Okay, we're live. How does William Ramsey Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on today's show. I have a returning guest, Professor Darryl L.
Boch.
We talked back in July twenty second, twenty twenty one about a book he just published recently titled Cultural Intelligence, Living for God in a Diverse, pluralistic World. But today we're going to talk about a book, a second edition that he published in twenty seventeen titled Jesus according to Scripture, Restoring the Portrait from the Gospels, very detailed scholarly inquiry into kind of early church and how the Gospels were
put together. But doctor Bach has earned recognition as a Humboldt Scholar from Tubajin University in Germany and is the author of over forty books, including well regarded commentaries on Luke and Axe and studies of the historical Jesus, and
work in cultural engagement. As host of the Seminary's Table podcasts, he was President of the Evangelical Theological Society from two thousand to two thousand and one, writes for the Christianity Today's Places and Space series, and serves on the boards of Wheaton College, Chosen People Ministries, the Institute for Global Engagement, and Christians in Public Service. His articles appear in leading publications.
He's often an expert on the media in New Testament issues, and doctor Bock has been a New York Times bestselling author and non fiction and is Elder emeritus at Trinity Fellowship Church in Dallas. And you can see kind of a list of his books that I included in my earlier interview with him in July. So I suggest people go back and listen to again. That book is Cultural Intelligence, but this one is Jesus according to Scripture, restoring the portrait from the Gospel. So doctor Darryl L.
Bacher, there I am in good day.
Yeah, good day to you. Thanks for returning, and for people who may not have caught the earlier interview that we did, can you talk all about culture Intelligence and also what led you conduct to write or re edit this book Jesus according.
To script Yeah. Well, cultural Intelligence is a short theology of cultural engagement, and it really makes the argument that considered biblically, the way we have gone about cultural engagement in the church is not properly biblically aligned. As a result, we're doing as much damage as we are good in
the effort. And so it's an attempt to explain why that is and to really correct a misdirection that we have, particularly with regard to the tone of the way we engage in the way in which we look at issues. And so that book is about a year old, and it's been out and I've literally been speaking around the country on it in the last year. Jesus according to Scripture was originally a bigger book, I believe it or not, in that when we did the second edition, we split
it into two parts. Jesus according to Scripture, which works through every gospel passage in all four Gospels in detail, with an event, even if it's reed, being examined in its gospel context each time it appears. And then the second book is called Jesus God Man, which puts everything that's in the Gospels together in one place and kind of does a short here's the theological emphasies that come out of the gospels when you work with them altogether.
I'm trying to do two things. I'm trying, on the one hand, to show what is consistent across the gospels, and yet at the same time show is what is distinct within them at the same time, because normally what people do when they read the Gospels, particular, if they're reading the same event between the gospels, they make what I call gospels stew. They bring out the pot, they pour a little bit of Matthew, a little bit of Mark, and a little bit of Luke in its stir fry
and deliver. And part of the point that I'm trying to make is that each story has its emphasis, and appreciating that emphasis means that what the way Luke may do it and the way Matthew or Mark may do it may be different enough to appreciate what those differences are at the same time. Now, in saying that, I'm not saying the difference is something that's in contradiction. But they actually compliment one another in their portraits, and they
help to fill out who Jesus is. So I like to make the analogy it's like listening to Jesus in quadrophonic sound. Each speaker is doing its own thing with Jesus, and the mixture also works. So that's that's the point of the approach of the book.
Right, And some people believe that if they're not telling the same story. They're contradicting each other. So you see that alternate kind of view of the early Gospels in your introduction, I mean you actually talk about the four corners of the Earth kind of like the four Gospels. Can you describe to people what the Synoptic Gospels are, how John is different, and where they're where they think they came from.
Yeah, well, the Synoptic Gospels. Synoptic is actually made up of two Greek words, one of which we recognize, the word optic. I mean you go to an optometrist to get your eyes looked at. So the word soon means together. So these are gospels that can be seen together. They fit together because they overlap so much. That's Matthew, Mark and Luke. Matthew Mark and Luke are the Synoptic Gospels.
And when people say Synoptic Gospels, it's a shorthand for not having go on and say, well, I'm talking about Matthew Mark and Luke. John is viewed on its own.
And part of this has to do with the way at least it's the argument of the book is that the Synoptic Gospels tend to tell the story of Jesus from the Earth up They start with categories that we're mostly used to, with the virgin birth being a little bit of an exception, telling you something unusual is going on, and then you watch it dawn on people who Jesus is. Because the challenge of Jesus, of course, is these most
unique human being who's ever walked the earth. He is one in a gazillion, and a gazillion's a big number. My point is is that no one combines divinity and humanity and this person like Jesus did, and so that makes him completely exceptional in one sense. One of the challenges of the church is how to communicate that to somebody that Jesus is a human being different than the human being has ever walked the earth. And then the
second John does it either way around. John just says the synopsis from the Earth up, John is from Heaven down. So John opens in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This is CNN. I mean from the very first verse, you know what John's thesis point is and where he's taking you. He doesn't develop it or hide it. It's
right there up front. And the other point of the book is to argue that the Church is used to the second version of the Jesus story, the John version of Jesus story. We like John because John does all our heavy lifting for us. But most people who come to Jesus, in fact, everyone who comes to Jesus comes to Jesus through the first means of the synoptics. We all have to have who Jesus is explained to us
and his uniqueness explained us. No one is born gets the swat of life and goes when when when Jesus is the sac of person, the ontological trinity, When when no one starts off with that understanding of Jesus, they have to have someone explain the uniqueness of Jesus to them. And part of the premise of the book is to argue the church needs to learn how to retell the story of Jesus in that first form, in that earth up form, which actually connects with what people need when
they hear about Jesus. And we tend to do it in that second form, in the Johanna in form. And when we do that, we are asking, actually asking people to leap over tall theological buildings in a single bound. And so that's probably not the best way to think about how to present Jesus, right.
And I mean you go into detail about the origins, the orality, and the written stuff. You mentioned the name I'd never heard of, poppy Us. Can you kind of talk about how the genesis of the Gospels took place?
Yeah, the news section in the second edition is about all that. It's the stuff that people never think about in asking how do we get the Gospels? Now? The reason we don't tend not to think about it, if we're conservative Christians is is that we tend to just put it all under the idea of well, God inspired the Word, so God is responsible for the production of the Gospels. But there actually was a social, historical, cultural environment in which the Gospels were nurtured, and we take
a pretty close look at that. So I'm looking at things what I call minding the gap. There's a gap between the time the events took place and the time they were recorded in the Gospel about thirty to sixty years thirty years generally speaking for the Synoptics, sixty years
for the Gospel of John. And then what skeptics do as they say, look, we've got this sixty year gap in which nothing's written down the stories are circulating orally, they can be played with and what you end up with is not necessarily what you had at the beginning, And so they exploit that gap. This is why I
call it minding the gap. And so we go through a great detailed explanation of how orality worked, thinking about issues tied to memory and the way memory has been studied, acknowledging the fact that in most cases, when we have memory, particularly from long ago, memory can leak. So how do you deal with that. The way you remember things twenty or thirty years down the road isn't necessarily the way
you would have remembered it at the time. That kind of thing, This has been studied, and we go through those studies and wrestle with those questions, and we talk about things like the Apostolic oversight of the Gospels and the way the tradition was handled orally, the fact that Jews had experience with handling oral things when they wanted to preserve memory, that kind of thing, and we go
through that space. So how does Papiis check in? Well, he checks in because he tells us certain things about the origins of the Gospel. Perhaps the most important thing that he tells us is that Mark was very closely tied to Peter. And because Mark is generally regarded by scholars as the first Gospel written, the quality of the tradition that we see encapsulated in Mark becomes very important for thinking through the historical roots of the gospels and
where they come from. And Papius is very clear that Mark wrote down his gospel having heard Peter's preaching, which is important and so and it suggests the Apostolic roots of the gospel tradition. Two of the Gospels are attributed primarily to people who are Apostolic figures, Matthew and John. Mark has this close relationship with Peter and is very very aware of the early church tradition because he hung out with all of them. So it's a very very
important set of features that we're talking about. And another thing about the tradition that's important is the tradition stays honest. And here's what I mean. For example, with the Gospel of Mark. In the tradition, there's a very tight association with Peter, and skeptics will like to argue that we really don't know who the authors of the gospels are. They just attributed names to them. That would raise their stature. But if that's the case, the Gospel of Mark should
be called the Gospel of Peter. But it isn't. I mean, if you had a choice between raising the statue of a gospel whose authorship you supposedly don't know, and you had a choice between attributing that gospel to Mark, about whom we know now almost next to nothing besides the fact that he wrote this gospel, we know where he is from and that's about it. Or Peter, you know, who kind of was one of the big boys in the twelve the fault. This should have been called the
Gospel of Peter, but it wasn't. It was called the Gospel of Mark because the tradition was careful about attributing the authorship to whom the authorship belonged. And so that's a very very important idea as well.
Yeah, at the very beginning, so you see that, and you mentioned that Luken prologue too, So all these things are being verified. But the oral it's interesting that they called the gospels the memoirs before they became the.
Gospels, that's right.
So they're talking like about these things as their memories, the first memories, and that you're right in that tradition, the Rabbinic tradition that came after, or even the kind of Jewish tradition. The oral history and you talk about the historiographical context of even the Greeks too, all were very orally focused. Memory and stuff like that was much different back then.
Than Yeah, you have to remember that. I mean, we've been through at least two major technological innovation since the time of the first century. The first was the creation of the book. Well, actually I make it three. Yeah. First of all, you have papyrus and the way you wrote things down. I like to tease people that a second century Bible church didn't operate the way the Bible Church works today because no one was carrying a New
Testament in their back pocket. In the second century. It was all done by scrolls and it was recorded, and that represented the first shift from oral culture to a written culture. And the belief of the ancients was you were much better hearing the testimony of a live witness orally than you were reading something written down. That's an
important idea. In fact, one of the reasons why the Gospels take so long to be written is you still had live witnesses to the events, and you didn't start recording your gospel until people who had the direct experience began to die off because youral culture couldn't apply anymore. And so there's that element of what's going on as well.
So all this is important in setting the background. The Second Revolution, of course, was the book next to the pyrus, next to the scroll, and then the Third Revolution is of course our digital age today with ebooks and that kind of thing. Well, every one of those subsequent revolutions is designed to I'm going to point a word here, or somewhat point a word of context, fossilize a text, Okay. The moment you put it on a scroll or put it in a book or digitize it, the text becomes frozen, okay.
Orality allows you to tell a story, develop it, elaborate on it, etc. And it was the normal way people passed on information in the ancient world because books were not at all that common.
So I like it.
Whenever I lecture on this, I begin in the beginning there was orality. You know that there weren't books. In the beginning, there were no books or very few, and it was very expensive to do. So all of this indicates some of the cultural dynamics that are work, that are responsible production of our.
Gospels, right, I mean, And you can even use Christ as an example of a very good memory, and you actually say he probably repeated some of his stories in different places, so his own memory was retelling these stories and then passing through almost kind of seating that environment. Yeah.
One of the things that we do in the book is to walk people through thinking through this orality thing, because the impression is you have the event and then thirty to sixty years later they wrote it down. Well, no, that isn't what's going on at all. These stories are being repeated in churches, they're being told and retold, etc. When I lecture on this, I tell the story of how my grandkids, before they could ever read or write, were big Star Wars fans, and they watched Star Wars
over and over and over again. They heard the story over and over and over again. When my kids were little, I used to read Bible stories to them and they would hear the story over and over and over again because they liked the story and they like to have the story read to them at night. So when I was a dad reading the story, I would say, sometimes have fun because you know, reading the same story over and over and over again, it's a parent is not
exactly an exercise in thrilling joy and stimulation. You know, you're doing it because you love your kids. And I would sometimes change the story to see if they were with me. Well, the moment I did that, I got a very consistent reaction, Daddy, that's not how the story goes. And it wasn't said Daddy, that's not how the story goes. It was always often said, with some emotion, Daddy, that's not how the story goes. And then they would even take the next step and tell me how it goes,
you know, because they had heard it so much. So this idea of the way a reality functions, the repetition of the stories, the repeating of what goes on, the fact that you had multiple witnesses to these events who were feeding into the tradition. All those things are at work that make the tradition different than the simple impression that you get, Oh, there was an event that happened and someone sat down and remembered it thirty or sixty years later.
Right, And now you make an interesting point. I think it's in chapter three too, that the model of the relationship between Christ and his disciples was formal, so they're drinking in all that knowledge too, and I think it was the scholar ger Hertzen said it was like a collegium, or could have been a collegium. So they're intentionally listening, like in a form or something like that classical knowledge, so they're remembering and that gets passed on.
One of the reasons you have the twelve is because they are supposed to be instructed in what this instruction about the kingdom is supposed to be about. And so the whole point of the exercising part was that they were to oversee this tradition that eventually came out of it, which is why when Judas gets replaced in the first chapter of Acts, you have someone who's been with us
from the very beginning. You're looking for someone who really knows the whole story, who has, if I can put it in sociological terms, who has institutional knowledge about what it is that Jesus taught and in that context then reassure about what's going on. And so the part of the role of being an apostle was to be instructed in this teaching and to have been with Jesus for three years. There are two points I like to make
about this. First is to remember that we actually don't have anything directly written to us by Jesus himself, so everything's mediated that we receive. That's the first point. And I actually was in a forum at the University of Michigan with a professor talking about this historiographically with graduate students, in which he was making this point, we don't have anything directed from Jesus. How can we be sure that what we have about Jesus is actually reflective of him?
It's a good question, it's a fair question. And so so I turned to the to the to the seminar discussion we were having. It just happened. He happened to have twelve students in the room, and so I said, you have these twelve students, most of them are taking doctoral courses. They're going to be with you for three years.
Do you think after those three years being with you in class after class they can talk about what you taught And just left the question there for them to ponder, So, you know, So that's that's the scenario that we're talking about people who are deeply, not just casually acquainted with Jesus, the people who are deeply immersed in what it was he was doing and saying.
Right, following him around, being with him daily. There's all the sastratories through the gospels.
Yeah, this wasn't This wasn't a nine to ten nine o'clock to ten twenty five class on a Tuesday Thursday. You know, this was this was life immersion that we're talking about.
And I think it's important too, because, at least in my life, you just hear all of these criticisms and context that these gospels came up out of nowhere, and this book really refutes those over and over again with so many examples of morality collegium. So it's really a fantastic introduction. And then you kind of move through and
start talking. You've talked a little bit on the intro about the gospels, but can you kind of just go in in deeper before you kind of get into the text of the gospels.
Yeah. Sure. The main thing to realize is this earth up versus heaven down picture that I'm trying to use, and what you see in the Synoptic Gospels. You watch it dawn on people who Jesus is, you know, so he calms the winds and the waves. And how does that passage close, Well, it closes by saying this who's able to command the winds and the waves and they obey? And I like to talk a lot about, at least when I speak on this orally, I talk about what
are called cultural scripts. Cultural scripts are things that are built into the understanding of the text because the person writing and the person reading share the culture. So, for example, I'll give an example of a modern cultural script that cowboys are going up to the frozen tundra to meet the cheeseheads, to beat the cheeseheads. Okay, Now if I ask thk you what that sentence is about, and you're culturally aware, okay, then you will go. You just talked
to me about American football. The Dallas Cowboys went up to Wisconsin to meet the Green Bay Packers, And I know all that from that sentence, and yet the word American football is nowhere in that sentence. Okay, So how do you know that's about American football? You know that's about American football because you're triangulating cultural clues, cultural scripts that are embedded in the text that send that signal
to you. And so you're able in shorthand to say what I summarized in about three or four sentences in one sentence because of the cultural scripts that are embedded in it in your understanding of them. Now, if I gave that sentence to someone learning English in Saudi Arabia and said, here's a perfectly good in English sentence and
here's a dictionary. Tell me what this sentence means, they would have no clue, okay, unless they had some acquaintance with American culture that I would look up all the words and all the meanings and go, how in the world does that sentence fit together? What in the world is that? That's a bunch of gobblybook, you know, you know. An example of the reverse experience would be Ian Botham march to the crease to defend the ashes on behalf
of the Queen. Okay, that's a perfectly wonderful sentence about cricket. The test match is at between Australia and England is called the ashes. Ian Botham was the captain of the English cricket team when I was doing doctoral work in Scotland. That kind of thing, again, perfectly good English sentence, but you have no clue what it is if you don't share the culture and thus can recognize the cultural scripts
that are embedded within it. And my argument is the Gospels work with cultural scripts, and if you don't understand what's embedded in what's being said, you're going to miss some of what's being said. So let's go back to the example that I use. He's able to calm the winds and the waves and they obey it. Well, the cultural script in there is God's in control of the creation. Okay, this wasn't a case of a miracle. This wasn't a case of Jesus praying to God and asking the winds
to stop. This wasn't a case of Moses tapping a rock with an object and asking God to do, you know, to bring water from the rock. That is what's going Jesus speaks directly to the creation, and the creation responds, and so that triggers the question about who Jesus is. In another Gampo cultural script is the healing of the paralytic. Okay, they dropped the guy who wants to walk in front of him. Jesus doesn't deal with his walking initially, he
deals with his spiritual condition. He says, your sins are forgiven. Now that's interesting because in one sense it's easy to say your sins of forgiven. William, I could look at you and say, you know, you look like a wonderful guy, but I'm really worried about what your soul's like. So I'm going to declare your sins forgiven. Now. Do you feel any better after I say that to you? No, because I don't have that authority. Okay, it's a nice thing to say, but it doesn't do anything for you.
So Jesus says, Jesus says, your sins are forgiven. The paralytics sitting there going, well, that isn't why I crash this party, that's not why I'm here. I want to walk. Meanwhile, the theologians in the room get what's going on. They get the script that's being evoked, because they go, no one can forgive sins but God alone. And so the gospel writers tell us the cultural script that's being evoked by what it is that Jesus is doing. And then what does Jesus say. What's easier to say your sins
are forgiven? Or get up and walk? Which is actually a trick question because in one sense it's easier to say your sins are forgiven because you can't see it. Okay, no one's seen forgiveness of sins. Okay, it isn't a part of the material world in the way that we think about it. Okay. But if I say to a paralytic get up and walk, it's showtime. Something's got to happen.
So what Jesus does is then he turns the guy and he says, in order that you might know that the son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, I say to you, get up and walk. He links something that you can't see to something that you can see to show his authority to do something that only God has the authority to do because of the cultural script in the passage, and all of a sudden, the
full force of what Jesus is doing comes forward. And these are little bricks in the chrystological wall to indicate to you the portrait of who Jesus is. And that's what that's how the Gospels work in many of their passages. In many cases, they don't talk about who Jesus is. They show who Jesus is, and they show who Jesus is through these cultural scripts that are the commentary on what is going on.
Right, and so those cultural scripts are the history of Judaism and kind of the culture leading the.
World, the worldview and the understanding that they have in the world, which that which is being accepted and played upon as Jesus is acting because he's he's you know, he's revealing actions and reflecting a theology that exists that's coming out of Judaism, right, fascinating.
So you see that kind of revelation on the Synoptic Gospel slowly to the end. The inversion is John, what other kind of elements do you I mean you start off, do you want to go forward and tosk start in the context of your book like the birth of Jesus Jesus according to the Synoptists, or.
Yeah, what we did in the book. What we did in the book is to go through. Now, we did something that the Gospels don't do. If I were if I were to read the book today, I'd still have this choice, and that would be I could simply go through the gospels and sequence one after another and tell the stories, and I could have I could have structured it that way. So here, here's Mark, here's Matthew here's Mark, here's Luke, and here's Joan, and just go through the
stories and sequence. And I could rearrange all the units that I have in the book and just do it in the sequence that they come in in each gospel. I could have done it that way. Instead, what I did was to take the structure of what's called a synopsis. A synopsis, and a synopsis is not making chronological judgments. It's just making literary sequential judgments about how the three gospels synoptic gospels relate to each other. And I went through.
I went through the gospels in that sequence. So we started with the empacy material juxtaposed, you know, the sequencing that's likely between what's going on in Mark and what's going on in Luke. Then we went to Jesus's ministry and John the Baptist, and then the Galilean section and the journey to Jerusalem, and went through those in supposed potential sequences for what's going on based on the literary structure of the various gospels. Then finally we come to Jerusalem.
We structured the Passion week accordingly et cetera, and we met, we meshed Matthew, Mark and Luke together, but always in a way. If the two gospels had a different placement for a story or told it in a slightly different way, that contribution of a particular gospel would be highlighted at least in one of those retellings. So I'm doing a lot of stuff all at once, is the point here.
And the book in some ways isn't designed to be so much a book that you read through in sequence, although you can do that as a resource that you use depending on where you are in the Gospels and what you want to know about it.
Right, So then you can see those little variations in each sequence you have, and.
We've play a great deal of attention to those variations. We spend a lot of time thinking through why did Matthew say it this way and Mark say it that way? That kind of thing, and to really detail that out.
Do you have, like any specific examples of those variances in the synoptics that come to mind that you find the most interesting?
Yeah, well, okay, so let's do one that's pretty famous when you have Jesus healing the centurion slave. Okay, in Matthew the centurion in Jesus have a direct conversation with each other. In Luke, the centurion in Jesus never talked to each other face to face. It's all done through emissaries. How the world does that work? Okay? I mean that's
that's two very different portraits of what's going on. Well, there's a cultural script embedded in that text, which is that if I send someone in my name to represent me what's called a shaliah, then even though they're speaking, it's as good as my speaking. Okay, I'm being represented by them, much like the way we would say a press secretary represents the White House. Okay. So what you get in Matthew and Matthew tends to do this. He tends to simplify his stories and in some cases compact them.
And so in this more compact version, Matthew is simply interested in the fact that the centurion in Jesus had a exchange of ideas, okay, and he leaves the emissaries out okay. In the Luke And version. One of the important themes in Luke Ax is how how God has brought you in gentile together, and so we have we
have Jewish emissaries representing a gentile soldier. So that's an important detail to put together, and in putting that detail together, all of a sudden, Luke's able to make an additional point besides what happened within the event, Oh, Jesus held healed the centurion son, and the centurion had a faith that was really unprecedented in Israel for the way he trusted, for how Jesus did this to and look at how Jews and Gentiles can get along, okay, And he can
put that next to next to the portrait. So that's an example of a difference in which each author is doing, is trying to bring something to the portrait that the other author might not have noted.
Was there anything in your research when the Synoptic or even the Gospels were made that they knew of the other stories? Did you ever get that? I didn't understand. But what I mean by that question is Matthew, Mark and Luke. Do you think that those variations are because they saw this story and Mark and Luke made it different, Like my understanding of Luke is a little bit more of a personal account of the Lord than maybe the other ones were. Christ is interacting with people in more ways.
Do you think those variations are intentional? Does that make sense?
Well? The variations maybe just strictly a function of personality. But having said that, if you're asking generally speaking in New Testament, let's us get discussed. And it's been in and the history of this discussion is long and complex, but today most scholars think that Mark is the first Gospel that was written, and that Matthew and Luke knew Mark. Okay,
then after that the discussion begins. Now, there is an older form of this that sees Matthew's being the first gospel and Mark coming at the end later on in one way or another. But my own view is is that Mark's likely to be the first gospel. Just look at the infancy material between Jesus, between Matthew and Luke,
and there's very little overlap between those two. So it's hard for me to believe that if Luke knew Matthew, he wouldn't have had more of the Mathean infancy content in his own infancy story, okay, because you either have to believe that he knew it and made a choice not to mention any of that other fact that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and to totally ignore that, or they wrote their stories separate from one another and they
don't know each other, okay. And then what that does then is that there are about two hundred and twenty five verses of Jesus's teaching that lap uniquely between Matthew and Luke, okay o. Those of that material, a quarter of it's almost verbatim, a quarter another significant percentage is paraphrastically agreed, and then there's a small percentage of it where there's enough difference that people wonder whether that's part of the collection that Luke and Matthew shared. And so
this shared teaching and it's mostly teaching. This shared teaching has been called by scholars ques for the German word quella for source. It's a teaching anthology that was circulating through the church, either in written form or in oral form. We don't know which, maybe even a mix because of the variations that we do see. And so most people think that Matthew wrote aware of Mark and Q, and Luke wrote with an awareness of Mark and Q. And then Matthew had his own set of information that he
uniquely had. Of course, as an apostle he could do that, and Luke had a set of information that he uniquely had. As a result, of his research, and thus you get the differences between those three gospels with all them knowing Mark. Now, those who believe that Matthew be came first have a different way of putting that together. But I think that the more likely scenario is Mark was the first gospel, and we're dealing with with the tradition structures in the way I've just described.
Really fascinating, I mean, it is It is remarkable that all that information was was being still bandied about. And I think there was a kind of a an issue as to why Paul's letters don't reflect so much of the God, Like why didn't he reference the gospels in detail? Can you talk about that?
Yeah, I think it's because he doesn't reference to the gospel teaching gospels in detail. On fact, he only alludes clearly. He alludes clearly to an understanding that he knows what Jesus taught on divorce. In one Corinthians seven we have some indication of him being aware of Jesus's ethical teachings and some of the ethical sections of his epistles, particularly the latter part of Romans, But generally Paul didn't go
around citing Jesus. Now part of The reason is because some of the issues that are being raised with regard to church practice and that kind of thing weren't issues that Jesus directly addressed. So that's part of the reason why you don't see so much of Paul in there. What you do see is an emphasis on forgiveness of sins and the provision of the spirit as the driving force in faith for a person who responds to the Gospel. That overlaps with the themes of the Gospels and the themes
of Jesus's teaching. But Paul doesn't go about citing Jesus. Does He do it in part because because you know, he wasn't He wasn't a disciple in that sense. He wasn't one of the Twelve. He didn't hang around with Jesus in his ministry, et cetera. So everything that he knows about Jesus he is absorbed after the fact. That's
another element of what's going on between them. He's very aware of the theology that Jesus is teaching, but he tends not to cite Jesus as an authority because the issue, in one sense, once you get past the work of Jesus, is the message of Jesus, you know about what he has to say about God and salvation and man and that kind of thing, and so I think you get some of that going on as well. So that's a whole series of reasons for why we don't get Jesus cited directly by Paul.
And that may be why the Pauline letters are so potent in a way, because he's take he's the next step beyond the apostles and of really early churches that I mean, even though he was in there, but his view is a much different kind of like you said, much different the.
Old Well, he's at theologian putting the package together and explaining to someone and he has the benefit, which is something that we don't see in Jesus. This is another reason why the Gospels are a challenge for people to read, is that Paul's able to look back I call the New Testament Epistles the NFL section of the Gossip of
the New Testament. Upon further review, okay, Paul's able to look back on the totality of jesus ministry, on the reality of resurrection and ascension and says, here's what God was doing when Jesus in the midst of that he could talk about what was coming and what was ahead, but no one had experienced it yet, So you've got that difference in what's going on. So the epistles are kind of an upon for the review section of the New Testament. By the way, John's Gospel, to a certain extent,
is the same thing John's Gospel. Not only he's written from heaven down, but it is done with a reflection of the totality of Jesus ministry, very much in John's head, because you have a choice. When I tell a story about what someone has done in the past, I can tell it from the standpoint of this is how his experience while it was happening, with all the gaps in our knowledge that that represents, or I can tell it in light of the whole of what I know eventually happened.
The synoptics are more of the first, and the John is more of the second. So John is upon the upon further review gospel, okay, just like the epistles are upon further ofview. Theology of the of the New Testament period of the Jesus ministry.
Right, it is remarkable, and John is a little It is not only different stands alone. But I think some of the ideas of I've remember correctly like he integrated almost kind of a some people have likened it to kind of like a Greek philosophy kind of of you do you hold that opinion? Or why is he so different than the other three?
Well, because he's more direct, He's he's communicating very directly and from the very beginning what he's doing. And he's doing that with an awareness of what is all, what is all about, what's wrapped up theologically fully in what's going on. He's less concerned to tell the story about how it dawns on people. Okay, He's more concerned to tell the story this is what they should see.
Right, Professor, great conversation, really fascinating, and really I really enjoyed reading the book, particularly the intro. I got a lot of pieces of history put together for me. Do you have anything you'd like to add or anything I missed before we wrap up the discussion.
Well, just enjoy reading the Gospels, and the better the more you understand how the Gospels work, and the more you keep your eyes on those cultural scripts which the book is working to point out as you move through the passages. The better you'll make sense out of what's going on the gospels. And this is the bonus, the more you will see how the gospels and the epistles
actually fit together. Okay, because a lot of people say, I get the epistles, but I'm not sure I understand quite how the gospels work because the Gospels, the bulk of the Gospels, do it more inductively, and the epistles deliver the deductive results. And so we're so comfortable with the deductive results we sometimes miss how do we get there? If you understand how the gospels work, you can connect those dots. Gotcha?
Yeah? Great? And also you wanted to emphasize our earlier discussion in your most recent book, Cultural Intelligence, Living for God in a diverse, pluralistic World. So I'll put the link to that most recent book in the show notes. And also people can go check out that discussion we had back in July, but also link to this book, really great book, Jesus according to Scripture, Restoring the Portrait from the Gospels, published twenty seventeen, second edition by doctor
Darryl L. Boxel. Doctor Buck, thank you so much for.
Your time, my pleasure.
As always, God bless take care right Stay there, Stay there, mm hmm