MATTHEW'S GOSPEL AS A COHERENT BOOK

Today the Gospels are very seldom read in their entirety, from beginning to end. Laypeople prefer instead to choose isolated passages for their daily Bible readings, perhaps from a book of lections. Pastors do much the same: they need excerpts from the Gospels for their sermons or instruction. Theologians often use the Gospels (and other biblical texts) as a sort of quarry or ‘documentation centre’, employing passages from them to substantiate one or another theological verity. This state of affairs can even be felt in Gospel research: here and there the Gospels have been described as books of pericopes or lectionaries, that is, as collections of the traditions about Jesus. Hardly anything could be more incorrect than this assumption.

There are several reasons why the Gospels are only rarely read from beginning to end. One very important reason is that we know them well – or think we do. Books we know well lack the element of excitement we feel, for example, when reading a novel or short story. Instead, one prefers to read isolated passages in order to refresh the memory. But this is to overlook one very important consideration: all the Gospels, though perhaps least of all Luke's, have an internal ‘line of tension’ extending from beginning to end.