Rev. Kenneth Brighenti - Catholicism For Dummies

Catholicism regards Jesus as the eternal Son of the Father and teaches that the relationship between Father and Son is one of profound love. To understand this dynamic even better, see the nearby sidebar “Deep thoughts about Father and Son.”

The belief that the relationship between Father and Son is so close, intense, and perfect led St. Thomas Aquinas to say that the third person of the Holy Trinity — the Holy Spirit — is the living, personified fruit of that mutual love.

Obedience is a sign of love and respect, and Catholics believe that Jesus obeyed the will of the Father. To Catholics, “Thy will be done” is more than just a phrase of the Our Father. It’s the motto of Jesus Christ, Son of God.

And Catholic belief maintains that God the Father’s will was for Jesus to

Reveal God as a community of three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) united in divine love

Show God’s love for all humankind

Be humankind’s Redeemer and Savior

To the Church, the relationship between God the Father and God the Son (Jesus) isn’t the same as the relationship between human parents and children. Human fathers aren’t fathers before their sons or daughters are born. If you were an only child, for example, could your dad ever have been called a father before you existed? No. Until a son or daughter is born, no man is a father.

So if you think in those terms, you may think that God the Father didn’t exist before the Son (Jesus) was born. But the Church says that God the Father has always been the Father. So if the Father has always been the Father, then the Son (Jesus) has always been, too. Jesus is the eternal Son of the Father. The Father didn’t exist without the Son for even one instant, one second or microsecond, because the Father was always Father and the Son was always Son.

The New Testament contains four Gospels, books of the Bible that tell the life and words of Jesus. The four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, each wrote one of the four Gospels , considered by Christians to be the most important of all biblical text, because these four books contain the words and deeds of Jesus when He walked this earth.

Even though a different man wrote each of the four Gospels, the same Holy Spirit inspired each man. Inspiration is a special gift of the Holy Spirit given to the sacred authors (those who wrote the Bible) so that only the words that God wanted written down were written down.

The Catholic Church emphasizes that it’s imperative to consider the four Gospels as actually forming one whole unit. The four Gospels aren’t four separate Gospels but four versions of one Gospel. That’s why each one is called the Gospel According to Matthew or the Gospel According to Mark, for example, and not Matthew’s Gospel or Mark’s Gospel. No one single account gives the entire picture, but like facets on a diamond, all sides form to make one beautiful reality. The faithful need all four versions to appreciate the full depth and impact of Jesus.

Catholicism cherishes each different perspective but stresses that all four together, in conjunction with the other inspired writings of the New and Old Testaments, give a better portrait of Jesus.

Both the Holy Spirit and the author, inspired by the Holy Spirit, intended to use or not use the same words and to present or not present the same ideas and images based on the particular author’s distinct audience. For more on how the Gospels are both inspired and audience-savvy, see the later section “ Comparing Gospels.”

Figure 4-1 shows how Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are often depicted in art from Revelation (Apocalypse) 4:7. According to St. Ambrose (339–397), a Father of the Church (learned scholar), a man with wings symbolizes Matthew because he begins his Gospel account with the human origins and birth of Christ. Mark starts his account with the regal power of Christ, the reign of God, and is therefore symbolized by a lion with wings, which was held in high esteem by the Romans. Luke begins his account with the father of John the Baptist, Zachary, the priest, and is symbolized by an ox with wings because the priests of the temple often sacrificed oxen on the altar. John is shown as an eagle because he soars to heaven in his introduction to the Gospel with the preexistence of Christ as the Word ( logos in Greek).

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

FIGURE 4-1:The writers of the four Gospels are often depicted like this from Revelation (Apocalypse) 4:7.

Were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John standing on the sidelines taking notes as Jesus preached or performed miracles? No. In fact, only two of the four, Matthew and John, were actual Apostles and eyewitnesses, so you can’t think of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as, say, reporters covering a story for the media.

Before the Gospels were written, the words and deeds of Jesus were told by word of mouth. In other words, the Gospels were preached before they were written. The spoken word preceded the written word. And after it was written, because the papyrus on which the scrolls were written was so fragile, expensive, and rare, most people didn’t read the Word but heard it as it was spoken in church during Mass. The Church calls it the three-level development of the Gospel: first, the actual sayings and teachings of Christ; second, the oral tradition where the Apostles preached to the people what they saw and heard; and third, the writing by the sacred authors to ensure that the message wouldn’t be altered.

The New Testament was written between A.d. 40 and 100. St. Irenaeus (c. 130–200) in A.d. 188 was the first person to mention the four Gospels. But it wasn’t until the Council or Synod of Carthage in A.d. 397 that the final and official judgment of the Church came out and explicitly listed the 27 books in the New Testament, including the four Gospels. St. Jerome (c. 341–420) was the first one to combine both the Old and New Testaments into one volume and to translate all the books from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek into Latin, which was the common tongue of his time. This Latin version of the Bible is the Vulgate. It took him from A.d. 382 to 405 to finish this monumental task, but he was the first person to coordinate the complete and whole Christian Bible.

The Catholic Church regards the entire Bible as the inspired and inerrant (error-free) Word of God, so the Gospels in particular are crucial because they accurately relate what Jesus said and did while on earth. As we discuss in Chapter 2, the Catholic Church believes that the Bible is sacred literature, but as literature, some parts of it should be interpreted literally, and other parts are intended to be read figuratively. The Gospels are among the books that are primarily interpreted literally insofar as what Jesus said and did.