In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 1 Beginnings Assemblies, “Gospel,” Gospels In most of the Christian assemblies meeting around the world today, a reading from one of the four Gospels—from Matthew or Mark or Luke or John— occupies a central moment in the worship service of every Sunday. This reading is a kind of pillar of the meeting, a reliably recurring ritual, a principal locus for meaning. In many assemblies, certain intensifying ceremonies accompany the Gospel reading and mark this moment as central. The assembly stands for the reading, facing the reader and the book. Or the reading is greeted with song. Or the Bible or Gospel book or lectionary is carried into the midst of the room, the assembly turns toward it and, perhaps, this movement is accompanied with candles and incense. Or, in the East, the book is brought out through the Holy Doors, which themselves carry images of the Gospel writers. Or all of these things occur. The preaching in the service usually follows the reading, often bearing special responsibility to articulate current meanings of the Gospel text that has been read alongside all the other texts. In a well-planned service, images from the Gospel text not infrequently fill the hymnody sung on that Sunday. If the congregation follows a lectionary—say, the Revised Common Lectionary—this very system of reading the Bible in community finds its coherence and its organization , in the first place, around the unfolding reading of Gospel texts. Indeed, the content of the feasts and seasons of the so-called “church year” is primarily brought to expression by whatever Gospel text is read. And, in some communities , the vigil of a feast or the Saturday evening vespers culminates in the reading of the Gospel text appointed for the feast or the Sunday immediately following. Much of this practice has been going on for a long time. All of the Christian Sunday and festival lectionaries used throughout the centuries have been centered in the Gospel. The Western and Eastern liturgical ceremonies of its reading are very old, reflecting Roman and Byzantine court rituals. Already in 4 The Four Gospels on Sunday the mid-second century, Justin Martyr said that “the memoirs of the apostles” were read in the Sunday meetings of the Christians with whom he was associated in Rome,1 these “memoirs” having been already explicitly identified by Justin himself as “the Gospels.”2 Alongside “the writings of the prophets,” these Gospels were then read, according to Justin, not necessarily in their entirety, but for “as long as there is time.” The very Christian preference for using the codex, the bound book, rather than the widely used but unwieldy scroll, may well have been encouraged by having the Gospels in the meeting of the church, perhaps having all of them there, even if only one was being read. We know that the codex was invented in the first and second centuries, and that thereby books began to look like what we call “books” today, with pages sewn together and with the whole easily held in the hand. This primary Christian book form enabled the written Gospels to be bound in a single book and carried into the Christian house meetings or “shop-churches” to be read aloud.3 Indeed, all four Gospels, copied out by hand on papyrus, could fit in a single ancient codex and thus be available to a community’s reader. Why this intense communal use? Was such a use envisioned by the books themselves, at their origin? And do the Gospels themselves have anything to say about the Christian meetings of the time of their origin or about the idea of a Christian meeting generally? Mutual Coherence, Not Panliturgism We need to be careful here. Such an attempt at biblical-liturgical thought—biblical studies aware of Christian worship, worship studies caring about the Bible— could be skating on thin ice. Good scholars have been here before, and they have quite frequently crashed though to the ruin—or, at least, to the scholarly rejection —of their project. There was a time not long ago when “it was fashionable 1. 1 Apology 67. 2. 1 Apology 66. 3. Cf. Graham N. Stanton, Jesus and Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 84–85, 165–91. Stanton interestingly proposes that the Christian preference for the codex may well have been due not only to its portability but to its countercultural sense of newness. These were new books, with a countercultural message. On “shop-churches,” see Marcus...

Share