Gospel Stories about Jesus

The early stories about Jesus in the canonical Gospels are best understood in relation to and in the context of Second Temple Judaism. These texts testify to the cultural context in which they were written and the authors’ assumptions that the groups for whom they wrote were conversant in the prophecies later canonized in the Hebrew Bible, albeit mainly from the Septuagint. For example, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke both cast Jesus as a descendant of King David and thus a rightful messianic candidate (compare to Isaiah 11:1 and Jeremiah 23:5). So, too, the narratives of Jesus’ resurrection reflect the Second Temple–period concern with questions of whether there is an afterlife or bodily resurrection (see also Resurrection).