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by Susan Polege
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There are very few texts that survive and duplicate the historical events as the Gospels. So, we do not have much to compare with them. Even among those four Gospels, there are not four independent accounts, because much of the material (at least for the Synoptic Gospels) is dependent on the earliest Gospel, believed to be Mark.
But something I did learn in this study: that in understanding Biblical writing, we must remember that the writers were writing in a literary form, for particular audiences. Most (if not all) of the authors of the Biblical texts were Jewish and were writing for Jewish audiences, or early Christian audiences. The split between Christianity and Judaism took place after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. After the split (the Jews apparently expelling the Christians), Christians needed to see why they were separating from Judaism, so the some of the Gospel text in Matthew shows the Pharisees as the "bad guys" much more than the other gospels. This emphasis was sort of a libelous revenge thing, according to Shorto.
The literary forms that Jews (and the early Christians as former Jews) were used to reading were more subtle than the literal way the new Gentile Christians interpreted the Biblical texts. Shorto says that midrash and pesher were both literary techniques used by Jews to read meaning into an event by using Scriptural references. Shorto says that the details from the passion narrative in the Gospels were mostly strung together from Old Testament writings to give spiritual meaning to the historical fact of the death of Jesus. A remarkable number of the elements of the passion story are clearly parallel or verbatim to Old Testament stories, which was a standard method of finding meaning in ancient Judaism. It seems that the ancient religion was giving this new branch the flexibility to use old texts and reinterpret them to have contemporary significance. Ironic.