I want to expand a little bit on Bishop McGrath’s statement, blogged below.

On the level of the down n’ dirty, bare-bones of Scriptural study, he’s right. The Gospels are not straight history, as we understand history in the 21st century. If they were history, we would call them “historical books.” If they were biographies, we call them that. But we don’t. We call them gospels, which is something different.

The Gospel is the good news of our salvation through Jesus Christ. The Gospels are the written record of that good news. They are overtly and unambiguously accounts of Jesus seen with the eyes of faith, shaped in light of experience of the Risen Lord. There is nothing “modern” or “relativistic” in that. When you actually read the gospels, you understand that faith is a crucial element in perceiving Jesus rightly – from experiencing miracles to understanding parables, those who have “eyes to see” are the ones who…see.

That is the truth that Bishop McGrath is expressing.

However, he, like too many others who choose to emphasize this point, do so at the risk of implying that historical events are irrelevant to the proceedings, that what we read are simply “reflections” with no basis in historical events. Of course, this is not the case. The evangelists were not writing reflections or meditations or creating theological systems. They were recording what they understood to have been events that occurred in history, in time and space. The impact of post-resurrection faith is not to inspire fiction or allegory, but is to help them see the meaning in events, and to draw that out. The true meaning, we would say, since we believe them to be inspired and protected by the Holy Spirit.

It’s like the difference between telling the story of your grandmother’s life as you experienced it and heard her talk about it, and then telling the story of that same grandmother’s life after she died and you discover that as a young woman, she lost the love of her life, who was not your grandmother, during World War II. Even if that was all you knew, it would impact your understanding of the grandmother you thought you knew. The events of her life that you experienced and shared would be the same, but their meaning would be enlightened and expanded.

Simplistic, but similar, and a little hard for us positivists to understand. But still the way it is.

Unfortunately, in the enthusiasm to make this distinction, the importance of the events themselves is lost, and we get the impression that they are not that important. They are, and anyone who forgets that needs to begin each day with a quick reading of the first few verses of Luke’s gospel. That should do it.

And remember – if the gospels were, indeed, only history, as we think of it, we would be talking about a dead Jesus, and what would be the point of that. The Gospels are good news because the Jesus they describe is alive. We read the Gospels, not just know what he did, but to recognize him when we encounter him today.