MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE, AND JOHN
When one opens his or her copy of the Bible, they find that there are four accounts of the life and death of Jesus Christ. The four Gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These works cannot actually be called biographical accounts in the technical sense, for they do not provide an extensive record of the entire life of Jesus. In fact, minus the events of His birth and one reference to His youth, (Matt. 1-2; Lk. 1-2; Lk. 2:41-52), the Gospels deal only with the final few years of Jesus’ life.
The question often arises, “Why are there four accounts of the ministry and sacrificial death of Christ?” This has been a puzzling problem for many down through the years. As far back as Tatian (A.D. 150), who sought to harmonize the four gospels in a work called the Diatessaron, and one of his contemporaries, Marcion, who “chose” the Gospel of Luke and discounted the others, many have thought that having four gospels actually discredits the gospel message.
The believers at large rejected Tatian’s synthetic account of the life of Jesus and Marcion’s espousal of Luke to the preclusion of Matthew, Mark and John. Prior to their misguided efforts, the church had regarded each of the four accounts as offering correspondent testimonies to the life of Christ. In fact, to point to the significance of the unique accounts, there were symbols generally used to identify the four: Matthew was symbolized by a lion, Mark by an ox, Luke by a man, and John by an eagle. Early on, the church had determined that the conglomerate documentation of the gospel quartet was necessary to confer the maximum portrait of Jesus which God intended to convey.
The story of Jesus is substantiated by the four separate witnesses to his life. Christ was to be presented to four different classes and races of men, and thereby to four representative aspects of human thought: Jewish, Roman, Greek, and Christian. If these four had not comprehensively touched every element of human thought, there would likely have been more.
