book, we skim over it and miss the full meaning." Well, in the first months of 2002, as I began my research, I was skimming the entire Gospel. I had to make myself stop this. I had to read and reread the entire book until I stopped anticipating and jumping, until the flow of the work became as familiar as the individual words.
Scholars played a special role in this, and none more for me than John A. T. Robinson with his book The Priority of John.
Reading Robinson feels like sitting by the fire with a brilliant professor and having him discuss with you the things that happen in John's Gospel as real events. Slowly, you come to realize that for Robinson, this is almost like detective work, figuring out what Our Lord chose to do at a specific juncture, or how He responded to something that occurred. Faith in the text is essential to recovering the vibrancy of it. And suddenly, as I was reading Robinson, the Gospel stopped being a passel of quotations, and became a living account.
I crossed some barrier in my studies. I stopped hearing chapter and verse and got caught up in the story, eager to discover what was going to happen next.
Taken again and again to the Old Testament backdrop for the Gospels, I was soon reading the Old Testament books with equal curiosity and vigor, astonished by the distinct voices of the characters, and the wondrously surprising twists and turns of the various accounts. I fell in love with 1 and 2 Samuel, and the exploits of King David. I became entranced with the Book of Jonah, and the Book of Tobit. I began to see everywhere the explosive creativity of the documents I was reading. I began to feel their pulse.
The writings of N. T. Wright brought alive for me the accounts of the Resurrection, and helped me to see them as the record of men and women struggling desperately to describe something for which they had no experience and no words. Christ had risen from the dead.
It wasn't too long at all before I came to see the distinct personality of each Gospel writer, and to reach the inevitable conclusion - in contradiction to much sophisticated scholarship - that the Gospels were indeed first-person witness, and that they contained our earliest and most accurate knowledge of Christ Himself. The novelist in me responded to the internal and effortless unity of each Gospel, the kind of unity that emerges in any heartfelt written account. I'm certainly not alone in this conclusion. Much worthy scholarship supports the same view.
However, an entire generation of New Testament scholars and clergymen has obviously come of age believing the Gospels to be "late date documents," compiled by "communities" of people, who somehow lived in isolation from one another, and apparently made up words for Jesus according to what these communities thought should be made up.
Sophisticated explanations are given for this by skeptical critics, but it always comes down to the same thing: they think the Gospels are fictional documents. They think they are collaborative documents. They think they have been heavily edited. They think they must be "edited" again by the modern student as to what is more or less likely to be "historical," if anything in the Gospel is historical at all.
It is sad that the influence of these skeptic critics is so widespread.
Not only do I find no evidence for isolated Gospel communities making up documents for their little groups, but I see no evidence of collaborative writing in the Gospels at all.
Collaborative documents would never contain so much that is contradictory and surprising and difficult to explain.
On the contrary, the Gospels, once I plunged into them and let them really talk to me, came across as distinct and fascinating original works. Nowhere does one see the "smooth-ing" of an editor or a group of collaborators. Too many mysteries are woven into the fabric of the work.
Also something else has happened to me in the study of these documents. I find them inexhaustible in a rather mysterious way.
I'm at a loss to explain the manner in which every new examination of the text produces some fresh insight, some new cascade of connections, some astonishing link to another part of the canon, or to the Old Testament backdrop which enfolds the whole.
The interplay of simplicity and complexity seems at times to be beyond human control.
Picking up the Gospel on any given morning is picking up a brand-new