Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective. By FRANCIS WATSON.

Abstract

In this impressive, energetic new magnum opus Francis Watson sets out to topple key conventional paradigms of gospel origins in favour of a far-reaching new construct. In doing so, he extends the process of gospel formation and canonization well into the fourth century. Professor Watson’s astonishing range of scholarly interests and methods is well known to his readers: he has moved over the years without apparent cognitive dissonance from social-scientific via theological readings of the New Testament to Pauline hermeneutics, and here now to a comprehensive thesis about the gospels. Watson believes New Testament scholarship has been fundamentally misguided in assuming (a) that the writing of the gospels was complete by the year 100 and (b) that their diversity is a cause of distortion and therefore requires either implausible harmonization or else the sequential resolution of a synoptic ‘problem’. Instead of gospel scholarship’s conventional reverse-engineering exercise that sought pristinely ‘authentic’ gold beneath the dross of multiply distorting traditions, Watson claims to show how ‘the dynamic of the Jesus tradition issues in a proliferation of gospel writing and culminates in the construction of a fourfold canonical gospel out of the mass of the available literature’ (p. 7, italics mine).