It is commonly believed that the Spirit of God brought the facts of our Lord’s life back to the Evangelists’ memory. They may have seen these things themselves or heard of them from others, but merely seeing or hearing did not make them understand. They needed a light from above to tell them what the facts meant and to bring them into harmony. Without that light they were not fit to record them.
That is our common belief. With it we have joined the opinion, drawn from outside sources or from Scripture, that each Evangelist was closely linked with one of the leading Apostles. No one doubts that St. Luke was St. Paul’s companion. Tradition, backed by weighty texts, connects St. Mark with St. Peter. We have not usually tied St. Matthew to any Epistle-writer, but critics ancient and modern agree that he wrote especially for the Hebrew part of the Church—so in our minds he is associated with St. James, the presiding Apostle of the Jerusalem Church, the Christian Jew above all others.
I do not think people have asked themselves clearly how they connect these two sets of facts. They say vaguely that the Evangelists were inspired to report certain events. Because they find the events recorded differently, they suppose the inspiration produced those differences; because some events are left out by one and recorded by another, they suppose the same cause is at work. But they are so little used to seeing these events as one whole, with one purpose, that they fail to explain—to others or to themselves—what they mean either by the human helps of eyesight and testimony the writers used, or by the divine guidance over them.
But is it hopeless to reconcile these two views? Is any book worth anything unless some idea or principle in it binds its facts together? Can anyone write a lasting book, one that leaves a living impression on many minds, without such an idea within it? And if the idea is there, will it not penetrate every part of the record, so that the writer sees every fact in its light—and passes his impression to us by making us see every fact in the same light?
If we grant this, we might better understand what it means for the Spirit to bring to remembrance events already seen or known by testimony. Would not that operation be exactly this: that what was scattered, disjointed, and incoherent in the mind became a living, harmonious whole, each part brought out in its proper proportion by a light spread over all? In this way we might understand why, among the many gospels known to have existed in the early Church—and which St. Luke says were composed in his time—some sank into obscurity at once and some lasted a little and then perished, because they had no living coherence. The events they recorded, even if true, lacked the sure divine stamp, and were felt to be not a divine history but only its loose fragments.
In this way too we might understand how the idea of a Son of God is stamped on all the true gospels, while the false ones tried, by strange narratives and startling wonders, to suggest they had some very great One to tell of, yet never managed to present Him to the heart and conscience of their readers. But if this fundamental idea is the common test of every true Evangelist, were there not also special aspects of it that struck each of them? Could a single narrative convey the whole of such a truth? Here is the place to consider those links between the Evangelists and different Apostles which we have all taken for granted.
St. Matthew, as we have seen, sets before us a Son of God as much as any of the three. But under what aspect? I will say nothing yet about St. James’s special work, since I must later examine his Epistle for his meaning and purpose. I assume only that St. Matthew’s is what all have called it—the Hebrew Gospel. If so, I would expect his prevailing idea to be that the revelation of the Son of God fulfils the revelation of the Old Testament, that the new covenant is needed to complete and confirm the old, that the God of Abraham must be a Father, and Abraham’s kingdom a fatherly kingdom.
I will speak of St. Peter later, so I will not now go into what his Epistle shows of his ruling idea. I will only recall his confession recorded by St. Matthew: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Turning to St. Mark, I find his opening words, “The Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.” I would expect St. Mark’s aim to be, above all, to bring out Christ in His own person and His own acts, as the head and founder of a kingdom and an object of faith.
I must later examine St. Paul’s Epistles and his place in the Church. For now I assume only that he was the teacher of the Gentiles, and that he saw the new dispensation not merely as completing the old but as having a deeper foundation than the old—so that the Jewish law and whole Jewish economy rested on the revelation of Christ, rather than Christ resting on them. So I would expect St. Luke’s Gospel to embody this idea, to present the Son of God as the giver of the Spirit and the founder of a spiritual kingdom with an older and deeper root than Judaism itself.
Whether these expectations match what we actually find in these three Evangelists is now, as briefly as we can, our task to consider.