Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Who were these four authors, immortalised in the titles of their own books? Where did they write and when? Who for?

Our four gospels, we might say, give us four portraits of one Jesus, painted by quite different artists from different "schools" of painting and with different viewers to inform and enthral.

We will look first, of course, for information about the artists themselves. We always look more comfortably at a painting if a neighboring plaque declares the artist's name and dates and nationality. Our portraits of Jesus, however, are not signed. The four writers to whom they are ascribed are shadowy figures; they have left not a word of biography behind. We will pursue what slight records we have of four men with these names, and what grounds for linking them with the gospels. This search presents an intriguing puzzle.

Matthew the Rabbi searches the scriptures for clues to the identity and standing of his baffling Jesus. Matthew draws from deep wells of tradition unknown to most of his Christian readers today. These streams break through the surface still, running fresh and clear, in the Judaism that Matthew knew and loved well.

Mark the Rebel has no love for the powers that be, and makes no attempt to conciliate or attract them. Mark is driven to disclose his enigmatic Jesus to those who will suffer as Jesus had at the hands of the world's elite.

Luke the Chronicler tells a straightforward narrative whose stories construct a historical world such as we ourselves inhabit. But there is more than meets the eye: Luke clearly wants to set his story, and so its church, within the respected mainstream of Greek culture. So he wrote in stylish Greek, under His Excellency's patronage, a sustained and enthralling narrative such as graced the libraries of the empire's elite.

John the Mystic's strategy is the bravest of all, and he is the midwife of this extraordinary new birth. He sees the majesty and depth of his task with a poet's eye: If his readers are to see what is there to be seen, they must be "reborn" and once are reborn, they will see with all clarity what has made possible their rebirth.