Note: My post yesterday (part 1) was intended to include a brief note on Robert Gundry, but a poorly-timed power outage while I was working on the post last week caused me to lose that note. Long story short: Gundry was expelled from ETS in 1983 for his published views that Matthew embellished his gospel with non-historic accounts of Christ's birth. You can read the story here. There are indications in Jesus the Word . . . that Gundry is not a strict inerrantist, but I don't see any necessary implications on the validity of his hypothesis. A more interesting question might be to what degree one Gospel writer might have written with an agenda distinct from the other Gospel writers, resulting in divergent portrayals of Jesus Christ. However, distinct agendas are not necessarily contradictory agendas. Gundry occasionally implies that they are contradictory*, but again, I don't think that detracts from his central point. In any case, I appreciated the irony that's obvious whe a man expelled from ETS extols the virtues of paleofundamentalist separatism.
*As an example, "The Bible offers more than one theology of church and world--Luke-Acts represents almost the polar opposite of John's, for example" (92).
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