For 2,000 years, the story of Jesus has been the single universal legacy of the Western world. But the story is fading, and this strange man today stands for many people as the guardian of an alien shrine whose meaning is long forgotten.
Jesus himself asked, "Who do you say I am?" In The Four Witnesses, author and Oxford scholar Robin Griffith-Jones brings alive the answers of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as four dynamically different visions that are at once radically ancient and profoundly modern.
South Carolina’s PBS station, South Carolina Educational TV, is developing The Four Witnesses into a four-part docudrama for PBS nationwide. We look forward to offering you the book and TV series in a vivid and powerful combination.
Four Visions, One TruthMatthew, Mark, Luke and John. Here we have, as the popular motto goes, "The Greatest Story Ever Told." The description is as familiar as any Hollywood classic; but it is oddly misleading. Each gospel is as gripping and dramatic as any story we could hope to hear. But each storyteller portrays a strikingly different version of the same person and events, working from different angles and agendas.
The stories of the Rabbi, the Rebel, the Chronicler and the Mystic are neither histories nor biographies. Rather, they aim for nothing less than to reveal one strange man's divinity to their readers. Such "unveiling" was as difficult to grasp in the storytellers' troubled times as it is now.
Confronted with all four gospels, we might think of ourselves as detectives. To understand the depositions before us, we need to know who these witnesses are, what makes them tick, what needs and purposes shape the evidence they offer.
In The Four Witnesses, a whole empire comes before our eyes: from rural Galilee to Rome itself; from Jewish fishermen to the Emperor himself. When the cast of this drama comes alive, so, too, can these stories come alive as not one, but as "The Four Greatest Stories Ever Told."
As the Rabbi, the Rebel, the Chronicler and the Mystic are driven to understand this strange man from the first century, so, too, are we. As these witnesses generate for their communities an encounter with Jesus in their own times, so too does The Four Witnesses confront its audience with this strange man here and now.
The hardback of The Four Witnesses was HarperSanFrancisco's lead title for Spring 2000. Within nine months over 20,000 copies had been sold.
The Four Witnesses is written for any reader who has ever wondered, Who was this strange Jesus? All the ‘clutter’ of notes and indices has been avoided. But some readers will want or need to study the evidence further. This includes all the indices of texts and subjects discussed in the book.
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