Introduction

After spending four chapters setting the context of the Gospel community debate and challenging the current community readings of the Gospels, it is time to apply our proposal to the FG. It was Gail O'Day who pointed out that one of the weaknesses in Martyn's reconstruction of the JComm was that his reading strategy

The question of reading the Gospels is the key issue in the Gospel community debate. But until now the debate has been entirely theoretical. The various conferences and article interchanges have only dealt with the exegetical principles and not exegetical practice. The newness of the debate has required more in-depth discussion and clarification, as this book has attempted to do in the first four chapters. But now we must turn to exegetical practice. Before we enter into exegesis, a brief summary of our proposed reading strategy is in order.

Our proposed reading strategy assumes, at the broadest level, that the Gospels were written for an indefinite audience, not an individual “church” or network of churches disconnected from the rest of the early Christian movement.