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The Single Gospel

The Single Gospel

Last updated on: August 16, 2016 at 9:11 am by Frank Viola

The Single Gospel 2016-08-16T09:11:15-04:00 Frank Viola

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Neil Averitt has just released his new project, The Single Gospel. This is an integrated text of the four Christian gospels. It takes the texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and edits them together into one consolidated story.

I caught up with Neil to discuss his new book.

Enjoy!

Instead of asking, “what is your book about,” I’m going to ask the question that’s behind that question. And that unspoken question is, “how are readers going to benefit from reading your book?”

Neil Averitt: Knowing the life of Christ – really knowing the life of Christ – is an essential part of becoming a Christian. This book will help by making the full text of the gospels more accessible to ordinary readers.

Today even believers know less about Jesus than they think they do. That’s because the gospels are no longer widely read. In our secular, consumer-oriented world, Christianity has fallen out of favor. Anyone who follows newspapers or television will see commentators attacking and criticizing people of faith. When you read their comments, it’s obvious that they don’t know the basic facts of Jesus’ life. They are clueless about even the most famous events and teachings – the Sermon on the Mount, the driving of the money-changers from the Temple, the loaves and fishes. But even our own friends and relatives, the people that we would most like to know Christ’s message, aren’t familiar with the stories that could lead them to a greater appreciation of the goodness of Jesus Christ and his message for all of us.

I myself am a good example of what has gone wrong with Christian education. When I started on this journey, I knew very little about Jesus. I was the son of two scientists, both geologists, good people, but neither of them believers. I got a very good secular education – Harvard, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School. I felt proud of my achievements, and for a long time I was satisfied that I had learned a good bit more than other people.

Gradually I came to realize that something was missing. The life I was living did not lead to harmony with the world around me, or with other people. But when I looked at the Bible for guidance I grew perplexed. The four gospel accounts of Jesus’ life – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – are complex and hard to fit together. Which event came first? What did Jesus do next? Why did he do that?

I wrote this book to help myself, and to help others like me, to better understand the life of Jesus. My book weaves the four gospels together into one single story, from beginning to end. This uses all the words and only the words of scripture. However, this material is now arranged in a way that is easier to follow and understand. I hope it will make the story of Jesus’ life more accessible to everyone, and will help people come to appreciate his wisdom, and to love him.

What motivated you to write this book?

Neil Averitt: I came to a decision to write the book in stages, rather than at a single moment.

When I was a freshman in college saw that a new translation was needed. I had set out to read the Bible. The school library had shelves of them, in all sorts of editions and translations. But none of them seemed quite right. The King James had all of its great language, but many other passages were antique and hard to understand. The more modern translations often lacked the kind of dignity that you associate with scripture. They had changed many of the familiar phrases. Instead of the angels saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men,” they might say something like “peace to those on whom his favor rests.” This might be good language scholarship, but it undervalues the traditions of the Christian community, in my opinion.

Later on I came to realize that the substance of the gospels needed to be better known as well. This kind of insight might come to a person anywhere, but for me it came during a visit to the monastic republic of Mount Athos in Greece. That’s a spectacular place, a sort of “Christian Tibet,” part of the unfamiliar world of the Orthodox churches, and a surviving part of the old Byzantine Empire. But I found faith there in forms I had not seen before. The lives that the monks had chosen for themselves seemed to make them calm and cheerful, at peace with the world. The nighttime services were done by candlelight, with the lighting dim and low, and they conveyed a sense of connectedness with something larger. I left convinced that people would be happier if they were more familiar with Christian teachings, and if the gospels made more readable.

Finally, I was motivated to write this book in order to help counteract a drift toward indifference or actual hostility toward Christianity in our culture. We live in an age of the world where religion is becoming more important in many other countries. This book will help to put the traditions and teachings of Christianity back on the table, in an original form that will help us remember where our own faith has come from, and what its virtues are.

Tell us a bit about the experiences that shaped the insights in the book.

Neil Averitt: Really the main thing to note is that this book is not primarily about my own insights. I have tried to let the gospels speak for themselves.

That goes a long way toward making this book unique. Most people who write about the life of Jesus feel that they need to add their own interpretations as well. That’s useful in principle, but it can often go wrong. Most interpretations seem to end up portraying Jesus as being exactly like the writer.

To avoid that I have tried to keep myself out of this story, and to let the gospels come through to the reader in their own voice. There are hundreds of footnotes and endnotes in the book, but they have the limited purpose of making it clear what the gospels themselves are saying. The notes explain difficult language, or provide helpful background details such as a description of who was holding political power at a certain time. But they do not put my own spin on the material.

I have been similarly inclusive in the treatment of different Christian denominations. I have identified passages that are particularly important to one or another denomination, but have not expressed conclusions about any of them.

Where personal insights do come through is in the Introduction to the book. There I allow myself some latitude to talk about my own background and my views on the role of faith.

For me that involved a journey of discovery. As I mentioned before, my own parents were non-religious, but I was born into a family with a longstanding religious tradition, which had produced many clergymen over the years. My own childhood was agnostic, with very little religious instruction. All that began to change when I was on a motorcycle trip in France, and had an accident that put me in the hospital for a few days. The hospital was run by a religious order, and each evening the nuns came through, chanting something haunting and otherworldly. I couldn’t understand the words, but for the first time I came to sense that other values existed, and that a life could be lived in light of those values. I started to become interested in learning more.

You can talk about this throughout the book, but sketch out briefly some of the things that make life worth living.

Neil Averitt: One of the main things that comes through from the gospels is the importance of connectedness. Connections are vital to living our lives with full humanity. They can operate on several different levels – connection with the natural world around us, and with our fellow man, and with God.

I have noticed places in my life where these things were either present or absent, and was struck by the difference between them.

The lack of connectedness became apparent when I first entered adult life. I thought back to the European towns that I had seen on my travels, and the classic American towns with churches at their center, and realized that they had helped to bring a sense of community that was no longer with us. The rational secular laws I had studied in law school didn’t seem to be providing a similar structure for people’s lives or making them particularly happy. There were a lot of alienated strivers in our world. But what was the alternative?

The alternative can be found in the teachings of Jesus, as recorded in the gospels. Those have made me more patient and connected with the people around me. I have become more willing to accept each of these people for who they are, rather than looking for who I wish they would be – to see them, as far as I am able, as God sees them. The words of the Sermon on the Mount have not encouraged me to set aside my judgments, but rather not to judge in the first place. For your heavenly Father “is kind even to the ungrateful and the selfish.”

Tell us about the research behind the book. How did you put it together? Did you use any of the other books that have done the same thing (some of which are out of print now).

Neil Averitt: This book presented two main challenges – assembling the material into a single chronology, and then presenting it in a fresh translation. Those jobs required two different approaches to the research.

First of all, the book edits the four accounts – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – together into one continuous story in chronological order. This makes the narrative account a lot clearer. The sequence of events becomes linear. The announcement to the shepherds and the visit of the magi now follow one another in a natural order, rather than having to be mentally assembled from separate accounts.

Moreover, some particular events become more understandable by having all their details brought together in one place. This is the case with Jesus’ climactic interview with Pilate, or with the important role played by women in the discovery of the empty tomb, both of which now have their details spread among all four accounts.

The book also makes the gospels more accessible through a fresh translation. I had to go back to the original Greek to provide new versions of the transitional passages so that the combined account will flow clearly and smoothly. Once I was working on that, however, I went further and also introduced varying tones in the translation – mildly traditional in most places, somewhat freer when conveying difficult concepts, and in the original words of the King James when familiarity demands them. I made a special effort to identify familiar turns of phrase — from ordinary speech or from gospel songs — such as “turn the other cheek” — and to be sure that those are present in the traditional wording.

The result is a sort of ideal platonic form of the gospels – the Bible story as everyone thinks they have remembered it all along.

The two steps of this process involved quite different research issues.

In preparing the integrated narrative, there were only a limited number of research materials available. This is a change from earlier centuries. Integrated gospels were very popular in the mid- to late- Nineteenth Century. However, those volumes are a bit too old to be useful guides today: translations and scholarship have changed too much. And since then, the fully integrated gospel has passed out of fashion. Instead, people have been preparing gospel “harmonies,” which set out the four accounts in four parallel columns. That still helps to see the relationships among them, however. I have made use of several such references. Those include Orville Daniel’s four-column presentation of the New International Version, Ralph Heim’s of the Revised Standard Version, and Thomas Mumford’s of the King James.

By contrast, a whole wealth of references are available to help in the translation. Because of the number of sources that are relevant in interpreting any given phrase, electronic and internet-based tools are especially useful. I found the references prepared by Biblos and biblecc.com to be particularly good. For each verse of the Bible those provided links to twenty or so standard translations, as well as a Greek-English lexicon for each individual word.

What do you say to the person who objects and says, “The Gospels are not supposed to be put together, but each one is to be read on its own?”

Neil Averitt: The gospels are a very rich source of material, and they can be read in different ways for different purposes.

Of course, the four gospel accounts were written separately. They have individual authors – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – and they have individual points of view on the life of Jesus. Moreover, only these accounts, as so written, are canonical. Any study of the gospels must sooner or later come back to those accounts in order to be grounded in an authoritative text.

That said, however, there is also value in a consolidated narrative. It’s important to remember that while there may be four gospel accounts, there is only one underlying gospel. There was only one life of Jesus, and one core body of Christian belief. The four gospels illuminate this one underlying reality from their four different vantage points, but bringing these four accounts together will give us our most rounded and nuanced portrait of Jesus and his life. A consolidated account is likely to come closer to this single underlying truth than any one incomplete gospel can do.

But modesty is called for. While the consolidated narrative is closely related to scripture, it is not scripture itself. Inevitably there will have been errors in my editing process. So the book should be seen as a companion or a study guide, rather than as something that competes with the four gospels.

What do you hope readers will walk away with after they finish your book?

Neil Averitt: Courage in their faith – the kind of courage that comes from real familiarity with it.

So I hope readers will walk away with a willingness to express deep admiration for Jesus. His teachings speak fundamentally to the human heart, and they carry wisdom to our own day. When he tells us to “Love your enemies,” and to seek out “treasures in heaven,” he is giving a profoundly corrective message in a strife-ridden and materialistic world.

I also hope that readers will walk away with a sense that the gospels are a story that can be shared widely, without hesitation. The book should appeal to several different groups within the religious community. The first and most obvious are the actively committed members of Christian churches, who will find all the familiar stories of the gospels here, set out in an understandable order in all their rich detail. A second group will be members of the secular middle class, who will find in this book a way to reconnect with one of the world’s great works of philosophy and literature, and also a way to reconnect with their traditional faith. And finally, the book may also appeal to our Jewish cousins, who may find in the figure of Jesus an example of an interesting and important First Century reform rabbi.

The bottom line: I hope the readers of this book will walk away with a renewed appreciation for the life of Jesus, and with a sense that they have now become truly familiar with the gospels, from beginning to end.

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