The gospels of the New Testament, compiled somewhere between AD50 and 110, get older every year. They also stay strikingly new, fuelled by a literary experimentalism that keeps them alive not as religious artefacts but as pieces of writing.
The Gospel of John stands apart, with no mention of the nativity or the breaking of bread at the last supper. But even though the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke share many of the same incidents, or “pericopes”, these short, self-contained passages appear in a different order in each one. In Matthew, the pericopes of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, are gathered together in a single block. In Luke, they’re separate. Each gospel is therefore a reworking of predetermined material for literary effect. Sound familiar?
The postmodern cut-up technique, as used by writers from William Burroughs to Julio Cortázar, is often traced back to Dada experiments of the 1920s. Think again. The word pericope comes from the Greek, meaning “cut around”, placing the gospels a mere preposition away from the cut-ups of the 20th century.
This resemblance to postmodern texts goes further. The pericopes are a mash-up of genres, including exorcisms, miracle stories, parables, sayings (prophetic and apocalyptic), proverbs, instructions for church discipline, and rules for communities. With a little more typographical flamboyance, the gospels could look like the kind of mosaic text readers might expect from Jennifer Egan.
These ancient avant-garde techniques mean that a composite picture of Jesus and his activities are created at the expense of a fixed realist portrait. The early church did consider merging the four gospels into a single linear story. The theologian Tatian compiled a version called the Diatessaron (“made of four”) in the second century, condensing the four gospels into a single narrative known as a “gospel harmony”. It didn’t catch on.
Already by AD155, Justin Martyr is comfortable referring to the gospels in the plural. He and other church leaders preferred the narrative flexibility of four separate versions. To paraphrase Einstein, the story of Jesus should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler than that.
The four perspectives of the New Testament offer a prefiguration of another postmodern commonplace – there is no single incontrovertible truth. This multiple Jesus story leaves space for interpretation between the repetitions, revisions and contradictions that punctuate four distinct gospels.
It’s a notion that glints with postmodern playfulness, undermining the traditional vision of the evangelion as an authoritative proclamation definitively announced by a herald. Instead, the one truth is announced in four different ways, a sophisticated narrative strategy that takes advantage of the fact that unreliable narrators are simply more plausible because they’re more recognisably human. Uncertainty and inconsistency better reflect the world as it is, in AD100 just as now.
The word gospel comes from the Old English “godspel”, a good story. The longevity and power of the New Testament gospels are deeply reassuring for literary experimentalists. Structural experiments are worth pursuing because they work – if they add to a story the authentic textures of lived experience, then the story may last for 2,000 years.
No wonder, then, that the repeatable story of Jesus seems to invite attempts to tell it again. The ongoing 21st-century renewal of the New Testament is a constructive reaction to the original material. Don’t be frightened, that’s the literary message of the four pre-postmodern gospels. Be bold, writers, because there’s more than one way to approach the truth.
• Richard Beard’s Acts of the Assassins is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99)
