The Christ of the Gospels

CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS AGAIN
AVAILABLE
Christian News, Vol. 49, No. 9, February 28, 2011

Christ of the Gospels is now again available from Christian News. The price of the 236 page hardcover book will be listed in next week’s CN.

Reprinted here, is the foreword by Dr. Martin Scharleman and the preface by Dr. William Beck.

The CN editor has used the sections in “Christ of the Gospels” on the passion, death and resurrection of Christ for many years during midweek Lenten services. He knows of no better harmony of the Gospels to be read during Lent. Pastors who want to use these readings in their Lenten Services may contact Christian News at cnmail@fidnet.com.

Foreword
Irenaeus, one of the early church fathers, argued that there had to be four Gospels because there were four regions, north, east, south, and west, and also four winds. The church was scattered in all four directions, he went on to say, and so it had to have four Gospels to serve as four pillars supporting the life of the church.

But when the church kept using the expression “The four-fold Gospel,” it asserted that the four Gospels were basically one. The first man to try to make one of the four Gospels was Tatian, who around 150 A.D. prepared the Diatessaron. This life of Christ was read for centuries in the churches of Syria.

Many such unified accounts of the Gospel records have appeared since the days of Tatian. This present work is the result of many years of painstaking work and infinite care for details. And a great deal of consultation has gone into the making of this work. The undersigned had the privilege of serving on a special committee that reviewed the translation and the sequence of events presented in this volume. Where questions arose that could be handled in one of several ways, the final decision was left to the translator.

The reader will find here a reverent presentation of the life of Christ in the language of today. It will be a useful tool in the hands of pastors, teachers, and Sunday school workers. And it will certainly be welcomed as a handy volume in family devotions wherever parents and children want to gather around Him who was made man that we might be God’s children.
Martin H. Scharlemann
Director of the Graduate School
Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri

Preface
If Jesus were talking to us today, He wouldn’t use the strange words of long ago. He would talk to us in the language we use when we talk to one another. The purpose of this book is to let Jesus tell us His wonderful truths in our own language.

What He said and did was written down by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And we have to read all four Gospels if we want the whole story of Jesus. Only Matthew and Luke tell us how Jesus was born. Only John tells us about the raising of Lazarus and the breakfast of the disciples with their risen Savior by the lake. Three of these writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, tell us about the Lord’s Supper. But all four tell us how He suffered, died, and rose again.

How do the four Gospels fit together? How do the many events follow one another in the life of Christ? What was the one life of Jesus that all four writers tell us about? These are the problems which I have tried to solve. Here you will find everything in the four Gospels fitted together in one flowing story. Here is the life of Jesus from the time He came down to the earth until He returned to His Father.

It is a thrilling story, something never seen “on land or sea.” It is the story of the Son of God who loved us and gave Himself for us. Here we meet Him face to face, let Him talk to us, and as He goes to give His lifeblood for us, we let Him tell us, “Your sins are forgiven.” And so He reaches with power into our lives, claims us as His own, never to let us go.
William F. Beck

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Jacob Preus, William Beck and “Mud Slinging”
“THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS”
Christian News, Vol. 49, No. 9, February 28, 2011

Christian News has just reprinted William F. Beck’s Christ of the Gospels, a harmony of the Gospels. It was first published by Concordia Publishing House in 1959. CPH published Beck’s New Testament - An American Translation in 1963. An LCMS convention asked CPH to publish the entire AAT. CPH said it would but then did not. CPH said that a $25,000 market survey showed that publishing the AAT would not be a profit making venture for CPH.

Liberals at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis wanted CPH to use the revised Standard Version of the Bible copyrighted by the National Council of Churches. Some liberals feared that if the LCMS had its own translation it would not help get the LCMS involved in the ecumenical movement. The ESV which CPH now uses is 91% RSV. Beck showed that most of the RSV translators rejected such doctrines as the deity of Christ. They changed the text in more than 1,000 places Beck said. After Beck lectured on the RSV, a group of confessional Lutheran pastors and laymen, including Pastor Paul Burgdorf and his son Pastor Lawrence Burgdorf, at Trinity Lutheran Church, New Haven, Missouri adopted a resolution warning against the “perversion of the RSV” (see photo on page 10).

Beck’s support of the CN editor also did not help gain Beck any support from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis and the LCMS bureaucracy. Christian News published some 250,000 copies of the AAT. CN was gaining support throughout the LCMS because of its “positive” work in publishing “the most accurate translation in modern English.” LCMS President Jacob Preus wanted Christian News to go out of existence. He widely distributed a report claiming that Beck was some Romanizer undermining the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Preus registered no complaint against the AAT when CPH published Beck’s New Testament. Jacob Preus only claimed to have found doctrinal error when CN published the AAT. If Preus could have stopped the sale of the AAT after CN had just paid the bill for another 50,000 copies, he could have destroyed CN financially.

A source closer to CPH reported that the real problem with the AAT and the reason CPH would not publish or use it is “Herman Otten.” If CPH published and promoted the AAT it would lend credibility to Christian News and be “a feather in it’s hat.” Otten’s response: “Now that is a real scholarly attitude.”

James Burkee writes in his Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod:

For fear of damaging the movement, Otten still did not release the good on Preus, suggesting only that he was “two faced”.98 But he still pushed, as always, in print, Preus to retire:

Something has happened to the LCMS president. He needs our sympathy and prayers. Right now it appears that it would be best both for him and the LCMS to declare he will not seek re-election. This is exactly what we told him in the letter he is using as evidence for his charge that CN is guilty of “blackmail.”99

This mudslinging went both ways. Preus first threatened to reveal what many already knew by then, that Otten and his informants secretly tape recorded conversations. Otten responded that Preus was only offended by the tactic when he was its victim:

While you have severely faulted us for using tape recordings, we fail to see what else we can do to support a report in which a person denies saying something which we reported he said. . . We then published a statement from a tape recording made at a speech which you gave in Lisle, Illinois where you said exactly what we had reported.100

Preus wrote in December that he had more dirt on Otten: a Preus informant told him that Otten had applied for a call in a West German church body.101 Using a favorite Otten approach, he asked, “Is this true?”102 Finally, in a move that caused Otten considerable hardship, Preus pulled synod support from William Beck’s An American Translation (AAT) of the Bible. “Bible Beck,” an eccentric Otten enthusiast who worked in a freezing office to keep his mind alert, translating the Bible with fingerless gloves and without socks, had his New Testament translation published by synod’s CPH in 1963.103 Preus now claimed it doctrinally deficient and pulled his support. Otten felt the pinch, having just paid the bill for 50,000 copies of AAT he now had to sell.104

x x x

Don’t expect to read anything about Beck’s “The Christ of the Gospels” from CPH or the organized conservatives who hailed Jack Preus and follow Paul McCain. When Burkee went through CN’s files on Jack Preus, he should also have checked letters in CN’s files from Paul McCain. He would have found another double-talking bureaucrat. Jack Preus said he was considering asking CPH to stop all promotion of Beck’s work.

End notes
98 “Investigate Christian News,” CN, January 1, 1979; Otten, CN Encyclopedia 2, 1448.
99 “Missouri Synod President Preus in Dispute with Conservatives”; Otten, CN Encyclopedia 2, 1449.
100 “Herman Otten to J.A.O. Preus (unsigned), December 16, 1978, JAOP, Otten/CN.
101 The West German church is the Selbstandige Evagelisch-Lutherische Kirche.
102 J.A.O. Preus to Herman Otten, December 15, 1978, JAOP, Otten/CN.
103 Marie Meyer interviews.
104 “President Preus Says AAT Bible Published During Liberal Period,” CN, February 5, 1979; Otten, CN Encyclopedia 2, 1450.