Who did each gospel author write for and how did they portray Jesus?

Answer 1

A:

As the authors of the four New Testament gospels were all anonymous, we know very little about the communities to which they belonged and who their intended audiences were. We can only speculate on these issues, using the texts for guidance, and such speculation is often made through the lens of modern beliefs. The first to speculate were the second-century Church Fathers, who attributed the gospels to the men whose names they now bear, on the basis of what they believed they saw in the gospels. They thought that the authors of Matthew and John were probably disciples, and so attributed these to the disciples Matthew and John. They thought that the authors of Mark and Luke would have known the Apostle Paul and that the author of Luke must have been a gentile, since he apparently wrote for Christian gentiles, thus defining the author as the physician known as Luke.

We now know that all the gospels were originally written in Greek, so we can no longer say that Matthew was written in either Hebrew or Aramaic for a Jewish audience, although it is always possible that he wrote for Greek-speaking Jews of the diaspora. Mark is often thought of as written in Rome, but this is based on second-century assumptions about Paul's companion Mark, who was in any case not really the author of this gospel. Mark actually appears to be the one gospel to have been written for pagans or former pagans. John's Gospel seems to have been written early in the second century for a closed Christian community that originally held mildly gnostic beliefs.

Mark's Gospel portrays Jesus as human, adopted by God as his son at the time of his baptism. In Mark 10:18 ("Why call me good. There is none good but God"), Jesus clearly denies being God. Matthew and Luke portray Jesus as the son of God from his conception. John portrays Jesus as divine and pre-existing, with its author avoiding the notion of a mortal birth.