Page 17 - The Gospel Chronicle - Redaction SE

Redaction: Introduction

Redaction Introduction

Have you wished that you could read the four narrative gospels as one single story? Were you
ever troubled by your efforts to compare similar sounding events amongst them? Did you ever wonder

why these accounts were never combined into a single biography? I did. I struggled with seeing how
these four separate accounts of Jesus’ life could be merged together to tell a more complete story.
They each seem to seal up Jesus’ life in their own account; and of course whenever I attempted to
compare their similar parts I encountered frustration with the pieces that read differently. So I

struggled.
Then God challenged me. I had this unexplainable urge or perhaps obsession to pursue the
study which has become The Gospel Chronicle. That was in 1998. The path I have walked from then to
now has indeed been a challenge, and it changed me. I believe better.
The Redaction is a very unique work. This is the part of the Gospel Chronicle that

combines the separate gospel accounts in the Parallel into a singular text of the Narrative. It
shows the reader how the Narrative was made from the Parallel. It it is the second step of the
work, but is likely to have the least interest to the casual reader. Its purpose is to extract a
comprehensive account of the ministry of Jesus Christ, allowing the removal of the duplicate

material while maintaining the maximum content possible from the four narrative gospels.
According to the website, www.biblebelievers.com, the four raw gospel narratives of
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the King James bible contain approximately 82,600 words
altogether. The finished Narrative of the Gospel Chronicle contains approximately 73,200
words. Deleting only the shared content, the total word count for the gospels was only reduced

by approximately 9,400 words or 11.5%. This high retention of content in the Gospel Chronicle
is very surprising when compared against the Synoptic Gospels theory. From the Synoptic
perspective, approximately 75% of Mark, 45% of Matthew and 40% of Luke are considered
shared or synoptic content and the gospel of John is considered to contain too little shared

content to be included. What does this mean? The Synoptic perspective basically tells us that we
can effectively remove 40-75% of the content from two of the three synoptic gospels depending

The Gospel Chronicle • i