In the New Testament there are four Gospels professing to deal with the life of Jesus independently; but it is now almost universally agreed that the first three of these, known by the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are interdependent, corresponding to the various forms of contemporary Baraitot, while the fourth, the Gospel of John, is what the Germans call a Tendenz-Roman, practically a work of religious imagination intended to modify opinion in a certain direction. The supernatural claims made on behalf of Jesus are based almost exclusively on statements of the fourth Gospel. Of the first three or synoptic Gospels the consensus of contemporary opinion regards that of Mark as the earliest and as being the main source of the historic statements of the other two. This Gospel will, therefore, be used in the following account almost exclusively, references to chapter and verse, when the name of the Gospel is not given, being to this source. Beside the original of the Gospel of Mark, there was another source used in common by both Matthew and Luke, namely the logia, or detached sayings, of Matthew and Luke; and besides these two documents the apocryphal Gospel According to the Hebrews has preserved, in the opinion of the critics, a few statements of Jesus which often throw vivid light upon his motives and opinions. Much industry and ingenuity have been devoted by A. Resch to the collection of extracanonical statements of Jesus, known as agrapha (Leipsic, 1889). #JEWISHENCYCLOPEDIA
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 12:03:58 +0000
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