While the question posed in the above title may seem quite odd to some, there exists in critical NT studies a gulf between the way Jesus is presented in the Gospels and the way He is portrayed in the Epistles. One of my favorite writers puts it this way in a book I am currently reading (After You Believe).
“The epistles people have thought of Christianity primarily in terms of Jesus’ death and resurrection ‘saving us from our sins.’ The gospels people have thought primarily in terms of following Jesus in feeding the hungry, helping the poor, and so on. This either/or split does no justice to either the epistles or the gospels. For Jesus, the kingdom He inaugurated could be firmly established only through His death and resurrection. The main purpose of those redemptive acts was to establish the kingdom He had already begun to inaugurate. The famous passages which encapsulate what later writers have thought of as atonement theology (such as Mark 10:45: ‘The son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’) are interpretive clues to understand one key dimension of what the whole story is about, not the superimposition of a supposedly ‘Pauline’ theology (about Jesus ‘dying for our sins’) on a narrative which is basically about something else.”
This author has effectively captured the essence of a problem that can be found in many critical treatments of NT theology - and he also has succinctly pointed out the serious problems with that view. I want to add, however, that it is easy to criticize the critics on this point, but we evangelicals often have affirmed the unity of these aspects of Jesus’ ministry but lapsed into a theology and a practice that stresses a distinction between them!
For example, we must honestly admit that there is a tension between these two equally Biblical presentations of Jesus, and that tension has been handled in some strange ways. Older dispensationalists attempted to erase the tension by shoving Jesus’ teachings to the future millennium. Anabaptists, on the other hand, have often neglected the salvific acts of Jesus when they so strongly emphasize the Christian life almost solely in terms of the Sermon on the Mount. Further complications arise when we in Calvinistic circles so stress the great redemptive acts of Jesus while neglecting the social aspects of His teaching as so much liberal hogwash!
Is there a way that the gospels people and the epistles people can meet together instead of stessing the extremes of this bi-polarity? With the help of the above author, I will share some ideas how we can tomorrow.