F.F. Bruce on the Sources of the Gospels

The following article is now available on-line in PDF:

F. F. Bruce, "The Sources of the Gospels," Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 75 (1943): 1-19.

Bruce offers some valuable advice to NT students:

One danger must be guarded against. The quest for Gospel sources may prove so fascinating and their hypothetical recon­struction so engrossing that the student is apt to forget that the actual four Gospels as they have come down to us are much more important than any putative sources, if only because they are not speculatively reconstructed documents but individual works of literature which have been transmitted to us from the first century of our era. Each had its own characteristic view­point and its own immediate circle of readers, though it is the one Christ and the one Gospel that all four present. And it is these four Gospels, and not any hypothetical sources, that have come down to us from early days with the general consensus of Christians as the divinely inspired fourfold record of God’s culminating self-revelation to men, when “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”