Why Four

Start with the word, because it does not mean what a modern reader assumes. Euangelion in ordinary Greek is an announcement of good news, most often the news a runner brings from a battle or a court. Roman imperial usage stretched it further: the accession or birthday of an emperor could be announced as good news for the province. In the Greek Old Testament the related verb carries the herald of Isaiah 52:7 who climbs the hill and tells Zion that her God reigns. Every one of those senses is public, oral and political. None of them is a book.

That is how the New Testament uses it. Mark 1:1 is the closest thing to an exception, and even there the sentence most naturally reads as the beginning of the announcement rather than the beginning of the volume. Paul uses euangelion dozens of times and never once means a document. The transfer of the word to a written text belongs to the second century, when Justin Martyr can refer to the memoirs of the apostles which are called gospels. So the genre label our Bibles print at the top of Matthew is a label the church attached later to four books that did not call themselves that.

What kind of writing are they, then? For most of the twentieth century the standard answer, associated with Karl Ludwig Schmidt and Rudolf Bultmann, was that they are sui generis: popular literature with no real parallel, assembled out of small units of oral tradition by communities rather than composed by authors. On that view the evangelists were editors of a scrapbook, and looking for a literary genre was a category mistake.

That consensus came apart. Richard Burridge's What Are the Gospels? in 1992 compared the four with a sample of Greco-Roman biographies on measurable features: length, subject distribution, opening formulae, the proportion of verbs whose subject is the central figure, structure and topics. The gospels sat inside the range for ancient bios. The argument has been widely, though not universally, accepted, and it matters practically. Ancient biography was not neutral reportage and never claimed to be. It selected, arranged, compressed and shaped in order to display a person's character and its claim on you. Plutarch says as much openly at the start of his Alexander: he is writing lives, not histories, and a small saying often reveals more than a battle with thousands of casualties.

Take that seriously and a good deal of anxiety drains out of the study of the gospels, while a different kind of care becomes necessary. If these are ancient biographies then chronological reordering and compression are normal features of the form and not failures of it. If they are ancient biographies then they are also making claims about a real person in a real decade under named officials, and are open to being tested.

There was no committee. What happened is slower and more interesting than the vote a conspiracy story requires. By the middle of the second century churches around the Mediterranean were reading these four, and the pressure to reduce came from people who found four inconvenient.

Marcion, around 140, kept one gospel, a shortened Luke, along with ten letters of Paul, on the theological ground that the God of Israel was not the Father of Jesus and that Jewish material had to go. Marcion is often described as the first person to publish a fixed list of Christian scriptures, and on the majority view, which goes back to Adolf von Harnack, his canon is what forced the church to define its own. That reconstruction is genuinely contested: others argue that the churches were already working with a settled core of texts and that Marcion was reacting to it rather than provoking it. What is not in doubt is that the answer to a shorter list was not a shorter list of one's own.

Irenaeus of Lyon, writing around 180, defends the number four in a passage that modern readers find odd and second-century readers evidently did not. In Against Heresies 3.11.8 he argues that since there are four zones of the world and four principal winds, there could not be more or fewer than four gospels. The reasoning is cosmological rather than historical, and it is easy to sneer at. What it actually shows is more useful than its argument: by 180 the fourfold gospel is so settled in Irenaeus' churches that it needs a justification for its number rather than a defence of its members. You do not argue that four is the right number unless four is what you already have.

The physical evidence lines up with this. Papyrus 45, the Chester Beatty gospel codex, dates to the third century and contains all four gospels and Acts in one book. The codex format itself, which Christians adopted far ahead of the wider book trade, made a four-in-one volume possible in a way that scrolls did not. The Muratorian Fragment, a damaged Latin list whose surviving text begins in mid-sentence about Mark, names Luke third and John fourth; it is usually dated to the late second century, though Albert Sundberg and Geoffrey Hahneman argued for a fourth-century date, and the question is not closed.

One more episode is worth knowing, because it shows the criteria actually in use. Serapion, bishop of Antioch around 200, at first permitted a congregation at Rhossus to read the Gospel of Peter, then read it himself, found teaching in it he judged docetic, and withdrew permission. Eusebius preserves the account. What decided the matter was not a council and not a list, but a bishop reading a text and measuring it against what the churches already confessed.

Around 170 a Syrian Christian named Tatian, who had studied under Justin Martyr in Rome, did the obvious thing. He took the four gospels and wove them into one continuous narrative, cutting the repetitions, resolving the sequence, and producing a single readable life of Jesus. The work is known as the Diatessaron, dia tessaron, through four, a phrase borrowed from Greek music theory, where it named the interval of a fourth.

It was not a fringe experiment. The Diatessaron became the standard gospel text of the Syriac-speaking church for something close to three centuries. Ephrem the Syrian wrote a commentary on it in the fourth century rather than on the separate gospels. Translations and adaptations turn up later in Arabic, Persian, Latin, Middle Dutch and Old High German. For a large and ancient branch of the church, the harmony was simply what the gospel looked like.

The reversal is documented. Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in the fifth century, writes that he found more than two hundred copies of the Diatessaron in use in the churches of his diocese, collected them, and replaced them with the four separate gospels. Whatever one thinks of the method, the judgement behind it is clear: a church that could have kept the smooth single narrative decided that it would rather have the four rough ones.

Why it was suppressed is overdetermined, and the reasons should be held apart rather than blended. Theodoret gives a doctrinal one in the same passage: he says Tatian cut out the genealogies and everything else showing that the Lord was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and he lists Tatian among the heretics. Tatian also carried a reputation as an Encratite, a rigorist about marriage, meat and wine, and that reputation attached itself to anything with his name on it. Whether the genealogies were in fact absent from the Diatessaron is disputed, because the work survives only through translations, later quotations and Ephrem's commentary, and the modern reconstructions do not agree with one another. So the honest statement is that Theodoret had doctrinal grounds for acting, that we cannot confirm from the text itself whether those grounds were accurate, and that the author's reputation was in play alongside the contents of the book.

What survives all of that is the shape of the outcome, and that is the part worth weighing. Every apologetic advantage lies with a harmony. One account cannot contradict itself. One account has one chronology, one resurrection morning, one wording on the placard above the cross. A harmonised gospel was available, in wide use in one of the church's major language areas for roughly three centuries, and what Theodoret put in its place was not a corrected harmony but the separate four. Whatever mixture of motives produced that decision, its effect was to keep the version of the story that is harder to defend.

Here the lesson has to be careful, because there are two ways to be dishonest about the differences and both are popular. The first is to deny that any real difficulty exists, and to produce harmonisations of such ingenuity that the reader stops believing the harmoniser. The second is to treat every variation as a demonstrated contradiction and to move quickly past the fact that ancient writers had conventions we do not share. Neither is argument. Both are the sound of someone who has decided in advance.

So set out the actual data. The genealogies in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 differ in the names between David and Joseph and cannot both be a simple biological line of descent. The temple clearing stands at the beginning in John and at the end in the other three. The wording of the placard on the cross differs in all four. The resurrection accounts differ over how many women came, how many figures they met, whether those figures sat or stood, and where the disciples were to go. Mark 2:26 has David eating the consecrated bread during the high priesthood of Abiathar, while 1 Samuel 21 names Ahimelech; Matthew and Luke both tell the story without the name. The Gadarene or Gerasene demoniacs are one man in Mark and Luke and two in Matthew. On the day of the crucifixion the Johannine and synoptic schemes differ by roughly a day.

Now the case that these are differences and not contradictions, stated by people who hold it. Ancient biography permitted compression, transposition, displacement and the transfer of a saying from one setting to another; these are the compositional devices Michael Licona catalogued from Plutarch's parallel accounts of the same events in his 2017 study, and he argues that a large share of gospel differences fit them exactly. Genealogies in the ancient world served claims about descent and could skip generations deliberately, as Matthew's own count of three fourteens shows he is doing; a levirate marriage or a line through Mary have both been proposed for the Matthew and Luke divergence. Craig Blomberg's work makes the general case that the accounts are reconcilable without strain in most places and that our standard of precision is anachronistic. Augustine made the same case, at length, in De consensu evangelistarum around the year 400, and his instinct was that a difficulty is usually a signal that the reader has not yet understood the writers.

Now the case that at least some are genuine contradictions, stated by people who hold it. Bart Ehrman's version is that harmonisation works only by inventing a fifth story that none of the four tells, and that the interesting question is why each writer told it the way he did. On the crucifixion date, the observation is not merely that the timings differ but that John's timing serves a theology stated in John 1:29 and 19:36: Jesus dies as the lambs are killed, and no bone is broken. If that is right, John has arranged the chronology to make a theological claim, which is a legitimate ancient authorial move and is also, flatly, not the synoptic chronology. Raymond Brown, who was not a sceptic and served on the Pontifical Biblical Commission, concluded in his two-volume Death of the Messiah that some details cannot be reconciled and that admitting this is better exegesis than forcing them.

What is settled: the four accounts differ in detail, sometimes in ways that resist reconciliation on any straightforward reading. What is not settled: whether those differences are best explained by ancient compositional convention, by independent traditions imperfectly remembered, by deliberate theological arrangement, or by error, and which explanation fits which case. A student should be able to argue each position without a sneer, and should notice that the strongest advocates on both sides agree about the data and disagree about what follows from it.

The cost is exactly what the critic says it is. Four accounts create four chronologies to reconcile, four sets of wording for the same sayings, and a permanent supply of difficulties that a single narrative would never have produced. Anyone who has taught a class on the resurrection morning knows how much of the hour goes on the mechanics of who arrived when.

What the four buy is harder to see and worth more. The first thing is a check. Independent or partially independent witnesses who agree in substance while differing in detail are the normal signature of testimony rather than of collusion; a police officer who takes four statements that match word for word suspects rehearsal. The gospels' differences are not evidence for their reliability by themselves, but their pattern is the pattern that testimony actually makes.

The second thing is portraiture. Matthew's Jesus is the teacher who fulfils Israel's scriptures and gives a new law from a mountain. Mark's is the one who moves at speed, is misunderstood by everyone including his friends, and is recognised for what he is by a Roman executioner at the moment of death. Luke's eats with the wrong people and puts the poor, the women and the foreigners at the centre of the frame. John's speaks in long meditations about his own identity and washes feet. No single account could hold all four without becoming a committee document, and the harmony we still produce in our heads, the beige composite Jesus of the Christmas pageant, is poorer than any of the four.

The third thing is the harder gift. Four accounts make it impossible to pretend that the church controls the story. A single authorised life could have been tidied at every point of embarrassment. What we have instead is a set of texts that preserve Peter's denial, the disciples' stupidity, the family who thought Jesus was out of his mind, a cry of dereliction from the cross, and women as the first witnesses in a culture that discounted their testimony. Whoever kept those four books did not keep them because they were convenient.