Jesus and the Gospels, taught by Dr. Fred Niedner

The early Christians took four “gospels” that tell Jesus’ story into their canon and almost immediately struggled with “harmonizing” them. Still today, some attempt to force these four voices into a single melodic line of the sort some of us remember hearing read every year during Lent. This six-week course taught during Lent involved listening to the unique voice, theology, and proclamation of each gospel, with particular emphasis on how the Passion Narrative of each reveals its own peculiar way of melding Jesus’ story and the story of its hearers and readers into one liberating, life-given narrative. The more carefully we listen to this quartet, the more we come to understand that no solo voice could ever communicate the fullness of what the fourth gospel called “the Word of God dwelling among us.”