The Gospels as Thematic Representations

There is a notion about the gospels that has impressed itself upon me while trying to write a "plotting"--as it were--of the Gospel of Mark.  I don't hold with the idea that the gospels are myths or fictions or satires or even symbolic representations.  Of course there are certain tenacious problems with maintaining that the gospels are factual accounts or even "histories" (the latter notion from commentators often attended by assertions that we must have a more or less flexible idea of what "history" meant to the ancients.)

All of the above ideas, I am afraid, ranging from the "history" of the literalists to the "myth" of the critics, address the notion of reliability of the gospels from a set standpoint of presumed representation about our world and about the place of "the man or the myth" of Jesus in our world.  What if the gospels were never intended to be representations about our world?  I know I am introducing here the idea that the religious quality of the gospels might presume a reality of more ostensible substance than our collective notions of "hard and fast" concrete reality--manifestations of physical reality as a norm being accepted presumptively by nearly all of the interpretation camps I alluded to above.

But to say (as we might reflexively) that there is a reality of more objective substance than that of some ideation of the gospels as addressing a "hyper-reality" (or some such) detracts in no way from the tentative assertion that the gospels as intended were written in light of contentions about how Jesus' realm is rightly viewed in distinction to the realm of our concrete reality.  One need not accept the contentions of an author's premises, in order to understand those premises as being key to understanding the author's intended message.

At the beginning of Mark there is a mention of John's ministry in light of some more-or-less correctly attributed, more-or-less correctly translated Old Testament passages.  The passages as presented in Mark speak of one crying out in the desert to make way for the Lord; the passages as presented in the Old Testament speak of one crying out to make a way for the Lord in the desert.  Much might be made of notions about the attribution, translation, and application of those passages--but conventionally those considerations are held in light of a notion that the Gospels are going to show how the lordship of Jesus is to be established through the workings-out of the Gospels, gospels that end in the deserved lordship of Jesus displayed in the Resurrection and in the effectual lordship of Jesus over the evil-ridden world existing as a promise of the End Times.

But Jesus is, in the conceptualizations of the messiah playing out through the Gospels, always the Lord.  However the passages about John's appearance play out, one thing they do not convey is the notion that Jesus is an aspirant to the lordship of the world.  We are confronted by the approach of the King, not of the man or god or god-man who Would Be King.  When Jesus (in gospels other than Mark) is offered the world by Satan, Jesus' refusal to Satan's offer is founded on piety--on rightful worship given only to God--rather than on ratification of Satan's "possession" of the kingdoms of the world as being of any substance in the realm of Jesus' lordship.

Even the lowliest of Jesus' followers is--in the conceptualities presented by Jesus--possessor of houses and fields and family innumerable, as the consequence and reward of renouncing such houses and fields and family as they might exist in our visions of concrete reality.  The price of such possession--training ourselves to thank God for his blessings on people who might not be ourselves but who yet are manifestations of our Savior--can be a difficult price to pay, but we are assured that in the eyes of God we are credited with offering back to God an entire world with our thanks for having created the entire world.

The world that we offer back to God is only in some manner of representation ours to give (or ever to possess) yet such notions are critical to understanding the ministry of Jesus and the message of the Gospels.  How much more, we might say, are the kingdoms of the world (now and ever and always) the possession of Jesus.  This is no small consideration, in that the standard conceptualizations of proper Gospel interpretation are founded on the idea that God has intruded thereby on the pitiable realm of humanity.  (Commentators like to use such terms as "in-breaking" and the like.)  This is not so.  The Gospels do not show Jesus coming in to the realm of humanity.  The Gospels show humanity--by such means as we have eyes to see and ears to hear--being provided glimpses and whispers of the overriding reality of Jesus' lordship that the Gospels presume.

The notions above are my attempt to show what I think the Gospel writers took as foundational premises.  Accepted or not as they might be by any critic--their believability or their savor is of scant import as to meaningful interpretation of the Gospel writers' intent.  It remains to my feeble efforts to name what I think is the best conceptualization of what the Gospels are (rather than myth, fiction, satire, symbolism, etc.): I think the Gospels are best understood as "thematic representations," such themes being of varied length and import and relationship respectively to the most basic intelligible premises of the Gospels' content.  One of the chief of those themes, as I have described above, is the perpetual lordship of Jesus, as against a persistent and mistaken theme evinced by most other commentaries: that the Gospels tell the story of Jesus attaining (or re-attaining) his lordship.

The truths about Jesus are themes that exist always, not stories about this or that coming or going, and the only way to understand this reality effectively is to understand that Jesus exists in the true reality, and our mutable concrete world is but a shadow of that.