What Do You Do First in Studying the Gospels: The Theological Narratives or Critical History?

When it comes to studying the Gospels, how should you do it?

Should one begin with a study of the critical issues like the Jesus tradition, synoptic problem, and genre and then move onto the narrative and theological texture of the Gospels?

OR

Should one first begin with the final form of the Gospels, describe their story and theological dynamics, and in light of that, them move on to discuss all the historical critical issues?

It comes down to whether one begins with a diachronic study or a synchronic study.

In my forthcoming volume The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus, I take the former view (diachronic) beginning with the Jesus tradition, synoptic problem, and genre and only then get into the narrative and theological texture of the Gospels. That said, a few chaps are leaving me with doubts. In a personal conversation with N.T. Wright, he reckons that this is precisely the way not to write about the Gospels! Start with the Gospels as they are, engage them on the level that we have them, get into their story, figure out what they are doing, admire the artistry and theological sophistication, and then afterwards begin looking at things like genre and sources.  Along similar lines, Chris Keith has recently argued that the historical task is not to cast aside the interpretive layer of the Gospels so that one can thereby scrounge through their underlying traditions in the hope of finding a pure and unadulterated image of Jesus in some textual relic. Rather, as Chris Keith says, “the first step in the critical reconstruction of the past that gave rise to the Gospels should be toward the interpretations of the Gospels in an effort to understand and explain them, not away  from them, as was the case for form criticism and its outgrowth …” (Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, 39-40). Hmm. They got me thinking!

Maybe its my inquisitive nature, but I’m committed to explaining how the Gospels came into being as a prerequisite to accounting for what they are doing and why they were written. Though in many ways, such questions must be approached simultaneously, since one cannot study the sources of the Gospels unless one first knows the Gospels themselves.