book production; books were often copied by individuals for private use, not "produced" in large quantities.

Richard Burridge, following his monograph which argues that the genre of the gospels is biography, explores whether the genre of biography assumes a broad audience instead of a private audience (i.e., the community of the author). Stephen Barton, in "Can We Identify Gospel Audiences?" raises a number of serious methodological concerns about the effort to locate from textual references the communities to which the gospels were written. In particular, he notes that the existing method of reading assumes a congruence between the gospel message and the community, that the gospel is never written to correct or oppose the sociological situation of the intended audience. Other essays include a second essay by Bauckham on the relationship of the gospels Mark and John, and one by Francis Watson which asserts that reading a gospel against a presumed community is a form of allegorical interpretation which is at root arbitrary.

This book does not prove that the gospels were written to a broad audience. It does, however, seriously challenge a strongly entrenched approach towards gospel interpretation. By questioning the consensus, Bauckham and his co-authors have challenged gospel critics to reexamine their presumptions, or to explore new approaches to reading the gospels. At the very least, this book will provoke extensive research and analysis. Hopefully, it will lead to significant new insights into the intended meaning of the gospels.

Mark A. Matson
Milligan College
Johnson City, TN