Thank you Andrew and Peter. How my reading of the epistles has been changed is very interesting. Whenever an epistle writer refers to ‘the gospel’ as they all do very frequently, my assumption now is that they have our Gospels in mind (or something similar).

When Paul says something like

(Eph 2:13-22) “ But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

The blood of Jesus has saved me and made me a part of His new humanity and that new creation is defined by Him (as He has been revealed to us in the Gospels) and this gives me a concrete goal - to be in Jesus and to become like the earthly, incarnate Jesus and a part of the community of believers who believe in this Jesus, our saviour, the Son of God.

So, to answer one of Peter’s questions first, I see a very concrete teaching in the epistles, strongly tied and in fact dependent for substance upon the Gospels.

I am not at all competent to tackle Andrew’s suggestions but I think that the sense that I get from rereading the epistles in the light of the gospels is that there was indeed only one gospel and the content of the gospel is precisely the birth+ministry+death+resurrection of Jesus and that is what indeed we have “fleshed out” in our Gospels. In Galatians, what Paul seems to be saying is that he received this gospel directly from the Holy Spirit and that it was the same gospel as that which Peter and James subscribed to; (ICor1:23)”we preach Christ crucified…”.

An interesting point is that in Acts 18:25 we find Apollos already having independently “been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus” and that indicates to me that the oral traditions that have coalesced into our Gospels were very widely known and were being passed on acurately by word of mouth amongst the believers. The very pericopial nature of the synoptics indicates that this was teaching designed for fairly accurate oral transmission and it makes me wonder whether the vague summaries that many scholars favour for being the content of the gospel (or kerygma) are not terribly misleading? In fact the idea that the Gospels are primarily written for chatecetical use itself needs to be questioned.

Getting to the question of the apparent divergence (between epistles and gospels), again I think that this goes away to a large extent if the epistles are in fact dependent on the Gospels for their content and meaning. I remember being very impressed with Cullman’s titles appraoch to Christology, but now I’m wondering whether very often when Paul says “Christ” does he in fact simply mean “the anointed”? There is real continuity between our Jesus and our transcendent Lord and Christ.

I would further suggest that the apparent lack of a lot of direct quotes actually makes sense if the ground is common; that is that the epistle writer knows that the readers know “the gospel” by heart. So, what some scholars have taken to be a hiatus between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” is a false dichotomy, there are not two but one and I too should get this sense if I read the epistles after immersing myself first in the gospels.

Live to serve : Serve to live