6. The BibleProject's “The Gospel”
Oct 17, 2026BibleProject is an appealing, online, high quality resource for introductory Bible study.[1] I like the project, and I've recommended it to others to generate discussion. Here I will offer a critique of one of their videos.[2]
Appealing Landscape
BibleProject's videos have an unusual ability to take complicated biblical material and present it clearly without making it dull. They are creative, innovative, fast-paced, visually engaging, and remarkably easy to follow. Most are relatively short and tightly focused, yet they manage to communicate a surprising amount of information. The production quality is consistently excellent, and the combination of biblical content, animation, narration, and visual explanation makes difficult ideas accessible to a very broad audience.
I appreciate what this group is doing and hopes to accomplish, and it is in the spirit of supportive engagement[3] that I am a reluctant critic, here. With that in mind, I found myself disappointed at a fairly deep content level with their video titled "The Gospel."[4] My complaint is about how the Gospels get treated, and I feel that the video is marred by theological quicksand traps.
So, in what follows I will critique this video according to perspective, method, and results.
Theological Quicksand
1. Perspective: The Controlling System
The video begins by quoting from the Gospel of Mark to define "the Gospel" as the arrival of God’s kingdom through Jesus.
But it doesn't stay with Mark; instead, it immediately flies up to thirty thousand feet to describe what kingdom is, not in Mark, but through a larger, meandering biblical storyline from creation, Abraham, Israel, David, and the prophets, all the way to a new creation. This perspective—that "the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus"[5]—becomes the primary controlling framework for "what the Gospels say" and "how to read them"—including when it comes to their differences.
This general perspective will be quite gratifying to many. As a general theory, it seems unobtrusive. Indeed, the video stays within the bounds of what many Christians already generally think about the overarching story of the Bible and especially for how to deal with the differences within the Gospels. (See more on this below.)
Many will miss this, but if you pay close attention during the video, you will see that the individual Gospels are always sifted through this synthesized metanarrative. However, it is inaccurate to call this “what the Gospels say.” It is rather BibleProject’s construction of how the whole Bible fits together, and it becomes the guiding light for how the video treats the individual Gospels in every case.
2. Method: Harmonization
For sure, this is not your father's harmonization. Older terms are avoided: witnesses, courtroom, car wreck. Not even does the word harmonize, or any obvious cognate of that word, appear anywhere in the video.
And certainly, a tip of the hat is given to more academic interests (as I'll show). But it is only a tip of the hat, for the dominant method at play is still a subtle and sophisticated form of harmonization.
It isn't called that, but grammatically and conceptually, the four Gospels are each said primarily to bring a distinct emphasis to the one larger underlying Gospel.
In other words, the video ends up doing what I've been describing for five posts now: advocating for[6] a combined and conflated story that no Gospel writers tell. What I have been calling a 5th Gospel.[7].
The real issue, then, is not merely that the video harmonizes the Gospels, but the restrictions that method places on their distinctive voices. Several results follow.
3. Replacing the Gospels
BibleProject’s “The Gospel” video sets out to show how the overarching good-news story of the entire Bible incorporates the individual Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and suggests they should be read as four distinct representations of one story—called in this video simply, "the Gospel."
The ideal, underlying "Gospel" is specifically named: "So let's talk about how to read the Gospel." Not the Gospels, but the Gospel—as though the four Gospels are just one unified story with different emphases.[8] From the start, the Gospels are repeatedly collapsed into a single entity called “the Gospel”: “how to read the Gospel,” “one of the main goals of the Gospel,” “the Gospel has so many stories,” “the Gospel authors,” and even “all four books of the Gospel.”
With this they signal that "the Gospel" is not a literary text, but a reconstructed whole, a unified theology that stands behind all of the texts. Paul, for example, is not mentioned in this video, but BibleProject interprets Paul’s gospel[9] as another expression or exposition of the one unified gospel story it sees running through Paul, the four Gospels, and the rest of the scriptures. They are merely expressions of it.
Here's the problem: the supposed or reconstructed unified theory then becomes the thing through which every biblical text—including the four Gospels—gets sifted. The actual text of any one Gospel must conform to that larger concern, whether it actually does or not.
So actually, this is not a new story. Just a more sophisticated application of it.
Essentially, the Gospels are replaced by "the Gospel." The result is a story that no Gospel—no biblical text—tells.
4. Hogtying the Gospels
I don’t intend this as mockery; I intend it to show just how this approach inappropriately restrains the Gospels—however unintentionally. Regardless of how many legitimate academic insights exist in this video, they all are made to serve the underlying theological system.
In this video, the distinct voices of each of the Gospels are dutifully and adeptly laid out, only to be immediately neutralized. Here is the very harmonization method—now dressed up a bit—I've been detailing in this series.
The video tells us Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John portray Jesus differently but intentionally:
[T]he diversity is on purpose. Each of the four Gospel authors has shaped and arranged their stories about Jesus differently, so they can emphasize different things about him.
Matthew emphasizes Jesus as a new Moses, Luke as Isaiah’s royal servant, Mark as the arrival of new creation, and John as Israel’s God become human.
The problem is it's difficult to tell what difference this so-called built-in "diversity" actually makes.
Those are really different from each other, but they all tell the same basic story…
That sentence signals that the differences in the Gospels are going to be treated merely as different emphases rather than genuinely different narration and interpretation. It's almost like saying that specific Gospel details are not going to stop us from mashing the Gospels together—because we have developed a theological theory that allows us to do it.[10]
Such matters as distinctive literary voice, arrangement, and particular theological interests get acknowledged, but in the end they make little or no difference.
This is such a common practice that it is hard to overstate it—how Christians (including Christian teachers and preachers) can talk about context, historical and literary integrity, issues of authorship and background, and other relevant issues, and then just completely ignore such things when interpreting the text for purposes of what it means for us.
5. Mashing the Gospels
Here the principle is: What one Gospel says, they all mean.
BibleProject even comes right out and says this: “All the gospels are essentially saying the same thing.”[11]
In the video I'm reviewing, statements made about one Gospel slide into statements about all four. The video begins with Mark's announcement of the kingdom, moves to a synthesis of “the whole biblical story,” then to Jesus in Bethlehem from Matthew, then to the claim that the Gospel writers “weave biblical phrases into the story without telling you,” then to Jesus' baptism in the Synoptics, and finally back to what “all four books of the Gospel” are supposedly showing.
Within moments we have moved from particular texts to assertions about the theological program of all four. This is exactly the problem: what begins as something Mark says becomes what “the Gospel” says. And so, all of them mean it.
But real Gospel differences get washed out. The fact is, the Gospel writers do more than emphasize different things. As I have already demonstrated in this series—several times—they sometimes change sequences, and alter wording, causation, characterization, setting, and sometimes theological direction in ways that resist or even defy legitimate harmonization. Yet those differences play virtually no role in the video. Lipservice is given to them, but what is so-called "the Gospel" in the video is a synthetic creation and remains firmly in control of the details.
Instead of allowing the details of biblical texts to inform their underlying theology, their general theological stance interferes with their handling of the actual details of biblical texts.
Summary
Of course, the ultimate purpose of this video is not academic but evangelistic-informative. Even so, the repeated theological overreach is neither helpful nor acceptable.
So, I would describe this approach as a more sophisticated form of harmonization than some of the popular, naïve forms of it that exist—but a program of harmonization all the same. It at least mentions the individuality of the four writers, which distinguishes it from some other popular presentations. But in the end, those individual voices still end up serving an overarching voice—BibleProject’s own synthesized “Gospel.” This is precisely what I'm calling a 5th Gospel—a story that no Gospel tells.
Finally, there is an interesting irony in this formulation: the video says the diversity in the Gospels is “on purpose.” Yet, it never really allows that diversity to play any real part disturbing the so-called unified story they have already constructed.
That, it seems to me, is the point that deserves the closest attention as we seek to get more from Bible study.
https://www.biblicalconversation.com/more
Questions to Consider
- If harmonizing the Gospels requires us to add events that no Gospel actually reports, at what point have we stopped interpreting the texts and started rewriting them?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - Why are readers often more comfortable with a reconstructed “complete” story than with the four differently shaped stories the Gospels themselves give us?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - In the resurrection stories, what becomes visible when we stop asking how the details can be made to fit and start asking what each Gospel is doing with the story?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - What would it look like in your own Bible reading to let each Gospel stand on its own before bringing the others into the conversation?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Next Week:
7. "Is it Live, or is it Memorex?"
Are the Gospels attempting to reproduce history like a recording—or are they doing something considerably more?
Series Note
This is Study Session #6 of the free, online, ten-session Bible study series: Beyond the 5th Gospel. It is best to begin with Study Session 1 and follow the entire study in the proper order, on a week-by-week schedule.
Because this is copyrighted material intended for personal or goup study, you are granted the right to freely use this material in Bible classes, small groups, private study, or similar settings—as long as you keep the material unchanged and intact, including this series note.
If you have come to this study session out of sequence, please go here for the beginning of the series:
https://www.biblicalconversation.com/blog/5th-gospel-prelude
Go here for all available PDF downloads:
https://www.biblicalconversation.com/studiesbc#section-1788376027032
Thank you.
Gary D. Collier
Footnotes
[1] BibleProject, founded in 2014 by Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, is a nonprofit, crowdfunded organization producing free animated videos, podcasts, articles, classes, and other resources intended to make biblical literature accessible to a broad audience. It describes its mission as helping people experience the Bible as “a unified story that leads to Jesus.” See https://bibleproject.com/.
[2] To see how some others have reviewed BibleProject, see Richard Sweatman, “Review: The Bible Project—Brilliant but Flawed,” The Gospel Coalition Australia, June 5, 2018, https://au.thegospelcoalition.org/article/review-bible-project-brilliant-
flawed/; Emily Belz, “How the Bible Project Is Using Video to Get People into Scripture Again,” Christianity Today (March 2019), https://www.christianitytoday.com/2019/03/
bible-project-tim-mackie-jon-collins-scripture/, which includes comments from Craig S. Keener and Tremper Longman III; “What Is The Bible Project?” GotQuestions.org, updated January 21, 2026, https://www.gotquestions.org/The-Bible-Project.html; and Gabriel Hughes, “What’s Wrong with the Bible Project?” August 6, 2019, https://themajestysmen.com/pastorgabe/whats-wrong-with-the-bible-project/.
[3] A phrase we have been using since 2015 to express the ability of Christians to engage each other civilly, even in areas of disagreement. Click the link to see.
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzq_X1NNaA
[5] https://bibleproject.com/about/
[6] Consciously or not is not the point. In fact, most who are doing this would deny they are doing it. They would likely disagree strongly that they are advocating anything that is not biblical. And the reason for this is that Christians have developed an internal "corporate culture" that they do not know the difference between what the Bible actually says, and what they think it means. Once that happens, we can call anything "biblical."
[7] See the first post in this series: The 5th Gospel.
[8] A new form of the Diatessaron. BibleProject does not claim this, of course, and they would reject it. Whatever the case, that's the result.
[9] https://bibleproject.com/articles/what-are-the-gospels/
https://bibleproject.com/podcasts/gospel-more-you-think/
https://bibleproject.com/guides/book-of-romans/
[10] All such specifics become insignificant next to the power of the Force.
[11] https://bibleproject.com/podcasts/obvious-extravagant-claim-gospels-gospels
-e4/
