To understand *that* Jesus is important, all you need is the Gospels. But to make sense of it all, you either needed to have been on the Emmaus road or in the upper room with Him while He explained it all (and even then they had a hard time with it), or just read Paul’s, Peter’s, John’s, & Jude’s letters, in conjunction with the Gospels.

If God hadn’t set apart Paul for the work he did, Christianity would have just devolved into a splinter sect of Judaism, a historical curiosity which we might have called the Ebionites.

You have a low view of the Gospels. We do not need Pauline Christology to understand why Jesus is important. As he says at the end of Matthew, “all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

Steven – No, I do not think “more clearly” certainly implies better. Else, the Old Testament would be “worse” because the Gospel is not clearly revealed there. They are all “good” – O.T., Gospels, Epistles because they fulfill their specific task. And really, the timing of the writing isn’t what I had in mind. It was when the timing of the events reported occurred.

Matt – I don’t think I said that the Gospels apply to the Old Covenant. And yes, the Gospels were produced post-Resurrection. But, the events within the Gospels and Jesus’ teaching ministry occurred while the Old Covenant was still in force – which is what we must keep in mind. This is why we understand that passages like Matt 23:23 do not teach that we should tithe. What Jesus said to the Pharisees in that passage was said realizing what law they were following.

Question : If you take the SOTM(for example) we know that we cannot be all that Jesus talks about on our own. We need the empowerment of the Spirit. But what about the people who first heard that sermon? What would have been their first thoughts? Could they have possibly thought they could be “pure in heart” if they were being honest with themselves. I’m just afraid that we are reading our understanding back into the intention of what Jesus was saying. I am aware of the full implications of this? No, not really. And I fully admit I could be wrong about more than a few things. I’m just trying to work it out like the rest of you.

And this is just an aside, but I was wishing that I could get together with a group of people locally to interact like we’re doing here. iMonk commenters are some of the best.

Yep. Especially me. Over at another blog recently, someone was absolutely flabbergasted that I said we couldn’t “go it alone” in reading and interpreting the gospels, that we needed what Paul, John, Peter, et al. said too. I thought this was pretty much Christianity 101, but I really put a torque on the noses of, I think, the majority of that blog’s readers. I was, and still am, completely confused.

The problem with tongue-in-cheek posts like this is that I (being admittedly clueless, anyway) can’t always tell exactly what is being argued for and exactly what is being argued against. I think maybe I agree with you whole-heartedly. But maybe our opinions here are night and day different. I can’t tell. My apologies to the other readers who don’t have this problem. If you have the time and inclination in the near future for a more direct, less ironic post on what you mean, it would be helpful — to me, anyway.

He wrote: “And this, sadly, chimes in with other impressions I have received from elsewhere within the same theological stable – with, for instance, the suggestion that since Paul’s epistles give us ‘the gospel’ while ‘the Gospels’ simply give us stories about Jesus, we shouldn’t make the reading of the latter into the key moment in the first half of the Communion Service. (In case anyone should rub their eyes in disbelief, I have actually heard this seriously argued more than once in the last year or two.)’

Here is a link:http://tinyurl.com/557kwb

– from “This is Love”, by Steve Bell,
from his CD “Beyond a Shadow”

The epistles are the further and explanatory revelation of the gospels.