One of the main take a ways from this article was the different portrayals of Jesus. And, in particular, the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels—or, in other words, the Gospel Jesus. The article brought up an interesting point that I had not thought of before: the gospels “stem from his highly selective arrangement of Jesus material in order to promote and strengthen a faith that would bring people closer to God.” In making this purpose clear, the article makes it obvious that the Gospel’s had a specific purpose and thus their portrayals of Jesus were geared to this purpose.
When we take this into account, it makes sense why we get different gospels. Instead of a uniform version of the story, the different gospels told their story to different audiences, thus resulting in unique versions telling of the same God.
While this ‘Gospel Jesus’ point of view made a lot of sense, it also caused me to wonder why these ‘different’ versions of Jesus had to be created. Without the uniformity, we lose some of the cohesiveness of the story and leads to a story that is, in a way, just pieced together. While there is much to gain from this way of describing the gospel story, I also feel like there is some to lose with the method.
John Seida 
I understand your discontent over the cohesiveness of the four Gospels in their different portrayals of Jesus but also believe that their is significant historical reason to provide such varying accounts. The Gospels were each written at different times and in different cultural contexts. They audiences their authors had to appeal to experienced daily life in wholly unique ways and being able to read different versions of Jesus’s life may have increased their capacity to relate to Jesus and his message in a changing world.
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**Please excuse my grammatical mistakes (yikes!!)
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Great response to the reading! Mentioning that the “Gospel Jesus” is probably the closest we humans can get to understanding the real Jesus is critical towards reading the four Gospels. In response to your question, I’m not sure if the “actual” and “historical” portraits were used to describe versions of Jesus. To me, I think that the purpose of mentioning the portraits was to point out the different aspects of the identity of the “real Jesus” and to show the flaws of studying the “actual” and “historical” aspects in order to understand him.
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