Origen called the Gospels the “first-fruits of all that has been written.” Do we concur? Over the past 150 years, the Gospels have come under attack my countless secular scholars. In response, orthodox Christians gave developed robust defenses of their reliabilty. Yet in doing so, the unity of the Four Evangelists, and a sense of the Gospels as offerring a coherent theological account of the person of Christ, has often been lost.
In this course, students will begin to grapple with the big questions of the last two centuries in New Testament scholarship such as the synoptic problem, the historical Jesus, the Sitz im Leben of the Evangelists, Johannine authorship, and more. Alongside the Gospels themselves, students will read Schlatter’s The History of the Christ and Faith in the New Testament. Beyond this, however, they will strive toward a synthetic understanding of the church’s first creed as presented by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: that Jesus Christ is Lord and God.