Thinking About the Gospels (Part 1)

Here is an example on how awareness of 1st century literary style when reading the Gospels is important:

The Jesus story is tooooo fake!!! I read the first part of the bible story if fit [sic] into todays context, you will realize its the same as a conman story. Just that the people illustrated in the bible seems gullible or maybe uneducated.

If Jesus exists in todays era, do you honestly think u guys will be his disciple and s**t like that?

Example, his disciples Simon and Andrew the fishermens.

Here it goes:

As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 19“Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” 20At once they left their nets and followed him.

This story is soooo Disney channel fairytale. Someone just ask u follow him then u will immediately follow him?

I try to convince my self that Jesus is the saviour but the more i read the more skeptic i became thats why i stop reading the bible to at least save my doubt towards the bible storyline

This person was posting on a Christian forum thread about his experience reading (presumably) the Gospel of Mark.

You can tell that:

1. He is reading and treating the story of the First Disciples from a modern perspective.

2. The Gospel stories as such read somewhat absurdly (he compares it to a Disney fairy tale, which tells as much how he has been influenced by such narratives)

3. Unfortunately he doesn't read the parallel narrative in Luke 5 which explains in more detail why the disciples decided to follow Jesus

4. Even more importantly, he is not aware that Mark is the shortest gospel and paints events with broad strokes. As such much detail had to be omitted.

Other important considerations - the Gospels were meant to be read aloud, hence had to be kept short. Likewise, scrolls for writing were not cheap or abundant.

Thus, don't expect a description in minute detail - with footnotes - when reading the Gospels.

This is why asking someone to read from the Bible without giving him or her a proper introduction to the genre, style and content of the book is a bad idea.

Another example would be Revelation, which is routinely made fun of, with no awareness whatsoever of the apocalyptic genre. Also Genesis. To be fair, both Christians and non-Christians fall into the same exegetical errors.

Coming back to the Gospels, we should realize that since these are probably the first books to be given to non-believers to be read it should be important to introduce them to the respective books properly. There are traps that people can fall into when reading the Gospels, such as taking Jesus commands literally (e.g. "hating parents").

By emphasizing on what the Gospels meant to the original audience vs. what it means to you (the example cited above is an example of what happens when the reader is left to interpret it entirely by himself, without recourse to other tools) we would have a much clearer message and help cut down on the sort of responses as that of the reader of the Gospel of Mark above.