Introduction to Jesus and the Gospels

“Jesus and the Gospels” is one of the most popular religion courses at colleges, and it is required at many seminaries and divinity schools. This textbook, written by an award-winning educator, is designed for a semester-long course in both these settings. Moreover, it could be used as a supplementary text in courses on christology, the historical Jesus, New Testament literature, and the Bible.

Murphy will provide an introduction to the gospels that does justice to the full range of modern critical methods and insights. He will discuss the implications of these methods for how we understand the nature of the gospels and how we can read them today. The chapters will sketch the portrait of Jesus that emerges from each gospel, and then examine the “canonical” view of Jesus by comparing and contrasting these pictures, as well as the ones that emerge from the non-canonical gospels and from the modern quest for the historical Jesus.

Chapter list:

Introduction, Theological and Historical Backgrounds;

Chapter 1, What is a Gospel?

Chapter 2, History of Critical Methods for Gospel Study;

Chapter 3, The Gospel of Mark;

Chapter 4, Q;

Chapter 5, Matthew;

Chapter 6, Luke;

Chapter 7, John;

Chapter 8, Other Gospels (Gospel of Thomas, Infancy Gospels, other Apocryphal Gospels); Chapter 8, Christian Interpretations of Jesus;

Chapter 9, The Historical Jesus;

Chapter 10, Conclusion; Glossary; Further Reading; Notes; Subject Index. (Charts, sidebars, illustrations, and maps.)

Frederick J. Murphy is Class of 1956 Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross, where he was named Distinguished Teacher of the Year in 2001. He is the author of The Religious World of Jesus: An Introduction to Second Temple Palestinian Judaism (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), which won the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award in the Humanities in 1991 (Alpha Sigma Nu is the Honor Society of Jesuit Colleges and Universities).