THE GREAT FAIRY-STORY

'The Gospels contain a fairy-story, a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels - peculiarly artistic, beautiful and moving; 'mythical' in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. The story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the 'inner consistency of reality'. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of the Primary Art, that is Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.'

JRR Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories in The Monster and the Critics, p.155.

CHOOSING THE GOSPELS

'In one sense, of course, the answer to the question: "Who chose the Gospels?" is, everybody who has know something of that indemonstrable power and majesty and, like Aristides, Justin, Irenaeus, Clement, and countless others, has chosen to live by their telling of the story of Jesus. But second century Christian leaders would have said that neither individuals nor churches had the authority to "choose" which of the many Gospels they liked, but to receive the ones given by God and handed down by Christ through his apostles. 

Christianity, of course, is not the only religion to claim Scriptures which its practitioners receive as revelation from God. But when encountering claims to divine revelation, such as Christians once made and even continue to make concerning their Gospels, one faces that paradoxical necessity of choosing books which one has no authority to choose. And I think I hazard no risk in suggesting this can only be done by heeding the call once heeded by St Augustine: tolle lege, take up and read.' 

CE Hill, Who  chose the Gospels? p.246. 

THE GOSPELS

'Moreover, I would wish that all, making a resolution similar to my own, did not keep themselves away from the words of the Saviour. For they possess a terrible power in themselves, and are sufficient to inspire those who turn aside from the path of rectitude with awe; while the sweetest rest is afforded those who make a diligent practice of them. If, then, you have any concern for yourself, and if you are eagerly looking for salvation, and if you believe in God, you may -since you are not indifferent to the matter - become acquainted with the Christ of God, and after being initiated, live a happy life.' 

Justin Martyr in CE Hill, Who chose the Gospels? p.240. 

CHOOSING THE GOSPELS

'...we have no evidence that the church ever sat down collectively or as individual churches and composed criteria for judging which Gospel (or other literature) it thought best suited its needs. On the contrary, the key realization which best explains our inability to find an ultimate "chooser", which best explains why the church didn't take the easy way out with some kind of singular Gospel and why it never cobbled together a set of criteria to all the Gospel candidates, is that the church essentially did not believe it had a choice in the matter! The question "why did you choose these Gospels?" would not have made sense to many Christians in the second century, for the question assumes that the church, or someone in it, had the authority to make the choice. To many, it would be like the question, "why did you choose your parents?"' 

CE Hill, Who Chose the Gospels? Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy, p.231. 

JESUS VS.PAUL

'Christians, particularly in the Western world, have for a long time been divided between "epistles people" and "gospels people." The "epistles people" have thought of Christianity primarily in terms of Jesus's death and resurrection "saving us from our sins." The "gospels people" have thought primarily about in terms of following Jesus in feeding the hungry, helping the poor, and so on. The "epistles people" have found it difficult to give a clear account of what was going on in Jesus's kingdom-announcement and his call to his followers to be "perfect." The "gospels people" - or perhaps we should say the "beginning-of-the-gospels people," since the line of thought they embrace usually screens out the last few chapters - have often found it difficult to explain why the Jesus who was doing those remarkable things had to die, and die so soon. They have often found it difficult, in consequence, to relate to the central themes of Pauline theology. 

This either/or split does no justice, in fact, to either the epistles or the gospels. Still less does it do justice to Jesus himself.' 

Tom Wright, Virtue Reborn, p.96. 

THE GOSPELS

'"Martha, Martha," I don't think Jesus ever speaks to anyone else in the Gospels that way. "Martha, Martha." He repeats her name twice, exasperated but loving, admonitory but intimate. It's one of those many details that convince me so much of the Gospels is true, the kind of intimate, intensely personal way of speaking, a detail that would never have been invented by someone trying to bludgeon the reader into some didactic lesson, the kind of address that a real person once used for a real person he loved, as much as for her faults as in spite of them. "Martha, Martha." "Andrew, Andrew." It is not the tone simply of love; it is the tone of friendship, an unmistakable tone, a tone that I did not only recognize but suddenly, breathtakingly, knew.'

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable: reflections on friendship, sex and survival, p.31.

THE GOSPELS

'Christmas and Easter are so full of church pageant and family custom that it is entirely possible to forget how the stories told on these two days did indeed rupture history and leave the world changed, implausible as that may seem. At the same time, they have created a profound continuity. If we sometimes feel adrift from human kind, as if our technology-mediated life on this planet has deprived us of the brilliance of the night sky, the smell and companionship of mules and horses, the plain food and physical peril and weariness that made our great-grandparents' lives so much more like the life of Jesus than any we can imagine, then we can remind ourselves that these stories have stirred billions of souls over thousands of years, just as they stir our souls, and our children's. What gives them their power? They tell us that there is a great love that has intervened in history, making itself known in terms that are startingly, and inexhaustibly, palpable to us as human beings. They are tales of love, lovingly enacted once, and afterward cherished and retold - by the grace of God certainl;y, because they are, after all, the narrative of an obscure life in a minor province. Caesar Augustus was also said to be divine, and there aren't many songs about him.'
Marilynne Robinson, 'Wondrous Love' in When I Was a Child I Read Books, p.127.

THE GOSPEL

'...the gospel is not a theological idea or two. It is theology grounded in the actual events of Jesus' life. The gospel and the Gospels are one.'

John Dickson, Promoting the Gospel: The whole of life for the cause of Christ, p.14.

THE GOSPELS

'I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that none of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage - though it may no doubt contain errors - pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read.'

CS Lewis, 'Fern Seed and Elephants' in Faith, Christianity and the Church, p.244.

JESUS & THE GOSPELS

'We are not being told of a superman but of someone supremely human.'

JB Phillips, Ring of Truth: A Translator's Testimony, p.65.

THE GOSPELS

'I have read in Latin and Greek, scores of myths but I did not find the slightest flavour of myth here. There is no hysteria, no careful working for effect and no attempt at collusion. These are not embroided tales: the material is cut to the bone. One sensed again and again that understatement which we have been taught to think is more "British" than Oriental. There is an almost childlike candour and simplicity, and the total effect is tremendous. No man could ever have invented such a character as Jesus. No man could have set down such artless and vulnerable accounts as these unless some real Event lay behind them.'

JB Phillips, Ring of Truth: A Translator's Tale, p.58.

THE GOSPELS

'Gospels scholarship must free itself from the grip of the skeptical paradigm that presumes the Gospels to be unreliable unless, in every particular case or saying, the historian succeeds in providing independent verification. For such a suspicious approach the Gospels are not believable until and unless the historian can verify each claim that they make to recount history. But this approach is seriously faulty precisely as an historical method. It can only result in a misleadingly minimal collection of uninteresting facts about a historical figure stripped of any real significance. Neither in this nor in countless other cases of historical testimony can the historian verify everything. Testimony asks to be trusted. '

Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, p.506.

THE GOSPELS

'Trusting testimony is not an irrational act of faith that leaves critical rationality aside; it is, on the contrary, the rationally appropriate way of responding to authentic testimony. Gospels understood as testimony are the entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus.'

Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, p.5.

THE GOSPELS

'Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story.'

JRR Tolkien in Humphrey Carpenter, The Letters of JRR Tolkien, p.100.