attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. As texts they grew within both oral and written traditions but were further refined by personal prayer and communal discussion. People walked from place to place thinking of the stories and sayings that later coalesced in the texts we know. As in the first moments after the Big Bang, the bits and pieces of the cosmos of the gospel were still in a disconnected and chaotic state in the early days of the Christian movement. By being told and retold they fell into shape and eventually into the form of the written texts we know. Each textual problem illustrates how a text represents the mind of a whole community for whom the individual is a channel. Such rich texts enshrine many levels of meaning of which the literal-historical is only one.
The gospels make explicit what was already implicit in the several oral traditions that developed in the first Christian generation. Although they are based on historical events they are not investigative journalism. How can we ever neatly separate different levels of meaning or draw a sharply defined line between the symbolic and the historical? Partly, at least, by not worrying about the inconsistencies between the four books. The gospels have a unity but they are not uniform nor were they intended to be. Their various strands cannot be unraveled without losing the whole pattern. Early modern scholars, like Strauss, Renan and Schweitzer, attempted to do just this. Their failure nevertheless helps to define our way of approaching the historical Jesus and the way the gospels were composed. Bultmann, the German biblical scholar, came to the conclusion, one largely accepted today, that a normal historical biography of Jesus cannot be conceived because historical or psychological biography was not what the gospel writers were about. Some modern scholars do claim that by the standards of their time the gospel writers were writing biographies. Nevertheless, for us, the great silent gaps in the early life of Jesus, the loss of the original contexts in which Jesus’ sayings were uttered and even of a sure chronology of events, all mean that we should not expect to read the gospels as normal biography.
A new book about Tolstoy means a reinterpretation of well-attested facts or the revelation of new facts or documents. Any book on Jesus adopts or adapts a position of faith not just an interpretation. The historical facts about Jesus that we can be sure of are important but they are principally interesting with regard to who we say he is. The insight into his identity is the first and foremost meaning of the gospels not just ‘what really happened’ in a journalistic or legalistic sense. What really happened in a spiritual sense, as in the case of the Resurrection precisely reveals who he really is. This means that we cannot talk about the identity of Jesus without in some way asserting or rejecting faith. The method of modern investigative reductionism is a rejection of faith. It leads to a profound misreading of texts which themselves are expressions of faith. If this sounds like saying that you can only fully understand what the gospels are and mean if you share their faith, that is what I am saying. How we respond to the redemptive question of Jesus determines how we read the gospels–and vice versa.
In 63 BC the Roman general Pompey strode sacrilegiously into the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem to find out what was at the heart of the Jewish religion that was causing him so much trouble. He expected to find a statue or cult object, some kind of visible mystery. He found nothing at all, merely a small empty room and left astounded and contemptuous. To invade the gospels with that kind of insensitivity will breed the same kind of insensitivity. To read them well we must also understand what we should not be looking for. Otherwise we will not see what is there, waiting silently for us to find.
Reading the gospels means more than studying and analysing them or performing textual surgery. But it also means more than making a cult object out of them and reading them with daft literalism. Another kind of reading is required: a prayerful reading. The monastic tradition called this method lectio divina.
One of the most ancient Christian ideas is based on this: lex orandi est lex credendi, the structure of prayer is the structure of belief. The way we believe is the way we pray. The quality and depth of prayer determines the quality and depth of our beliefs and therefore also of our way of living. For so many Christians the gospels, like prayer itself, have got stuck at a superficial cerebral level–the level of merely thinking about and speaking to God. Cerebral here does not mean highly intellectual. Getting stuck here encourages fantasy just as much as rational thought. As the experiential wellsprings of faith remained unopened in the training of most Christians, it is no wonder that their spiritual maturity is often so shallow. Even Christians trained in their religion from childhood have seldom read the gospels right through on their own. And few are encouraged, in school or parish, to pray in more than the way they learned as children, checking in with heaven from time to time to ask for favours or to assuage guilt. Without deeper spiritual development earlier, it is hardly surprising when the storms of adult life shake such faith to its roots.
Whether and how we read the gospels shapes how we believe, not only about Jesus but also about ourselves. Our way of reading the gospels is itself trained through a regular contemplative practice of prayer. If most Christians have to learn how to read their scriptures, most also have to discover that prayer is more than telling God what we want and flattering or bargaining with Him to get it. Like reading the gospels, to pray is a continuous education and training in faith. Prayer and lectio are not scientific methods or techniques but spiritual arts. Neither is an art that one perfects in a lifetime. They require regular practice and perseverance. They are delightful and challenging in themselves. But both demand the generous commitment needed for all learning: attention, discipline, detachment from preconceptions and prejudices, and openness. What are these gospels that we must learn to read prayerfully and that also teach us to pray?
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