Why You’re Reading the Gospels Wrong: A Conversation with Dr. Jeannine Brown

Johnny Ova: Hey everybody, welcome to the Dig In Podcast. I'm your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today we are joined by Dr. Jeannine Brown. Dr. Brown, thank you so much for taking some time out to join us today.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Really glad to be with you for this conversation.

Johnny Ova: Very much looking forward to it, and I'm glad we finally got through our technical glitches over here. We're off and running. Dr. Brown, you've spent your career studying the Gospels and training pastors to read them well. What's the most common mistake you see people make when they open Matthew, Mark, Luke or John?

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Great question. I think the most common mistake is that we are content to take little parts of the Gospel and stop there. We think about eight verses, we preach on that. We might do the good thing, which is pay attention to context as we preach, but we don't think about what it would look like to read the Gospel as a whole, or to help congregations and small groups read and keep on reading and see what emerges when we read for the whole and not just for smaller parts. That to me has been the most revolutionary thing for students: reading wholes, and listening for what emerges when we do that.

Johnny Ova: That makes a lot of sense. We all have our favorite verses, our favorite stories, the Sunday school snippets. And you're right, having an understanding of context and the arc of the story is really important.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Yes, and as we hear the arc of the story, we hear both the plot and these interesting themes that Matthew brings into the Gospel, highlights in particular stories, and builds throughout. Some of those are distinct from what's in Mark, Luke or John. Some are shared, of course. But for me it's really exciting to help students see those themes and go, "I didn't see that before." We have those moments in scripture of seeing something new. Often when you take little bits, it becomes a deep dive: that word could mean this too. And that's all good work to do. But we see more when we look at the whole. "That's a repeated theme. That must be important to John." Well, sure enough, it is. And I could preach on that, or really reflect on that theme, not just take a verse. I wouldn't say it's a devastating thing to take a verse and sit with it. I've sat with verses for a long time and studied them really deeply. But pretty soon you have to get your head out of the weeds and look up and say, what am I missing if I don't see the whole vista?

Johnny Ova: Now, you wrote a book called The Gospels as Stories. It sounds pretty obvious on the surface, but you're making a bigger claim. What do we lose when we treat the Gospels as a collection of disconnected episodes rather than unified narratives?

Dr. Jeannine Brown: We lose that sense of what, let's say, Luke is up to. We can lose sight of the fact that there was an author who cared about the way this story was told and arranged. The Gospels look like ancient biographies, or participate in that genre. They also look very Jewish in many ways because of all the scripture that gets brought in. One of the things about ancient biographies is that they have a chronological sequence, broadly speaking, but they often run by thematic interests in the smaller parts. So if I'm going to pay attention to the pattern of biographies in the first century world, I will need to think about themes. I'm invited to by what this thing is.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: That's been really exciting for me. I recently did a lecture for TEDS, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, on hospitality in Luke. Luke, I always say, is my last Gospel. It's the one I know the least. I've published only one thing on Luke, because I've done a lot in Matthew, some in John, and Mark is in many ways like Matthew. So Luke is the one I'm still getting my sea legs on. I loved working through Luke and looking at this theme of hospitality, which emerges not just when the word "hospitable" comes up, which it doesn't in an English translation, but where people are welcoming Jesus, Jesus is welcoming people, and God is visiting his people. All of that is the language of hospitality. Looking at it across the whole of Luke, I was mesmerized. It was just powerful.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: At the end of the lecture I landed on the first discernible moment of welcome in Luke. That's when Mary visits Elizabeth in her home in the hill country of Judea and stays for a while. They're both pregnant, and at the time I was working on this, my daughters were pregnant. So it was a very powerful story. John, inside Elizabeth, leaps for joy when meeting the Messiah. It's a welcome of Jesus. The first time Jesus is welcomed in Luke is in that scene. They stay for quite a while, and there's this language of visiting and of a powerful welcome offered from one to the other. Looking at that narratively, after having studied the theme as a whole, was just beautiful. It's intensified in Luke compared to Matthew or John. That language, those ideas, the meal scenes in Luke. Where are you hospitable? At a meal. So you have all of these ways the theme emerges.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: That's what I love about narrative work. You're not just looking at what one character is doing. Of course, in the Gospels we always want to ask what Jesus is doing. That's a good question. He's the important character. The biography is about Jesus. But you're looking at the whole mix of character, setting, theme and conflict, like you would when reading a novel. I'm not suggesting the Gospels are novels. I think they're historical, very much so. But that whole mix taps into this innate thing in us: we love stories. We understand how to read a story. Read the Gospels like you'd read a story. That's what my book is trying to say. Not as fiction, but as the story, because it's going to engage you on so many levels, and you're going to learn so much about who Jesus was and who Jesus is.

Johnny Ova: I love it. One of the things we teach on a lot at Sound of Heaven is what we call the Arc of Redemption. We start all the way in the Old Testament. You have God walking with man, then the fall happens, and the whole Old Testament is the story arc that leads to redemption in Jesus. Oftentimes we stop in the middle of the story and make final statements without finishing the bigger picture of the whole story being described in the finished work of Christ.

Johnny Ova: I'm curious what you'd say on this. I've heard the Gospels described like a baseball game. Everybody's watching the same game. One guy's sitting behind the plate, another guy's in the dugout, another is in right field, and another is outside selling popcorn, listening on the radio. They all tell what happened during the game, and they all share a common theme, "He hit a grand slam to win the game," but they experienced different things from where they were. I've heard that related to how the four Gospels view Jesus. What would you say?

Dr. Jeannine Brown: I love that, because it's about point of view. Now, I think the Gospel writers are reflecting oral traditions that were passed down faithfully about what Jesus said and did. So they're dealing with raw material. They're not just creating it. Like in a game, real things happened and you're reflecting on them. We know who won and lost at the end of the game, presumably. So they have those raw materials, but the way they tell the story reflects a different point of view and sometimes a different audience. Matthew, it's been argued, writes for a Jewish audience, maybe on the cusp of the mission to the Gentiles. He doesn't have to explain the Jewish customs of hand washing that we hear explained in Mark 7. He omits that part from Mark, if you think Matthew is using Mark. If you don't, that's fine. He doesn't have it. He doesn't need it. So the Jewish audience impacts how he tells the story.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: But he's also shaped by what he wants to communicate about who Jesus is. What we call the Christological portraits of the Gospels, who Jesus is as Messiah, as Christ, are not identical. They share common themes, but there are distinctive themes that emerge about who Jesus is, and when you read the whole, you hear the point of view of Matthew or of John. Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world is a Johannine theme that's so powerful. I talk about that in one of the chapters of my book, where we get to hear the Old Testament backdrop of the Passover lamb. It's so rich. So yes, I like the illustration, because point of view matters. These authors and their way of telling the story of Jesus matter. I'm trying to help my students see that's who we're paying attention to. Jesus didn't write a book. We can know what Jesus said and communicated, but we have the writings from these four people about who Jesus is. So let's pay attention to the authors.

Johnny Ova: Not at all. I was just going to say we're going to have your book linked in the description over here on YouTube. If anybody's listening and wants to get it and support Dr. Brown, I highly recommend it, because this conversation is so needed. My next question: how did the early church experience these texts? Were they read aloud as complete stories, or fragmented like what we do today?

Dr. Jeannine Brown: I think we've inherited a more recent way of fragmenting them. Scholars and the church, pastors, leaders, teachers, we're really comfortable with a verse, or eight verses, or ten. I think that's a modern phenomenon, or something that came up in the church slowly over time. We have the voice of Justin Martyr from about 156 CE, who wrote about church gatherings on Sunday, which gives us a sense of what the early church did. He wrote that in the Sunday gatherings, quote, "the memoirs of the apostles," the Gospels really, "or the writings of the prophets," the Old Testament, "are read as long as there is time." The reading of the Gospels and the Old Testament was a priority, as long as there was time. I don't think they stopped after eight verses. It looks like they might have read two chapters, four chapters.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: A scholar of Matthew, Graham Stanton, mentioned that there are so many wonderful starting and stopping points in Matthew. Inclusios, a kind of bookending. "From that time on, Jesus began to" in 4:17 and 16:21. So, a good place to stop for today: read 1:1 through 4:16, and next Sunday we'll pick up from there. And you can imagine that the first time a writing appears in a community, they just want to hear the whole thing. Nobody wants to go home in the middle of Matthew if they don't have to. They might know parts of the story from oral traditions, but to hear it crafted this way would likely have been something to stay for. So longer sections of text seem to have been the tendency. Scripture itself was something that fed people. Then think about Martin Luther and the primacy of the pulpit. Preaching becomes so important, and preaching can be on one verse, five verses, ten verses, at the decision of the preacher. It seems scripture was centered a bit more in those early years, though I'm no church historian.

Johnny Ova: As a pastor, I think that honestly is something that's missing. A lot of these things have good intent. You have the apps on your phone that give you a verse of the day to encourage you. Even with social media today, everything's fed to you in snippets, these little short segments. We're so used to that that it's almost unheard of to say, "All right, I'm reading Matthew 1, 2, 3 and 4 today, as a whole." I think we're missing something from the scriptures when we don't do that.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Right. I trained as a narrative critic. Narrative criticism, or narrative analysis, was my training, and my dissertation was a narrative reading of the disciples in Matthew's Gospel. One of my chapters in The Gospels as Stories recaps some of that. But then I started assigning passages to students for exegetical papers, ten verses to study deeply. I just capitulated to what had always been done. After about seven or eight years, I thought, what am I doing? This is not what I teach toward. So I started doing different kinds of assignments.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: One assignment is a plot and theme analysis. Plot and theme are the key things to pay attention to in a narrative. With plot, we know what to ask: what's going on, who's there, what's the setting. Then I add themes, and you can only hear those if you listen to more than one passage at a time. I had them do a plot and theme analysis of Matthew 21 through 22. You think, well, that's not too bad. It's about 90 verses. It's when Jesus hits Jerusalem and enters into conflict with the Jewish leadership. It's a wonderful, discrete section. They had to attend to the whole thing and think about how they would preach and teach it. I said, I don't want you to just say, "I'll preach this first section, then the next, then the next." They only had three or four preaching sessions, so they had to somehow deal with more text. I said, you can do it by theme, any way you want. Just tell me the rationale.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: One woman came up to turn in that paper, back in the day when you handed in papers, and she said, "Well, that was dizzying." I said, "Yes, you did it rightly." Because she was doing forest, trees, forest, trees, which is what it's like to read a narrative. You're reading your favorite novel, you get into the details of a description or a wonderful dialogue, and then you step back and go, "My goodness, all of this culminates here." That's what we do naturally in a story, because we want to pay attention to the details, and especially in the Gospels they're so rich. But don't stay there. Come back out. She had the sense of looking at one of those pictures where you try to see both images, which I can never do, by the way. Switching your focus so you can see both.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: The other assignment is a plot and theme diagram. Students have to visualize the whole travel narrative in Luke. In Mark, the travel narrative between Galilee and Jerusalem is about three chapters, chapters 8, 9 and 10. In Matthew it's about five chapters, 16 into 20. And in Luke it's like 12, from 9:51 to 19:27. That's the Lukan travel narrative. All sorts of stories unique to Luke show up there, a lot of parables. But it's hard to outline. Compare five Luke commentaries and nobody outlines it the same way, because it just keeps on going. It's kind of amorphous. Jerusalem is mentioned, there are all these tags along the way, but there's no clear "this, then this, then this," because he's just traveling, chapter after chapter.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: So they have to show what's going on in terms of plot, themes and sequence. Those are the three things. Most of them have so much fun with it. One guy, a pastor now, said, "It's on my wall in my office." I have an example of one in The Gospels as Stories. It might not be pretty. But there's something about seeing the themes emerge and keep popping up. They have to show at least ten themes, and I think there are probably 20 in the Lukan travel narrative. So instead of saying "this one theme is the most important one in Luke," you get to say, "All these themes are really important to Luke." If you're doing a single passage, you ask, "What's the one point of this passage?" That isn't a bad question, but it misses that the passage might have three themes Luke is really interested in. What if we looked at each of those? It provides a different way of thinking about preaching and teaching. What if we scanned through four times and looked at four different sub-themes, or one theme really closely, like I did with hospitality in Luke? I picked something I knew nothing about and learned a ton, which is just so fun when you're doing a lecture.

Johnny Ova: That is a new and refreshing way to see the scriptures. I think this is going to help a lot of our listeners engage scripture in a different way. So you hit on plot. I want to talk about characters now. In your book you focus on the disciples in Matthew. How does Matthew use the disciples as characters to shape the reader's experience in understanding Jesus?

Dr. Jeannine Brown: I'll compare with Mark a little, because what I did was set up what scholars had been saying about the disciples in Matthew. In Mark, it's clear they're dull, hard of heart. There are some really heavy descriptors of the disciples in Mark. In Matthew it's moderated a bit. Some of those descriptions aren't used, and they understand some things. They understand that he was referring to John the Baptist at a certain point. So there was an argument in scholarship, especially out of comparison with Mark, redaction criticism, that the disciples in Matthew essentially understand. My dissertation set out to say, no, they don't. When you do a narrative reading, they don't understand a whole bunch of stuff. If you just read narratively and don't look at Mark in comparison, you say, they messed this up, they don't get that. When Jesus says in chapter 16 that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer and die, Peter says, "Lord forbid, this will never happen to you." And Jesus has to say, "Get behind me, Satan." You are setting your mind not on the things of God, but on human things. So they don't understand. It wasn't a hard sell, really.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: So what does that do? And besides their lack of understanding, they are very clearly identified five times as those of little faith. Not no faith, but little faith, which in chapter 17 we learn is inadequate faith, because if you had just the faith of a mustard seed, you could have done this. Just a little bit more. So what do those characterizations do? I looked at that in my dissertation, which nobody's going to read, but you can get the condensed version in one of the chapters of the book. We identify with the disciples because they follow Jesus. They do some things right, they understand some things, and they're closest to him. So if we read as believers, we tend to identify with them. But we also pull back from the places where they don't understand, because we do. In their misunderstanding, Matthew helps us hear what's really true about Jesus. We know he's going to go to Jerusalem and suffer and die, and that this is, ironically, a good thing. His missional death is the climax of the whole story. And the little faith is meant to encourage stronger faith in us, a point Don Verseput, one of my mentors, has emphasized in his work.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: So it encourages us to move beyond them, to be more like the exemplary disciple in Matthew, which isn't the Twelve, but the disciple portrayed in all the teachings. But it also helps us realize that Jesus is more important than the disciple. If a disciple fails, Jesus is still there. We see that in the passion narrative, when they all flee and Peter is the only one who sticks around, but even he betrays Jesus. And yet Jesus says, "Tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee." The restorative piece at the end is really powerful. If we've been identifying with the disciples, we go, oh, it's not about them, it's about Jesus.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: You can hear that at the very end, in what's called the Great Commission. Matthew doesn't call it that. I call it the second commissioning. The first commissioning is to the women in chapter 28, and then to the eleven who are left. Jesus says, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all I have commanded you. And I will be with you to the end of the age." He doesn't say, "All authority has been given to me, so go take it, do what I've told you, and report back later." That authority is still Jesus's. We only have it if we stay close to him. "I will be with you." So the disciple stays close to Jesus. I'm not going to be a perfect disciple, if this story of these disciples is true at all, but Jesus is with me. Jesus is with us. I think it's a real corporate moment.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: So the disciples help us cling to Jesus even more closely. At least that's what helps me as I read the disciples in Matthew. I see them as fallible. Not awful, not perfect, somewhere in between in their portrayal. That helps us hang on and try to do better than they do, sure, by the power of Jesus in our midst. As a community we can do more than the disciples did. But we also need Jesus in our midst. Don't forget that piece.

Johnny Ova: That's awesome. Beautiful. I want to shift gears to a more technical concept: intertextuality, how the Gospel writers are constantly echoing and drawing from the Old Testament. Could you give us an example of recognizing these connections in some of the familiar stories we may know?

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Absolutely. In The Gospels as Stories, I walk through plot, talk about it theoretically, and then walk through Luke. The next two chapters, four and five, look at characterization and then the disciples in Matthew. The next two chapters aren't essential to narrative approaches, but they cover intertextuality, how the Old Testament is used in the Gospels, and I look at John's Gospel with the Passover lamb and the renewal of creation as examples. Even though it's not essential to studying the Gospels as narrative, the Old Testament is so essential, and intertextuality is an area I work in a lot, studying how John uses the Old Testament and that kind of thing. So it felt like an important part of what I wanted to share with readers.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: I find it so fascinating to look closely at how the Old Testament informs what's going on in the Gospels, because it shows up all over the place. Citations, of course: "This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah." But also allusions that are sometimes recognized and sometimes not. I think original readers and hearers would have heard them much more readily. They knew the Old Testament well, especially Jewish readers. And then little echoes, as scholars call them, intriguing moments where you ask whether this is an intentional pointing back.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Let me give you an example of an allusion that doesn't always show up in the lists of allusions. Matthew 18:21 and 22. Let me get my Bible up so I do it right. It's in what's called the community discourse, where Jesus teaches about who's greatest in the kingdom. The disciples come with the question, "Who's greatest?" He pokes at the question itself by bringing a child, who has no greatness in that context. Then there's the parable of the wandering sheep, not the lost sheep, since Matthew's language is wandering, the church discipline passage we may be familiar with in verses 15 through 20, and the parable of the unmerciful servant. The allusion comes in 21 and 22, when Peter comes to Jesus and says, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?" I think Peter is feeling rather magnanimous. Same person, seven times. Jesus answers, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times." That raises the stakes.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: I think that's an allusion to Genesis 4, where those two numbers are important in the Lamech story. The Lamech story isn't one we go back to a lot in Genesis. Lamech is a descendant of Cain, and he takes the whole promise of God to protect Cain after he killed Abel and ups the ante, without any indication in the narrative that God said this to him. Lamech tells his wives, "Adah and Zillah, listen to me. Wives of Lamech, hear my words. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times."

Johnny Ova: Wow, I never even caught that.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Yes. So this is not God protecting him. This is him claiming that protection. It's about revenge cycling out of control, spiraling. Seven is an important number in the Bible, a number of completion. So we hear this complete revenge cycle starting to roll out at the beginning of Genesis. And Matthew is helping us hear that in Jesus, the forgiveness cycle is starting to roll out. You can hear the thematic connection as a contrast, and you can also hear that the same two numbers are used. You might think that's not a big deal, but because of the thematic connection, I think it's an allusion back. In Jesus, forgiveness is to be unlimited. Not done unthoughtfully. If an abuser is still abusing, you need to go back to chapter 18, verses 6 through 9, and read that. But in this context, where seven times seems magnanimous to Peter, Jesus says no, you keep on forgiving, because this is who your God is. That's the basis for it in the parable of the unmerciful servant that comes next. I just find that one startling.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: And again, it doesn't typically show up in lists of allusions, because numbers might feel more arbitrary. But the thematic context nails it for me. I've just finished a project, not published yet, it'll be with Zondervan, looking really closely at allusions and citations in Matthew to the Old Testament. And I learned a ton. I hadn't seen some of these before. Are those three or four words a connection? I'm doing it with the Greek in mind. There's a Greek Old Testament as well, so you can do this kind of tracing back. I always think I have a lot to learn about Mark, Luke and John still, but Matthew I kind of know. I can tell you where everything is and what every verse is about. I can't recite the whole thing, but I know the story. And still these were rich moments of, "My goodness, this reshapes how I understand that text, or thickens my understanding of the theme." In scholarship, the Old Testament in the New Testament is called intertextuality. So if you see a book title with intertextuality, don't run. It could be really interesting.

Johnny Ova: Very cool. That was great. I'm picturing a pastor preparing a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount or on the feeding of the 5,000. How should narrative thinking change preparation for something like that?

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Let's think about the feeding of the 5,000. Of course, you'd ask which Gospel you're in, because it shows up in all four. It's one of the few narratives that does. So stick with one Gospel is what I would say. You could do a comparison. There's nothing wrong with that. Scholars and pastors have done that work. But I'd stick with one Gospel and see what emerges as you read it in context. In Mark and Matthew you have two feedings, the 5,000 and then the 4,000, and a motif of bread that runs through the section as well.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Do what I did when I finished my dissertation. I felt I knew Matthew 16 through 20 super well, because that's where I focused my attention, and I knew Matthew 11 through 16 the least. So I created my first plot diagram on Matthew 11 through 16, not to show in a book, but because I wanted to know how it functioned narratively. I had a really long sheet of paper with all this stuff going on. Do something like that. Look at all of Matthew 11 through 16 and study the feeding of the 5,000 from Matthew 14. Get the right one. Then see what themes start to percolate. In the introduction, Jesus has compassion and heals. That's huge from Matthew 8 on. You could talk to folks about the theme of Jesus's compassionate healing that didn't start right here but keeps going and resurfaces in this first feeding.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: You could also think about the Old Testament context. I have an essay on Exodus in Matthew in a volume on Exodus in the New Testament. One thing I note is that with the feedings and the walking on water in the next passage, you have Exodus echoes. What happens when you're in the desert? You need to be fed and watered. So some of the language, and the stories themselves, echo Exodus and God's provision for his people. That might be less about specific words from the Old Testament and more about type scenes, which is one kind of intertextuality: what kinds of scenes keep recurring? Women at wells, a Genesis thing, but also a John 4 thing. Hearing those next to each other, you ask if there's something there. With intertextuality, it's good to ask whether that's something the author wants us to hear. Are they already making that pattern important in their telling of the Gospel? Jesus as the bringer of the new Exodus, the one who provides for his people.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Then think about characterization. We learn that Jesus is a compassionate healer. But what about the disciples? After they say, "This is a remote place, it's getting late, send the crowds away so they can buy food," Jesus replies, "They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat." That's intriguing. He expects them to have faith enough to provide what he's about to provide. He's going to multiply the food, and it sounds like he expects them to. They say, "We only have five loaves of bread and two fish," and then he does the miracle. It's very short, but it's intriguing. In chapter 17 they ask, "Why could we not drive out the demon?" and he says, "Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed," you could move mountains. You could make food. So you could tap into the disciples piece. You don't have to do it all. But you could take that passage as your central passage and follow the themes coming in and going out from it.

Johnny Ova: We've spoken about perspective and themes, and this has been fantastic, Dr. Brown, because people need to hear how to study the word of God. Each Gospel tells the story of Jesus differently. Without getting into contradiction debates, which isn't where I want to go, how do you help people appreciate that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are each telling their own story with their own emphasis? I know we touched on this, but I wanted to go a little deeper.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Absolutely, because I grew up in a context where I felt I had to be an apologist for the Gospels, and I couldn't quite acknowledge that they don't always have things in the same order. As I read more in the Gospels, I kind of knew. If you line up the pericopes, the passages, of Jesus healing in Matthew 8:1 through 17, we have a leper healed, a centurion's servant healed, and then Peter's mother-in-law. In Luke they come in a different order. But knowing that ancient biography sometimes arranged by theme and not chronology could have alleviated a lot of fear and anxiety for me as a young eight-year-old thinking I had to defend the Gospels somehow. Once I figured out I didn't have to be an apologist, but I could be an interpreter of the Bible, that was so thrilling. The happiest day of my life. I don't know exactly when it happened, probably somewhere in my teens.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: So you listen for the themes that emerge as Matthew brings those stories together. He gathers nine or ten healings in chapters 8 and 9, and then he puts in a verse from Isaiah: "This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: he took up our infirmities and bore our diseases." I think, well, of course, this is all about healing. This is a Matthean emphasis. It's not that Jesus isn't healer in the other Gospels. He certainly is. But the way Matthew has told the story, he wants that on the front burner for essentially all of Matthew 8 and 9, and he keeps referring back to that compassionate healing as he goes. Knowing that ancient biographies offered a way of telling the story that was true to history and faithful to what happened, while allowing for this thematic development, opens things up. I can spend time on the wonderful themes of Matthew's Gospel.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: There's so much in common between the Gospels, and you could teach that. What do the Gospels have in common when they tell us about Jesus? That would be a great series. But then take on the distinctive themes. What about Jesus's wisdom, which really emerges in Matthew 11, maybe a little in John 1, but not in Mark and Luke? Or the hospitality theme in Luke, tied to Jesus offering hospitality. He doesn't have a place to set a table and offer a meal. The Son of Man has no place to lay his head. And yet in a couple of meal scenes, Jesus takes on the role of host. That's the insight of other scholars working on the meal scenes in Luke, and I find it fascinating. Certainly at the Last Supper, but also on the road to Emmaus. He breaks the bread. He does the hosting. And they recognize him as he does the very thing that surrounds his death, enacted in the Lord's Supper. Really powerful things to preach on. You could preach that theme and pick it up at a few places in the Gospel, or preach a longer section of text and go quicker through it.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: I remember when I offered to teach one Sunday in my kids' Sunday school class. They were first and third graders, something like that. They handed me the centurion story, which is in Luke 7 and also in Matthew 8, but the lesson combined them. I thought, I can't do that. I can't mush them together for kids, because we do that enough already. They'd have no sense of which Gospel we're in. So I did Matthew 8 and 9, the whole thing. I changed the lesson a little and talked my way through it. I didn't read it to them, I told the stories. "Jesus comes upon a man who has a skin disease," and here we go. And I probably did a sexist thing: the boys had to show the theme of power by putting up their arms and going "huh," and the girls had to show the theme of faith by raising their hands together or something. And sure enough, as I went through it, whether the word came up or not, they recognized every time Jesus's power showed up and every time people's faith showed up. It took me 30 years to see those themes in Matthew, and they were eight and they had it down, because we know how to read a story. But we can't stop short. Read the whole of Matthew 8 and 9.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Look for those themes. There are more, but those are two key ones. It's so fun to help people in our congregations read wholes. Challenge them: between now and next week, read all of Matthew. It's a couple of hours. Or listen to it while you exercise. You can hear David Suchet, who played Hercule Poirot in the Agatha Christie series. He reads the whole Bible, an NIV recording. It's wonderful. So pick the voice you like, listen to it, and listen for those themes.

Johnny Ova: I've got two questions I have to ask before we get out of here today. The first one: you mentioned the NIV, and you've been part of the NIV translation committee. How does understanding the Gospels as narratives affect the way you approach translation decisions?

Dr. Jeannine Brown: That's a great question. I don't think anybody's asked me that. I've been on the team since 2010, and I'm now vice chair, which is a new role. So I get to look at all the things we've done and make sure we're all agreed on what we decided. Everyone takes good notes, but it's amazing how much you're in the weeds. We're making decisions on individual words or phrases. Everything comes as a single proposal to our team, from the team or from people outside it. And just so you know, if you have a proposal for the NIV, you can send it through me.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: So I'm trying to think how much narrative plays in, because again, we're dealing with single words. But because I've read Matthew narratively, it sometimes impacts how I hear a particular interpretive moment. Here's an example from Matthew 8. This decision was made after the 1984 edition and came out in the 2011 edition, but it was made before I showed up in 2010. I loved it. It's the centurion story. The centurion comes to Jesus and says, "Lord, my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly." In verse 7, Jesus says to him, "Shall I come and heal him?" It's a question. The NIV was the first translation to have a question there. Most translations say, "I will come and heal him."

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Narratively, that's a characterization question. Does Jesus readily go past the boundary of Jew and Gentile? In chapter 15, when a Canaanite woman comes to him, the Syrophoenician woman in Mark, he demurs and says, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." In chapter 10 he sends his disciples only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So "Shall I come and heal him?" might be his first-blush response: I'm here to minister to my people. For a long time the NIV was alone in having a question there. Recently the Christian Standard Bible has also made it a question. If you look at the commentaries, they're split, maybe 60/40 leaning toward a question.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: There's a grammatical issue, which is hard to explain. In Greek the subject is built into the verb, so "I will come" is one word. You don't need a separate "I," but there is one. "Ego" is in there, so there's emphasis. That leans toward a question. There were no question marks on the earliest copies we have, so it really is a matter of how the grammar is set up. Because of that extra emphasis, I think it's "Shall I come?" You're asking me, a Jew, to come and heal? And he doesn't actually go. He heals from a distance. But he also says, "I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith." So the hurdle is overcome. The great faith of both the Canaanite woman and the centurion is what we see carry Jesus past that initial boundary to his own people. By the end of the Gospel it's wide open: all authority, go make disciples of all nations. So it's not a long-term boundary, but it is a boundary in his ministry.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: In Matthew I think that makes a difference for characterization, and I think it's the right decision in terms of translation. They go together, because I'm hearing it alongside the only two times Gentiles clearly come to him in Matthew, chapter 8 and chapter 15, this man and that woman. So there's an interconnection of narrative and translation there. Sometimes it shows up. Often it's just, "It could mean this word or that word, but in context this is better." Context is always helping us, but it may not be the narrative context so broadly. That's probably my best example.

Johnny Ova: Thanks for pulling the curtain back a little. I'm sure everybody wonders what that process is.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Is that my phone ringing? Sorry.

Johnny Ova: That's okay, no problem. Thank you for pulling that curtain back, because that's really fascinating. I'm sure many people have questions about how this actually happens and what the conversations are like. It's not just, "Hey, let's throw this out there."

Dr. Jeannine Brown: It's like being in a really deep Bible study with people who care deeply about how we do this, in every word. It's really interesting. Another conversation, another day.

Johnny Ova: All right, my last question: what's a passage most people think they understand, but when you read it with the larger story of the Gospel, it completely changes the meaning?

Dr. Jeannine Brown: At first blush I'd say it probably doesn't completely change the meaning, because I think it's about seeing more. But can we go astray if we read just teeny, teeny snippets? Of course we can. That's a really good question. Let me think of one off the top of my head. This could be a long conversation, though.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Chapter 10. Jesus sends out the Twelve, and at the very end of the first section, which is really focused on them, it broadens a little so that we hear, while he's still talking to the Twelve, that this may be about our mission as well. In verse 23: "When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. Truly I tell you, you will not finish going through the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes." What does that mean? Well, the Son of Man hasn't returned. If you're thinking of the second coming, coming downward this way, that doesn't work. All the towns haven't been reached. He's talking about Judea and Galilee, essentially.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: It really helps, and this is seen across the whole vista of Matthew, to hear the Son of Man coming through intertextuality, through a little phrase from Daniel 7:13, where the Son of Man comes into the throne room of the Most High. The coming is this way, upward, and he is vindicated. It's an Old Testament shorthand for the vindication of this Son of Man figure. We could debate all day whether the Son of Man figure is corporate Israel or the remnant, but clearly Matthew wants us to hear it as Jesus. So when Jesus uses Son of Man language, I think we're hearing the Danielic vindication. We hear the same Son of Man coming, and even "coming on the clouds of heaven," more language from Daniel 7:13, in Jesus's trial and in the discourse. So by reading narratively, you can look at about seven or eight times Matthew uses Daniel 7:13 or 14 or both to represent this vindication of Jesus.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Jesus is vindicated a number of times across his story. He's vindicated first when he's raised from the dead. That's the echo in 16:28, right before the Transfiguration, and the Transfiguration is a taste of that. He's also vindicated when the temple falls, because he predicted it. And he's vindicated when he returns, his parousia, which is the language of coming in chapter 24. This language of coming, erchomai, is a more generic term that comes out of Daniel. So recognizing that this is a Daniel picture, I think what's being said is: you will not finish going through the towns of Israel before the Son of Man is vindicated, before the resurrection. It's said in a veiled, Old Testament-ish kind of way. That's a lot. Your eschatology could keep you going forever on that.

Johnny Ova: I have some thoughts on that too, and I'd love to break that down. But Dr. Brown, I can't thank you enough for your time today. This has been so enlightening, and I think everybody who hears it will get a good blueprint on how to read the Bible, understand it better and study it. How can people get hold of you if they want to reach out? Are you on social media? Do you have anything coming up?

Dr. Jeannine Brown: I'm on Facebook. I'm not a real great social media person. Coming up, nothing in particular, and I'm out speaking mostly in the Minnesota area. But if people want to email me at Bethel, my email address is on the Bethel website, and I'm happy to take questions. I hear questions from people a lot. It was really good to be here, and I appreciate the conversation. I really love talking about narrative, and I appreciate your thoughtful questions.

Johnny Ova: My pleasure. And again, thank you so much for your time.

Dr. Jeannine Brown: Thank you.