Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Trusting the Bible
I have a dear friend I’ve known most of my life who came to me recently with a question. The friend in question is a lifelong Christian; he loves Jesus, attends church, is a faithful person. He doesn’t struggle with “doubt” per se. He struggles instead with the Bible.
I have a dear friend I’ve known most of my life who came to me recently with a question. The friend in question is a lifelong Christian; he loves Jesus, attends church, is a faithful person. He doesn’t struggle with “doubt” per se. It’s not the spooky stuff in Christian teaching that bothers him; God exists, Jesus rose from the dead, we’re sinners in need of grace, angels and demons are real—whatever: all a given.
No, what trips up my friend is the Bible. But again, a particular sort of obstacle. Not the Bible per se. He finds the Gospels utterly trustworthy: they give us Jesus, the real Jesus, the Jesus who lived two thousand years ago and who is alive and active today. Their accounts of him are accurate and we’re right to turn to them to hear his voice, learn his way, follow his example and teaching.
The rest of the Bible? Not so much. Or at least: TBD. Sure, the rest of the New Testament gives us much of importance. But just because it’s “apostolic,” does that necessarily mean it bears divine authority? that it’s infallible? that it’s inerrant? Might it call for a bit of picking and choosing, or sifting the wheat from the chaff?
All the more so, my friends avers, regarding the Old Testament. Does it contain wisdom and beauty and powerful stories? No doubt. Is it “revealed,” though? Not so sure. Is it all true? Meh. Is it “the word of God” himself? Nah.
At least, that’s his disposition, his instinctual posture toward the Old and New Testaments excepting the Gospels and granting the basic truth of (e.g.) the Apostles’ Creed. Knowing that this combination of beliefs—the reliability of the Gospels (and of the gospel) alongside the relative unreliability, or basic human fallibility, of the rest of the canon—is not exactly the traditional Christian position, he came to me with the question: Why should he place his trust in the Bible-full-stop? Why should a Christian like him who loves and follows Jesus confess that the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms and the Epistles are all alike “the word of the Lord”? Why, for instance, care about “getting the text right” when the text is Genesis 1–3? Why not just say it’s a lovely story full of rich insights without going further and committing oneself to believing it to be true in the sense of divinely inspired truth?
That’s the question. I think it’s a very good one. And I bet it, or something like it, is a lot more common in our churches than we might suppose. So I’d like to try to answer it as best I can below, leaving aside whatever is immaterial to the substance of the particular question in view.
I can think of six overall reasons to believe the Bible as such is God’s word, three regarding the Old Testament and three regarding the New.
1. The first and best reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word is that Jesus did so. This reason doesn’t apply to people who don’t already believe in Jesus, but if you already know Jesus and trust him, then that trust should follow Jesus’s own judgment that the scriptures of Israel are holy, reliable, and a revelatory vehicle of God’s will, character, and commands. Pick any Gospel at random, and you can’t go three paragraphs without finding Jesus somehow at the center of a question surrounding the interpretation of the Old Testament. Moreover, as children are rightly taught early in their time in Sunday school, Jesus’s manner of battling the temptations of Satan consists of nothing but the quotation of Torah. This is God himself in the flesh, facing down a rebellious angel who supposes he can force God’s hand with petty offers of power and fame, and what God does is put the words of Moses on his own lips. That’s because Moses’s words are his words; Jesus stands behind Moses. Quoting Moses is quoting himself, as it were, finding the right occasion for those words’ truest meaning and supremely fitting application. A holy mystery!
2. The second reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word is that it speaks of Jesus before his advent. One way of describing this is to say that Israel’s scriptures “predict” the coming of Jesus. That’s a perfectly fine way to talk about it, but it lends itself to oversimplification. The Old Testament isn’t merely a collection of oracles, each of which finds one-to-one correspondence with something that happens later in Jesus’s career. Rather, its correspondence is much greater, more encompassing, and therefore more interesting than that. Jesus, as the Gospels and other apostolic writings proclaim, “fulfills” the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms. They “speak” of him, sometimes with astonishing clarity, sometimes with mysterious hiddenness. But they speak of him nonetheless—Jesus himself says so: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:46-47). Or consider the time following his Resurrection, when Jesus appeared to the apostles and said, “O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:25-26). Then the Gospel goes on: “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (v. 27). And a little later, just before ascending to heaven:
“These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (vv. 44-48)
Jesus, in short, was a Jewish rabbi who believed what all Jewish rabbis have always believed about the scriptures. This belief was and remains a nonnegotiable given for anyone who would come to follow Jesus or put faith in his name. This doesn’t mean such belief is easy, simple, or straightforward. But given Jesus’s own trust in the scriptures, and his teaching that those scriptures have much to tell us about him—miraculously, ahead of his coming, by the work of the Spirit in the minds, hearts, and words of the scriptures’ authors and editors—it follows that Christians have good reason to call the Old Testament the word of God for the people of God.
3. The third reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word follows from the first two: namely, that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is none other than the God of Israel revealed in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. The God of Jesus is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah, the God of Joseph and Moses, Aaron and Miriam, Joshua and Rahab, Hannah and Samuel, Ruth and David, Solomon and Josiah, Ezra and Nehemiah, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel—and the rest. (Go read Hebrews 11: Jesus’s God is their God, the God of the cloud of witnesses, because Jesus is the One to whom they looked and in whom they placed their faith, ahead of time.) In other words, if you want to know who the God is whom Jesus called Father, go read the book of Exodus. Read the Psalms. Read the Song of Songs. Read Jonah. That’s him. That’s the one. No one else. And that’s part of the point: there is no other God except this God. As the Shema says, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6:4). Consider this encounter in the twelfth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel:
And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that he is one, and there is no other but he; and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” (vv. 28-34)
There is even more than this, however. It isn’t just that the Father of Jesus is one and the same as the God of Israel whom we find in the pages of the Old Testament—though that is true. It’s that the God we meet in Jesus is himself the Lord of Israel. That is to say, the God who is incarnate in and as the man Jesus is YHWH: He who called Abraham, the One who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, the Almighty who delivered Israel from slavery—in fact, the Creator of heaven and earth. “The Word became flesh” means that to see Jesus is to see the God of Sinai; to embrace Jesus is to embrace the very One Jacob wrestled with by the Jabbok River. The face of Jesus, in a word, is the face of God, the one true God manifested to Israel. This gives greater depth and meaning to the claim that the Old Testament speaks about Jesus. It certainly does, since it speaks about God, and this God became incarnate in Jesus.
So much for the Old Testament. What about the New?
4. The first reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that it is apostolic. Why should that matter? Weren’t the apostles only human like you and me? To be sure. But they were also more than that. The apostles were personally chosen by Jesus himself to be his emissaries in the world. To be an apostle is to have been commissioned by the risen Jesus for the lifelong work of bearing testimony to the good news about him to whoever might listen. In the final words Jesus spoke to the apostles before his Ascension (words recorded by St. Luke, the same author as the third Gospel):
It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. (Acts 1:7-8)
The apostles are the reason any of us know or believe the gospel in the first place. No apostle, no gospel; no gospel, no faith; no faith, no church. And without faith or church, neither you nor I, as believers, exist. We have Jesus because of the apostles and only because of the apostles. Christian faith is mediated faith. Mediation is baked in from the beginning; it’s a feature, not a bug. We know Christ through others: first of all the apostles, then through their successors, then through all of Christ’s many sisters and brothers, including the parents or mentors or ministers or teachers who gave him to us—all, it goes without saying, by the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit.
For the purposes of our question, it is crucial to see that the Bible is part of this chain of mediation; in particular, the writings of the New Testament. In these writings we hear the voice of the apostles down through the ages, giving us once again their testimony concerning Jesus, risen from the dead. They knew him on earth. They saw him alive on the third day. They, and they alone, have the power and the authority to tell us the truth concerning him. All we have to do—all that falls to us to do—is either to trust their witness or to reject it. There’s no third option. We can’t take it piecemeal. It’s an all or nothing affair. That goes for the letters of St. Paul as much as the four Gospels. Every one of the 27 documents of the New Testament is “apostolic”: it contains and communicates the teaching of the apostles as the founders of the Christian community, apart from whom it would not exist and, consequently, none of us would know of the good news of Jesus. Most of the apostles eventually gave their lives for Jesus. Their credibility is airtight. We have all the reason in the world to trust them.
5. The second reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that it is all of a piece. Jesus did not write the Gospels. His followers did. We are right to trust their testimony, but that testimony is not different in kind from other types of apostolic testimony, such as Acts, the Epistles, and the book of Revelation. All of them speak of Jesus, and all of them are apostolic in character. When the preacher of the sermon we call “Hebrews” tells us that Jesus is a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, such a claim calls for our assent in the very same way as when the biographer we call “Saint Matthew” tells us that Jesus was born of Mary, a virgin betrothed to Joseph. The latter is not only a historical claim; it is theological, for it is supported in part by reference to the prophet Isaiah, just as Hebrews relies on Psalm 110 and Genesis 14. (Indeed, one useful way to approach the innovative way the apostolic writings reinterpret the Old Testament is as an extension of Jesus’s own exegetical practice: the disciples learned it first from him; it doesn’t originate with them alone.)
In short, believing Hebrews’ words about Jesus and believing Matthew’s words about Jesus are one and the same kind of action for Christians. There’s no reason to opt for one but not the other. Even biography is never mere reportage. It involves interpretation, selection of material, sequence of presentation, and so on. The gospel is mediated, as we’ve seen, which means it requires trust. To trust Jesus means trusting the testimony about Jesus given by his followers, which means finally trusting the whole New Testament, and not only part of it, in conjunction also with the prophetic (Mosaic and Davidic) testimony contained in the Old Testament.
Recall, furthermore, that I’m not adducing the best possible arguments for a nonbeliever to put her trust in the Bible. I’m offering reasons for someone who already believes that Jesus is risen from the dead and reigning from heaven as Lord to see why the Bible as a whole, and not only the Gospels, is reliable and true, is divinely inspired, and therefore is to be received and confessed as the word of the Lord to his people. Here’s one more.
6. The third reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that the church does. What do I mean by this? Simply this: Christianity precedes us. We don’t make it up ourselves. We certainly don’t build it from scratch. It’s not a DIY project. It’s just there, waiting for us before we come on the scene. It possesses something truly precious, or so it claims. That something is the good news of Jesus. As I’ve argued above, the church has the good news to share with others because she received it first from the apostles. The church continues to preserve and proclaim this message, keeping faith with the apostles, by means of the New Testament (along with the Old). It is the texts of the New Testament that ground, govern, and norm the church’s teaching about the gospel. Were it not for the New Testament, we would have no means of ensuring we were still getting Jesus right, all these centuries later. They function not only as a source for our beliefs and practices but also as a judge or measure of them. They keep us on the straight and narrow. Without them, we’d be lost.
It is for this reason that the church has always placed the scriptures at the center of her life, in her worship above all. Within that worship the full diversity of scriptural voices is always read—an OT text, a Psalm, an Epistle—but the heart or climax of the reading in the liturgy always comes from one of the Gospels. For these tell explicitly of Jesus and feature his very words. It is as if the “red letter Bibles” of recent American vintage were inscribed for centuries in the liturgical practice of catholic tradition: all rise, the priest processes with the holy Gospel to the center of the assembly, and both before and after the reading, all cross their minds, lips, and hearts, in order to hear the living Jesus speak in their midst by the words of his servants.
I am saying all this in order to complete the circuit we began earlier, regarding trust. We cannot trust Jesus without also simultaneously trusting his apostles; this trust in turn entails trusting the Bible, on one hand, and the church, on the other. For the church is the body and bride of Christ, and her task from Pentecost to Parousia is to maintain and to announce the gospel of Jesus. She does this by constant, daily recourse to the scriptures of Israel and the writings of the apostles. From them she hears the truth about God, God’s Son, and God’s Spirit; she learns of his ways and will and works in the world; she assents to what he would have her do, as she undertakes the great mission given her by Jesus between his Resurrection and Ascension. It follows that for us, for ordinary believers, to trust him is to trust her, for without her we would not have him; and vice versa, we would not have her were it not for him, for he and he alone is the founder, head, and Lord of the church, which is his body and the temple of his Holy Spirit on earth. It is she from whom we received faith in Jesus; she who baptized us in his name; she who feeds us his flesh and blood. And it is she who directs our eyes and ears to his living word in Holy Scripture. Having trusted him, we ought to trust her; having trusted her to give us him, we ought to trust her again that we will find him there, in the sacred pages of the canon.
In sum: The church believes the Bible is the word of God. If it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for me. And, I hope, good enough for a faithful friend and member of the church, eager to learn from her what to believe about God’s word.
On Markan priority
Reading and re-reading and teaching Mark has raised anew for me the question of Markan priority. I teach, following the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars, that Mark was most likely the first Gospel written, and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark as a primary source. If I had to bet, that's still by far the choice I would go with.
Having said that...
Spend some time with Mark, and you'll notice just how expertly crafted it is; just how richly artistic and intentional its literary, structural, thematic, and theological features are. My sense is that at least part of the case made for Matthew and Luke's dependence on Mark is their "cleaning up" of Mark's roughness. Except that there is no reason in principle to take Mark's roughness as an accidental aspect of the Gospel, that is, to take it as a function of a hurried or rushed composition, unrelated to the purpose and stylistic substance of the work.
Because Mark's no-frills style is part and parcel of the subtle, sophisticated portrait of Jesus the Gospel offers to its readers. (One student compared the opening two dozen verses of the Gospel to a movie trailer: action, CUT, action, CUT, action, CUT—new scenes piling on top of one another with neither commentary nor context.) And the literary intentionality is undeniable: doubled episodes, intercalation, the messianic mystery, the triple repetition of Jesus's prediction of suffering in Jerusalem, the drum-beat refrain of the disciples' (most of all Peter's) absolute failure to understand Jesus, the allusions (centrally in the opening handful of verses) to Isaiah 40–55, the circumspect but exhaustive affirmation of Jesus's divine power and authority, the elusive and unsettling account of the resurrection, the irony of who it is that recognizes Jesus and who does not, the would-be angel's exhortation to the women (and so to the disciples, and so to the reader) to "return to Galilee" and to discover the living Jesus there—i.e., in the pages of the very same Gospel—etc., etc.
So what would have to be the case for Mark not to have been the first Gospel written? Matthew would probably have to be first instead, using his own materials (and perhaps something like "Q"), composed just before or after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D.; and Mark, receiving Matthew's Gospel—let's say in Rome, only months or 1-2 years after Matthew's composition—gives us not just the cliff notes, but a much less explicit, a much less didactic, a much less prolix and embroidered Gospel, one emphasizing mystery, secrecy, failure, shame, suffering, and irony—perhaps under the influence of Paul or one of his coworkers, perhaps under the heightened pressures of persecution in the imperial capital, perhaps aiming for something both more concretely close to the ground of Palestine yet accessible to gentile Christians in south-central Europe unfamiliar with Jewish groups, conventions, and language in and around Galilee and Jerusalem, perhaps even a hear-it-in-a-single-sitting biography-Gospel for Pauline-like churches that lacked something so rich in narrative detail but for whom Matthew's Gospel would be too invested in intra-Jewish polemic and interpretive dispute over Torah to be existentially and spiritually significant.
Perhaps. It's a long shot. It's unlikely. I know I'm not the first one to suggest it. But it's a thought.
16 tips for how to read a passage from the Gospels
1. Characters
Whom do I meet in this passage? Are they named? Are they central or peripheral? Why are they here? What are they doing? Have I met them before? Will I meet them again?
2. Places
Where does this passage take place? Does it take place in one place or multiple places? Does it tell me where, or leave that unknown? Is the location important to the action? Does the action take place between places? What has happened in this place before, historically or biblically?
3. Concepts
What concepts or ideas are mentioned? Do I know what they mean? Do they have a specific meaning here? Does the author define them for me, assume I know what they mean, or want me to wonder what they mean? Is the concept a new one or one that predates this passage? How can I learn what it means?
4. Action
What happens in this passage? Who does the acting, and to whom does something happen? Is the action good, bad, or something in between? Does nothing seem to happen? Why might there be a passage in which nothing at all seems to happen? How does this small action relate to the larger action of the book as a whole? How does the action affect or change the characters involved?
5. Speech
Who talks? About what? Is there a single person who speaks with authority, or is there some kind of exchange between two or more people? Does one of them, or do both, learn something from the exchange? Is the topic spoken about new, challenging, bold, unique in some way? How do those who hear it respond? Is the speech for them alone or for others, including the reader of this text? How do you know?
6. Problem/solution
Is this passage addressing a problem? Is it identified, or left implicit? Is the problem resolved in some way, or left unresolved? Who resolves it? Do all the characters accept the resolution? How does the proposed resolution affect them? Is the problem limited to the characters in the story, or to potential later headers of the story?
7. Echoes of Scripture
Does the passage interact with the Old Testament in any way? Does it quote it? If so, does it name the book cited? Does it cite a single text or combine multiple texts together? How does the text quoted inform or illuminate what happens in this passage? Is the OT text cited by the characters INSIDE the story, or by the narrator OF the story? To what end or purpose? If the OT is not cited, but alluded to in some way, why? And if it is not alluded to explicitly at all, but the action in the passage is similar to the action of a story in the OT, why might that be? Would the characters in the story have realized the similarities, or are the similarities the result of the way that the author of the passage has crafted it? If the latter, why might the author have done that?
8. Genre
What kind of text is this? Is it a story about something that happened in the past? Is it a parable? a letter? a poem or a song? moral teaching? How should my reading of the passage correspond to the kind of text it is?
9. Tone
How does the passage sound? Is it leisurely? Eloquent? Happy? Angry? Urgent? What about the passage makes it feel or sound that way? What happens in the passage that might help explain its tone?
10. Perspective
Whose perspective is represented in the passage? One of the characters’? Multiple characters’? Does the author presume to know what some or all of the characters are thinking? How could he know? What “angle” or “slant” on the action is the narrator taking, regardless of characters? What does he want you to notice, to see, to hear? What does he therefore ignore as a result? What details has he included intentionally—and what details has he perhaps included unintentionally?
11. Audience
To whom or for whom does this text seem to be written? Can you tell from the passage in question, or from other passages? Based on the presumed audience, how can that help you understand what’s going on in the passage? Are you, at least by extension, part of that audience, or are you an outsider? How does that affect your reading?
12. Purpose
What appears to be the intended purpose or purposes of this passage? Why did the author write it? What would or should result if the right people were to read the passage the right way? What does the author want to happen as a result of this passage having been written and communicated to others?
13. Implications
Whatever the author’s goals or intentions, what are the implications of this passage? What follows from it? In particular, what follows for some central biblical realities: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, gospel, church, discipleship, faith? If the passage you are reading is true, then what must therefore be true about God, or Jesus, or the gospel, or faith?
14. Then/now
Since this text was written at a different time and place and in a different culture than ours, what meanings might it have had then, separate from its potential meanings now? In turn, what meanings might it have now, regardless of what meanings it might have had then? And how might the meanings then and the meanings now be related?
15. Context, context, context
ALWAYS ask yourself: What are the relevant contexts of this passage? Within the book of which it is a part, what has happened just BEFORE and just AFTER this passage? What happens at the beginning and ending of the book? How does this passage relate to them? Does something very important happen in this passage, or immediately before/after it? What about the context of the Bible—how does this passage relate to other passages in other biblical books? What about historical context—what was happening at the time in which the passage’s story happened, or at the time in which the passage was written? What about cultural context—what aspects of the culture in the time make an appearance in the passage? What about theological context—what theological questions and conversations does this passage interact with? What about church context—how does this passage relate to the life, mission, worship, and ethics of the Christian community? What about moral context—what does this passage suggest about the good, about how human beings are to live in the world? So on and so forth.
16. The study notes are your friend!
Finally, use the notes in your study Bible! Read the introduction to the biblical book you are reading, and read the footnotes at the bottom. And preferably also consult a commentary on the book, at least when you have big questions about any of the above—especially context.
What it is I'm privileged to do this fall
For 120 of those students, I will be teaching them the Gospels, especially the Gospel of Mark. Many of them know a thing or two about Jesus, and some of them know quite a bit. But some of them don't know a thing. And none of them has read the Gospels the way I will teach them to read them. They haven't heard about the Synoptics. They haven't heard about Logos Christology. They haven't thought about Mark 8, the "hinge" on which the whole book rests, when Jesus twice heals the blind man, and then twice heals his followers (present and future) in the person of Peter, rebuking him then teaching about the passion of the Messiah, about his death and resurrection. They haven't grappled with the living, convicting force of the Sermon on the Mount on their lives (and mine). They haven't considered the Jewish context of the church's origins, of Jesus's life and work, of all of Scripture and the faith itself. They haven't contemplated the salvific significance of the resurrection. They haven't—as in two of the classes we will do—read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship, or for the most part even heard of him. They haven't analogized the Gospel portraits of the living Jesus to artistic interpretations of him, interpretations that make the familiar strange, that distort and confront, that take an angle, that imagine the Jew of Nazareth in other times, places, cultures, peoples.
They haven't done any of it. And I get to be their teacher, the one invested with the great responsibility of introducing them to so many wonderful, challenging, genuinely life-changing ideas—and not just ideas but events, persons, arguments, proposals, practices, ways of reading and thinking, ways of living and acting, ways of praying and worshiping God.
I get to introduce them to a whole world, the world of theology: of faith, and church tradition, and Holy Scripture, and the rest.
What a thing.
Teaching the Gospels starting with John
That's how I'll teach it this fall, and maybe the one after that. But I'm already thinking how to re-shape the course once I get a handle on it.
And I'm thinking I'd like to start with John.
The class is neither for seminarians nor for historians. It isn't a historical introduction to the composition of the Gospels; it's not a prep course for future pastors who will need to know the background and hypothetical redactional relationships between the books.
It's a course for freshman at a Christian university on the life and teachings of Jesus. We'll be beginning with prayer and talking like Jesus not only matters but is alive, present, at work in the world and in us. And if you believe, as I do, that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are every bit as theologically motivated, resourced, and interesting as John, then framing the course with the theological claims and questions that John raises might—might—enable more productive, more spiritually engaged, more intellectually challenging, and ultimately more rewarding interaction with the Synoptics than the other way around.
It's a thought. I'd love to hear how others have taught similar courses. We'll see how this fall goes, and if my intuitions are confirmed. If and when I undertake the experiment, I'll report on the results.
Barth on what matters in the Gospel narratives
—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 320