This means the gospels do stretch back to Jesus’ life—but not directly, and not without additions and subtractions. Understanding this editing process is crucial to anyone searching for the pure historical facts about Jesus’ life. This is because the changes were often theological or spiritual: they reflected what Christians believed about the Messiah, rather than what they actually knew about Jesus the man. For instance, the gospels of Luke and Matthew disagree about the details of Jesus’ birth, and there’s reason to believe neither account reflects the facts. But the authors of both gospels—whoever those authors really were—believed Jesus was the Savior, so He must’ve been born in Bethlehem, as the Old Testament predicts.
This ability to separate theology from fact is crucial, especially in the last and strangest of the gospels—the one that would become the focus of Ugo’s Diatessaron work: John.
“So the Alogi took issue with the gospel of John,” Ugo said, pulling at his thinning hair.
“Yes. And only the gospel of John.”
“They tried to snuff John out of the Diatessaron.”
“Right.”
“Why?”
I explained to him that John was the last of the gospels to be written—sixty years after the crucifixion, twice as long as Mark had been. It set out to answer new questions about the fledgling religion of Christianity, and in the process it revolutionized Jesus. Gone is the humble carpenter’s son who heals the sick and exorcises the possessed, who speaks simple parables with a common touch but never says much about his own identity. In his place, John offers a new Jesus: a high-minded philosopher who never performs exorcisms, never speaks parables, and talks constantly about himself and his mission. Scholars today agree that the other three gospels trace their roots to an original layer of factual memories—historical events that were recorded at an early stage and edited over time. But the fourth gospel is different.
John paints a portrait of God rather than man, removing facts and replacing them with symbols. The gospel even leaves guideposts to teach its readers what it’s doing: John says the bread we eat isn’t true bread; Jesus is the true bread. The light we see isn’t true light; Jesus is the true light. John’s word true almost always means the invisible realm of the eternal. In other words, the fourth gospel is theological rather than historical. And for many readers, that theology comes as a shock. After reading three gospels rooted more strongly in history, it’s perilously easy to read the fourth and fail to see how these facts have been transformed into symbols.
For that reason, John has always been the black sheep of the gospels. Only one Christian scholar before Tatian tried to write a gospel harmony like the Diatessaron, and he didn’t use John at all. No group, however, made its opposition to John clearer than the Alogi.
“And you’re telling me,” Ugo said, “that for our purposes the Alogi were right. If all I care about is history—facts—then I should toss John out.”
“It depends. There are rules.”
“Father Alex, I’m a good Catholic. I’m not trying to take a pair of scissors to the Bible. But the other three gospels say Jesus was buried in a cloth. John says cloths. They can’t both be right. So John is out?”
It was as if he didn’t even want to see the words that his team of conservationists was uncovering from beneath the smudges of the Diatessaron. I should’ve sensed the pressure on him, the urgency he felt.
“Or,” he said, “to take another example, John says Jesus was buried in a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes. The other gospels say the burial spices weren’t used because Jesus was buried in such a hurry.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Because the chemical tests that disprove the radiocarbon dating also found no myrrh or aloe present on the Shroud. Which is exactly what we have if we remove John’s testimony.”