This is the gap gospel.  It bridges the gap between the prophetic books and the book of Acts, between the kingdom which has slipped out and the church which has come in.  It explains the adjournment of the kingdom for a specified time, the church filling a sort of interregnum in the kingdom.  The kingdom is to come later when the church mission is complete.  It tells with great care and with convincing power that Jesus filled perfectly the prophecy of the Messiah in every detail personally, and did not fill out the national features because of the nation’s unwillingness.  That is the Matthew Gospel.

Paul was the apostle to the outside nations.  His great work was outside of Palestine.  He dealt with three classes, Jews, outsiders who in religious matters had allied themselves with the Jews, but without changing their nationality, and then the great outside majority, chiefly the great crowds of other nationalities.  These people needed a gospel of their own.  Their standpoint is so wholly different from the Jews’ that Matthew’s gospel does not suit, nor Mark’s.  Paul, through Peter and Barnabas and others, has absorbed the leading facts and teachings of those three years, and works them over for his non-Jewish crowds.  He omits much that would appeal peculiarly to Jews, and gives the setting and coloring that would be most natural to his audiences.

His studious companion, Doctor Luke, undertakes to write down this account of Jesus’ life as Paul tells it, and for Paul’s audience and territory, especially these great outside non-Jewish crowds of people.  He goes to Palestine, and carefully studies and gathers up all the details and facts available.  He adds much that the two previous writers had not included.  One can easily understand his spending several days with Mary, the now aged mother of Jesus, in John’s home in Jerusalem, and from her lips gleaning the exquisite account of the nativity of her divinely conceived Son.  He largely omits names of places, for they would be unknown and not of value or interest.  When needed, he gives explanation about places.

These three gospels follow one main line; they tell the story of the rejection of Jesus.  Then there arose a generation that did not know Jesus, the Jesus that had tramped Jerusalem’s streets and Galilee’s roads.  Some were wondering, possibly, how it was that these gospels are absorbed in telling of Jesus’ rejection.  There surely was a reason for it if He was so sweepingly rejected.  So John in his old age writes.  His chief thought is to show that from the first Jesus was accepted by individuals as well as rejected by the nation.  These two things run neck and neck through his twenty-one chapters, along the pathway he makes of witnessed, established facts regarding Jesus.  The nation—­the small, powerfully entrenched group of men who held the nation’s leadership in their tenacious fingers—­the nation rejects.  It’s true.  But the ugly reason is plain to all, even the Roman who gave final sentence.  From the first, Jesus was accepted by men of all classes, including the most thoughtful and scholarly.