How to Read the Gospels: Moving Beyond Individual Stories

We tend to do strange things with the Gospels.

What we have in the New Testament are four stories of Jesus—each distinctive, each with its own unique features. Yes, there is much in common between them, but their distinctive contours and individual styles are worth paying attention to.

Yet often, both in the church and in the academy, we have broken down these extensive narratives to their smallest units, sometimes disconnecting them from what comes before and after. This is how children most often learn the stories of Jesus: individually and without any sense of which Gospel a story belongs to and how it contributes to the greater whole. This can be true for preaching and teaching on the Gospels as well, where the tendency is to preach on a single Gospel story or saying of Jesus at a time. In scholarship, form critics of the early twentieth century were particularly prone to isolate the sayings and episodes of Jesus from their literary context by emphasizing the oral stage of the transmission of a single passage (or pericope). Dissertations in the Gospels have often enough fixated on a single passage or even a single verse!

Acknowledging the uniqueness of each Gospel

Now, on the one hand, there’s usually no great harm in this approach. Surely, we can focus on individual vignettes.

Yet something important is lost when that’s as far as we look. Each Gospel writer has shaped their story of Jesus in ways that emphasize specific themes and messages about Jesus, and there is great value in studying a Gospel in its entirety to see and hear these messages clearly.

Each Gospel writer has shaped their story of Jesus in ways that emphasize specific themes and messages about Jesus.

Let’s take the Gospel of Matthew as an example. Matthew is the only Gospel to begin his narrative with a genealogy of Jesus. (Luke includes Jesus’s genealogy after the story of his birth in chap. 3.) This sets Matthew clearly and decisively in the context of the Jewish Scriptures and its storyline. Think, for example, of the genealogies early on in Genesis (chaps. 5 and 10) and the extended genealogy at the beginning of Chronicles.

Matthew is also the only “evangelist” (the scholarly term for a Gospel writer) to narrate a long sermon as the first major event of Jesus’s public ministry.

• In Mark, Jesus’s first action after calling disciples is an exorcism in the synagogue (1:21–28).
• In Luke, Jesus preaches on Isaiah in his home synagogue in Nazareth and faces the rejection that follows (4:16–30).
• In John, Jesus’s first action after calling disciples is turning water into wine at a wedding (2:1–12).
• But in Matthew, Jesus chooses a few disciples (4:18–22) and then teaches them about the arriving kingdom in what can easily be considered his most famous sermon—the Sermon on the Mount (5:1–7:29).

Such an extensive section of teaching at the beginning of Jesus’s Galilean ministry sets a different tone and pace for Matthew’s Gospel. It is also the first of five great discourses that appear in Matthew (see chaps. 10, 13, 18, and 24–25).

Reading the Gospels as ancient biographies

These distinctive starting points suit the kind of writing (genre) that the Gospels are. They all, to various degrees, resemble Greco-Roman biographies, something Richard Burridge has carefully demonstrated in What Are the Gospels? (Baylor, 2018). They each focus on Jesus of Nazareth, and each of them show him to be the Messiah who has come to inaugurate God’s kingdom in this world.

Thematic arrangements

In biographies of this era, themes could guide the structure and plotting of a narrative as much as, and at points more than, chronology.

This is a feature of the Gospels—and one that has been eye-opening for me in my own work. Attending to thematic arrangement helps me to consider why Matthew begins where he does, both for his Gospel (a genealogy) and for Jesus’s public ministry (a long segment of teaching). Both choices fit themes about Jesus that Matthew particularly wants to communicate: his Davidic lineage and his role as teacher and bringer of God’s kingdom.

Synoptic relationships

Recognizing the freedom of ancient biographers to use sequencing to tell us something beyond chronology also helps us if we take up the task of comparing one Gospel with another. Sometimes scholars speak of the “Synoptic problem”—the question of which of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) was the source(s) for the others. Given how closely parallel these three Gospels are—often sharing the same accounts and sometimes sharing verbatim language—many have argued that Mark was written first and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark along with other sources to write their Gospels.

One of the things that becomes readily apparent in a close comparison of these three Gospels is that they don’t always share the same order of events. (For just one example, compare the three vignettes of Matt 8:1–15 with Luke 5:12–16; 7:1–10; and 4:38–39.) Since the genre of Greco-Roman biography allows for flexibility in sequencing, we can ask about an evangelist’s impulse for ordering accounts. In the case of Matthew 8:1–15, especially in light of all of chapters 8 and 9, we see Matthew’s interest in highlighting Jesus as a compassionate and powerful healer (8:17).

Historical contexts

Yet reading a Gospel narratively—paying close attention to its storyline from beginning to end—doesn’t mean ignoring its historical moorings.

Since the Gospels, as stories, are “cultural products,” as Joel Green refers to them,¹ studying the cultural setting that surrounds the story is important interpretive work. For example, knowing that early audiences would have understood Herod the Great to be not simply a Jewish king but a client king representing Roman interests helps to set Matthew 2 in its historical (Roman) context. And knowing that Jewish people in the first century would perceive Pharisees positively and tax collectors and Roman centurions negatively helps to clarify the sometimes surprising responses to Jesus by various groups in the Gospels.

Appreciating the particular themes of the Gospels

What is that value of reading Gospels as wholes? If we do so, we are able to hear themes that the four Gospels have in common. Themes like:

• The kingdom of God, with God’s reign being inaugurated by Jesus and his ministry of healing, teaching, and compassion.
• Jesus as Messiah, the Davidic king who both fulfills some Jewish expectations (e.g., enters Jerusalem as its king) and defies others (e.g., becoming king through his missional death).
• Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament hopes and promises and as the completion of the Old Testament story.

Additionally, by reading a Gospel holistically, we can also readily hear its distinctive themes—themes it doesn’t share with all three other Gospels. We can hear how Luke gives prominence to the theme of hospitality, both as something God in Christ enacts and as something disciples of Jesus are to embody.² We can hear how John identifies Jesus with the metaphor of a Passover lamb. John begins his Gospel with this acclimation by John the Baptist: “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (1:29, 36). And at John’s climactic point, Jesus dies as the Passover lambs are being sacrificed (19:14, 31).³

One of the gifts of reading Mark on its own terms, from beginning to end, is experiencing how much of the story is taken up with Jesus’s final week in Jerusalem. Close to 40 percent of Mark is set in Jerusalem and points towards Jesus’s death (Mark 11–16). The percentage becomes half if you begin where Jesus first predicts his death (8:31). This distinctive shaping of Mark highlights just how important Jesus’s death is to his mission. The kingdom’s arrival is bound up in Jesus’s missional death and resurrection (a resurrection announced but not narrated in Mark). The king dies, conquering death, and the kingdom arrives in all its life-giving power.

Practical guidance for interpreting the Gospels

As we consider practical guidance for how best to read and interpret a Gospel, I find it helpful to think each Gospel has two “levels.”

First, there’s the plot, which includes all the interesting facets that so captivate us about stories, even historical ones, and where our attention immediately goes when reading a story. This includes features like settings, characters, action, and conflict. Reading from the plot level is crucial to interpreting a Gospel.

Yet we should also pay attention to the thematic level of a Gospel (what narrative scholars have called the discourse level). On this level, we hear important themes emerge. At this level, we are invited to train our eye to see a Gospel’s wider vistas, especially since themes can typically be identified and confirmed only across several chapters, at minimum.

The best way to find themes is to read large sections of a Gospel, listening for the repeated ideas and motifs that emerge.

Consider the theme of the inclusion of gentiles in God’s salvation within Matthew’s Gospel. When Jesus heals the servant of a Roman centurion (Matt 8:5–13), you might wonder if gentile inclusion is thematic in Matthew. Yet the theme doesn’t clearly show up anywhere in Matthew 5–11, so you’d have to look further afield to see that Matthew does highlight this theme across his Gospel. It shows up sporadically (e.g., Matt 12:18, 21; 15:21–28; 21:43), but especially at the beginning and ending of the Gospel (Matt 1:3, 5, 6; 2:1–12; 4:12–16; 28:18–20).

If themes can be spread out or clustered (or both!), the best way to find themes is to read large sections of a Gospel, listening for the repeated ideas and motifs that emerge.

Concordances or word search tools can help us find some themes. For example, searching for the words “repent” and “repentance” in Luke shows this to be an important theme in the Third Gospel. These words occur in Luke fourteen times (in English) and only eight times in Matthew and three times in Mark (and not at all in John).

Whatever tools we draw on, there is nothing like reading through a Gospel with our eyes trained on its themes for illuminating key messages of a Gospel writer.

You’re invited!

The lovely thing about reading the Gospels as stories is that it taps into how we already read most narratives we come across. When we pick up novels or histories, we read them as wholes, from beginning to end.

So, next time you pick up your Bible, give it a try. Read all of Matthew (or John or Exodus or Ruth). Notice patterns, pay attention to the plot, listen for themes. Whole new storied panoramas are waiting for you to find them.

Jeannine Brown’s recommended resources

Mobile Ed courses on interpreting the Gospels

Related content

• How Jesus’s Death Resolves 6 Key Themes in Luke
• Women in Luke’s Gospel: Christianity’s Elevation & Concern for Women
• “The Earliest Manuscripts Do Not Have …”: How to Preach Mark 16 & John 8
• Did Jesus Falsely Predict His Return? | Jeannine Brown on Matthew 16:28

1. Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1997), 19.
2. See Jeannine Brown, “What Does Luke Tell Us About Hospitality?” Henry Center, streamed live on March 24, 2025, YouTube video, 1:16:48, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykGsPDn0XWw.
3. See Jeannine K. Brown, The Gospels as Stories: A Narrative Approach to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (Baker Academic, 2020), 128–32.