The aim of this book is to challenge and to refute the current consensus in Gospels scholarship which assumes that each of the Gospels was written for a specific church or group of churches. Nearly all scholars writing about the Gospels now treat it as virtually self-evident that each evangelist addressed the specific context and concerns of his own community, and a large and increasingly sophisticated edifice of scholarly reconstruction has been erected on this basic assumption. However, this book supports another possibility, that the Gospels were written with the intention that they should circulate around all the churches (and thence even outside the churches).
The editor Richard Bauckham is professor of New Testament studies and Bishop Wardlaw Professor at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
