Why Four Gospels?

I applaud Professor David Black for holding his own against the grain of "scholarly" source and form criticism of the gospels. Black's thesis and presentation truly lifts the spirits of those who have felt uneasy with the nonsensical explanations of how the gospels developed that are so popular among New Testament scholars. Black identifies the trend among scholars who approach the New Testament and especially the gospels with a dogmatic presupposition that any explanation other than what the Church Fathers, early church, church tradition and faithful Christians have believed and passed down is to be preferred regardless of its unsubstantiated speculation, lack of logic and rejection of historical context. Here Black gives the patristic Fathers their due credit in validating the gospel origins. Irenaeus, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, Tertullian, Augustine, Justin, Jerome are all cited by Black in support of his thesis that Matthew was the first gospel written amidst the Jerusalem church during the apostolic era, Luke's gospel followed at the behest of Paul as a gospel to the Greek Christians, Mark was written as a record of Peter's oral narration using Matthew and Luke and Peter's elaborations, and John authored his gospel to give his account of Jesus' ministry, teachings and claims. Black does not have to ignore loopholes, reject early church writers, make leaps of conjecture, rely on speculative form/source criticism or a fictional document (i.e. "Q" or "L"). His theory fits perfectly into the historical expansion of the church, the teachings of the apostles and 2nd & 3rd generation church leaders. His theory supports the acceptance of the four gospels and the rejection of the pseudographic and gnostic gospels by the church. This I think is the theory that an objective, faithful study of the gospel origins leads one to accept. I applaud Professor Black's work. This is a book written for a lay audience but welcome to professional scholars and theologians who have not felt comfortable with the tenuous theories put forth among academia since the Enlightenment eschewed the supernatural and ignored church Fathers and tradition as being irrelevant.

I picked up this book because it was mentioned by bestselling author Anne Rice in her book "Christ The Lord: Out of Egypt." Rice is well-known for the extreme accuracy and rigorous research of her historical fiction work. After many years of writing popular books, and having rejected her Catholic faith at 18, Rice decided to tackle the character of Jesus. She began to sift through stacks of scholarly literature about the historical Jesus, ranging from claims he never existed to "Q" theory to traditional church views of Jesus. Her initial bias was to reject orthodox interpretations. But as a historian she was shocked at the shoddiness and hubris of many of the liberal arguments, and their unmasked contempt for Jesus himself. Ultimately she decided the view taken by the church fathers made the most sense by far. This book earned a spot on her "A List" of historical Jesus analysis. Having read it, I now know why. There is nothing more elegant than a SIMPLE explanation that corresponds with known facts. Ockham's razor: The least complex, most economical explanation is the best explanation. Allow me to summarize some of the author's core arguments in my own words: -Matthew was written first, Luke was written second, and Mark is a transcript of Peter's sermons in Rome, in which he alternates between sections of Matthew and Luke, adding bits of his own perspective as he goes. Black re-assembles these pieces with ease. -The gospels had to have been written before 70AD, because they only obliquely refer to the destruction of Jerusalem (i.e. Jesus' prophesies about no stone being left upon another). If Jerusalem had been destroyed before the gospels were written, those oblique references would be equivalent to a historian in Hiroshima or Nagasaki in 1950 never explicitly mentioning the atomic bomb. Unthinkable. -Contrast this with the writers' descriptions of Judas, who is usually introduced as the disciple who betrayed Him. Had the gospels been written post-70AD, surely somewhere Jerusalem would be described as the city that was destroyed and the temple as the building which is now demolished. -"The Fourfold-Gospel Hypothesis needs no hypothetical documents to support it, nor any restrictions." -It is fully supported by the church fathers and the other known historical documents -It can easily be made to fit all the available evidence -The Q theory cannot be made to fit all the available evidence -Q theory is "built upon a deliberate and a priori rejection of the ancient Patristic evidence and the denial of any suggestion of a direct connection between the apostles and the Gospel writings..." -"The Markan priority hypothesis is based on a number of dubious assumptions, for example, that things are not as the fathers perceived them; that Matthew and Luke are, despite appearances, secondary to Mark; and that the hypothetical source Q was a vitally important document in the first fifty years after the resurrection but was lost through shocking

Professor Black gives the reader a short historical introduction to the origins of the Gospels. By historical, I mean a survey of the evidence of the church father's writings. While these works themselves are not inspired, they do paint a pretty consistent picture about the order of the Gospels according to Black. The first chapter is a survey of sorts, where little evidence is given. The next sections defend why he claims the books were written in the order he selects. The final chapter is a massive summary of sorts, proposing almost a CSI-style assembly of the puzzle via historical events. What I found most interesting is the simplicity of the arguments. I for one do not believe the textual arguments of the so-called Markian Priority position (ie Mark came first), because all of the arguments I see are reversible and don't prove anything. The order he presents makes perfect sense in light of the historical arguments he proposes. Of course we may never know the exact order, but Professor Black makes a pretty good case in a short amount of space. He doesn't really talk about textual criticism, so for that information I would look elsewhere. Why Four Gospels presents an alternative view to the main opinion of scholars, and comes with a massive bibliography. The book will give you confidence that we have all of the Gospels God intended for us to have. And he tells a great story about how the gospels came together in the Canon and gives us a great book for spring-boarding into the synoptic problem.