The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences

by Richard Bauckham

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 1998

Overview

This volume challenges the current consensus in New Testament scholarship that each of the Gospels was written for a specific church or group of churches. These essays argue, from a wide range of evidence, that the Gospels were intended for general circulation throughout all the early churches and, hence, were written for all Christians.

Richard Bauckham, Michael B. Thompson, Loveday Alexander, Richard A. Burridge, Stephen C. Barton, and Francis Watson examine such topics as the extent of communication between early Christian churches, book production and circulation in the Graeco-Roman world, the Gospel genre and its audience, the relationships between the Gospels, the faulty enterprise of reconstructing Gospel communities, and the hermeneutical and theological pitfalls of reading the Gospels as community texts. By putting in question a large body of assumptions that are almost universally accepted in contemporary scholarship, this book could fundamentally change both the method and the findings of Gospel interpretation.

Key Features

• Interacts with current New Testament scholarship
• Provides evidence that the Gospels were written for general circulation
• Examines the nature of early Christian communities

Contents

• For Whom Were Gospels Written?
• The Holy Internet: Communication Between Churches in the First Christian Generation
• Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels
• About People, by People, for People: Gospel Genre and Audiences
• John for Readers of Mark
• Can We Identify the Gospel Audiences?
• Toward a Literal Reading of the Gospels

Top Highlights

“This chapter has proposed, not merely that the implied audience of a Gospel is larger than the current consensus allows, but that it is indefinite rather than specific.” (Page 46)

“The aim of this book is to challenge and to refute the current consensus in Gospels scholarship which assumes that each of the Gospels was written for a specific church or group of churches: the so-called Matthean community, Markan community, Lukan community, and Johannine community.” (Page 1)

“Third, we should note that most of the Christian leaders of whom we know in the New Testament period moved around.” (Page 33)

“One of these questions is: Were Gospels written for Christians or for non-Christians?” (Page 9)

“There is, of course, a perfectly obvious alternative possibility: that an evangelist writing a Gospel expected his work to circulate widely among the churches, had no particular Christian audience in view, but envisaged as his audience any church (or any church in which Greek was understood) to which his work might find its way.” (Page 11)

Contributors

• Richard Bauckham
• Michael B. Thompson
• Loveday Alexander
• Richard A. Burridge
• Stephen C. Barton
• Francis Watson

Endorsements

This is a wonderful book, a bombshell in the playground of New Testament study. In writing on interpretation I have felt vaguely uneasy about the notion that the unmentioned specific congregation is of key importance to understanding Gospel narrative, but I lacked the imaginative spark to query this universal ‘given.’ Now Richard Bauckham and his friends have called the bluff. ‘Obvious’ after ‘obvious’ point (for instance, Gospels are different from Epistles; why should anyone write a narrative for their own congregation?) draws forth a grin, a ‘Yes,’ and a punch into the air from the reader. They also tell us lots of fascinating things about the real world in which the Gospels were written and disseminated, and point out some of the presuppositions of the consensus they explode and the significance of the case they press. I look forward to watching the fallout.

—John Goldingay

Not many books on the canonical Gospels are truly groundbreaking, but this one is. Richard Bauckham and his colleagues convincingly challenge one of the most deeply rooted assumptions of contempoary scholarship, namely, that the Gospels were written out of and for fairly restrictive early communities that enjoyed relatively little contact with the whole church. This book persuasively argues that both in intent and in reality the Gospels were written for ‘all Christians.’ It deserves the widest possible circulation among pastors, students, and scholars alike, and it promises to revamp more than one shibboleth.

—D. A. Carson

Unexamined assumptions are the bane of Gospel criticism. In this easily accessible, very readable symposium a group of leading scholars argues against the assumption that the Gospels were written for specific communities and reasserts that they were meant for reading by Christians everywhere. This thesis has important implications for the fashionable pursuit of reconstructing the readerships of the Gospels and then trying to explain the Gospels’ contents in terms of their readers’ needs; the way back to taking the Gospels seriously as biographies of Jesus is freed from yet another obstacle. This is a major work that could seriously alter the character of contemporary Gospel study for the better.

—I. Howard Marshall

Product Details

• Title: The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences
• Author: Richard Bauckham
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 1998
• Logos Release Date: 2020
• Pages: 220
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subjects: Bible. N.T. Gospels › Social scientific criticism; Sociology, Christian › History--Early church, ca. 30-600
• ISBNs: 9780802844446, 9780567085979, 0802844448, 056708597X
• Resource ID: LLS:GSPLSLLGSPLDNCS
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T00:25:40Z

About Richard Bauckham

Richard Bauckham (1946– ) was professor of New Testament studies at St Mary's College, University of St Andrews. He retired in 2007 from this position in order to concentrate on research and writing. He currently is the senior scholar at Ridley Hall in Cambridge and visiting professor at St. Mellitus College.

Bauckham earned a PhD at the University of Cambridge and was a fellow of St John's College. He taught theology for one year at the University of Leeds and for 15 years at the University of Manchester before teaching at the University of St Andrews. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Bauckham is known for his commentary on Jude and 2 Peter in the Word Biblical Commentary and his book Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church.