All that blogged...

Bullet points relating to the first essay (below):

1. Paul is a missionary generating new communities of faith in Jesus.
2. He ends up in prison for his faithfulness to his commission to make Jesus known to the nations.
3. Two of his prison companions are Mark and Luke.
4. Mark and Luke wrote two long stories about Jesus being the true King of Israel and the true Lord and Saviour of the nations.
5. We, following very early Christians, call these long stories "the gospel according to Mark" and "the gospel according to Luke."
6. Since early churches recognized what Mark and Luke wrote as the gospel, perhaps Paul would have done the same.
7. If we want to know what Paul preached as the gospel, the common narrative that he shared with his churches as a shared founding story, perhaps we need to look no further than the Gospels according to Mark and Luke.
8. I do not mean, of course, that Paul went around reading these as though the documents existed from his first missionary journey.
9. Perhaps it is just the other way around. Perhaps we've read the narrative gospels through a "Pauline" grid when we should have been reading the narrative gospels as good examples of what Paul would have recognized as faithful (and thorough) gospel presentation.
10. Perhaps Mark and Luke grew in their understanding of the Jesus traditions / sources becasuse they were 1) often together 2) often with Paul and 3) engaged in faithful missionary service to their Lord about whom they wrote.
11. This does not begin to reflect upon their use of the Hebrew Scriptures in their narrative portrayals of Jesus as Meesiah and Lord - another post - perhaps in another life...