The Words of Jesus in Our Gospels: A Catholic Response to Fundamentalism

Stanley Marrow packs a powerful punch in his brief tract: The Words of Jesus in Our Gospels: A Catholic Response to Fundamentalism. Many will expect a line-by-line rebuttal of why those who interpret the Bible in a fundamentalist, literal fashion misuse the holy text. That is not the means of Fr. Marrow. What Marrow does is to elegantly show that the Gospels are more meaningful, deeper and complex than what many regular church-goers believe. The gospels are not simple, compact biographies of the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, they aim to teach and to compel belief. There is far more theology than history, though that in no ways diminishes the critical truth of the man Jesus, nor the God who sent him. In Mark, the evangelist seeks to impart on the readers and his community that discipleship is a key component to following Christ. Written approximately forty years after the crucifixion, Christians must act on their beliefs in order to truly serve. Matthew and Luke borrow from the earlier tradition of Mark. Matthew makes heavier use of the Old Testament than any other gospel, carefully stressing the Jewishness of Jesus. Many believe Matthew was written specifically for Jewish converts to Christianity. This longest gospel has traditionally been a favorite of the Church and it is probably the most complex of the synoptic gospels. Luke is a gospel for the downtrodden. The women, the poor, the Samaritans and the sick. There is also a stronger historical element than in the other gospels, evidenced from the start by the painstaking record in which Luke opens his story. Luke goes farther than the other gospel-writers with a second volume, known as Acts. The Luke-Acts gospel must be taken and understood as a whole, as they were written. John is the most unusual of the four. From its fascinating prologue to its use of language, there is no more debated book in the New Testament than this. Not only is Jesus God, but he was God from the very beginning. The latest of the gospels has a pronounced christology and stresses life, light, faith and flesh. It is often viewed as a polemic against gnosticism and docetism, early Church heresies. Marrow is not interested in destroying anyone's faith, but strengthening and deepening understanding of scripture. The conflict can be summarized as such: Did God use the evangelists who penned the gospels as hollow vessels or did He grant them real power to shape the message? Should literary and historical criticism be employed as tool for understanding the gospels, or should context be eliminated in understanding what some say is a blow-by-blow account of the historical Jesus? Marrow's response to fundamentalism is clear, convincing and well-informed.