See Jesus Whole — Through All Four Gospels

If you have spent any time reading the Gospels seriously, you have probably felt something like this: a passage catches your attention — a detail that differs from what you remember in another Gospel, or a theological theme you can't quite place — and you find yourself without the tools to know what to do with it. You don't want to ignore it. You don't want to reach for a quick answer that papers over a real question. You want to understand what is actually going on. That desire — that holy curiosity — is exactly what this school is built for.

I have spent years sitting with the Gospels in exactly the way we will sit with them together here: closely, comparatively, and with genuine respect for both the text and the reader. What I have found, again and again, is that the differences between the Gospels are not problems to be managed — they are gifts to be received. When Matthew arranges his material differently from Luke, or when John tells the same story in a way that initially surprises you, those moments are invitations to ask a better question: What is this Evangelist doing, and why? Learning to ask that question well — and to answer it with historical, literary, and theological precision — is the single most transformative skill this school will give you.

We will begin where every good reading of the Gospels should begin: with the question of what kind of literature we are dealing with and what tools of interpretation are appropriate to it. From there we will move through the origins and contexts of each Gospel, spend careful time with the Synoptic Problem (which is genuinely fascinating once the evidence is laid out clearly), and devote substantial attention to the distinct theological portrait each Evangelist draws of Jesus. Then we will put texts side by side — birth narratives, miracles, parables, the Passion, the resurrection appearances — and practice the kind of responsible comparison that illuminates rather than flattens.

I want to be honest with you about what this school will and will not do. It will not give you tidy resolutions to every scholarly debate — those debates are ongoing, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that. What it will give you is the framework to enter those debates as a discerning participant rather than a bewildered bystander. You will know the major positions, understand the evidence, and be able to evaluate arguments on their merits.

What it will also give you — and this matters to me as much as anything — is a deeper love for these four extraordinary texts. The Gospels have shaped the imagination of the world for two thousand years. They are historically anchored, literarily sophisticated, and theologically inexhaustible. My hope is that by the time we have worked through them together, you will find that they reward close reading even more richly than you suspected when you began.

Come with your questions. Bring the passages that have puzzled you. There is room here for serious inquiry and genuine faith to occupy the same space — and that, I believe, is exactly where the best reading of the Gospels happens.