Other Agreements Among The Gospels About Jesus' Nonverbal Characteristics

In my last post, I discussed how the gospels agree about an aspect of Jesus' posture in the context of prayer. Because the gospels are documents about a teacher, they give a lot of attention to what Jesus said, and readers have a tendency to focus on those parts of the gospels. So, we're more likely to notice patterns in the verbal aspects of Jesus' life than in his nonverbal characteristics. And I think far more research has been done on the former than the latter. But I want to provide some other neglected examples of agreements among the gospels about Jesus' nonverbal characteristics.

He sometimes wept publicly (Luke 19:41, John 11:35).

He sometimes used spit in his healings (Mark 7:33, 8:23, John 9:6). Though spit was viewed positively at times in ancient sources, it was often viewed negatively as well. Raymond Brown referred to how "[Matthew] is in confrontation with Pharisees and in his account of the ministry [of Jesus] he is most careful not to give them anything they can use against Jesus (e.g., his omitting the spittle miracle narrated in Mark 8:22-26)." (The Birth Of The Messiah [New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999], n. 28 on 143) So, including that sort of detail in these healing accounts caused unnecessary offense.

And notice something else about the healings in Mark 8 and John 9. Both involved blind men, and both healings were done in multiple stages. So, not only do Mark and John agree in having Jesus use spit, but they also agree that he used it in the context of healing the blind in particular and that he sometimes healed the blind in multiple stages. That's a highly unusual series of agreements, and it's highly unlikely that Mark and John (and/or their sources) hit upon such agreements by chance in the process of making up stories.

Jesus was sometimes very confrontational, as we see with the temple cleansings (Matthew 21:12-13, Mark 11:15-18, Luke 19:45-46, John 2:13-22). It's likely that he cleansed the temple twice, not just once. Something that can get lost in the controversy over how many times he cleansed the temple is that all of the gospels are agreeing that Jesus had such a character that he behaved that way and did so in such a public context.

And he seems to have been good at avoiding crowds and avoiding the assaults of his enemies when he wanted to (Matthew 8:18-23, Mark 1:35, 6:31-32, Luke 4:30, 5:15-16, John 8:59, 10:39). Notice the overlap between those nonverbal characteristics and his verbal skills of a similar nature (e.g., Mark 4:1-12, Luke 20:19-26, John 6:60-66). The harmony between his words and actions is striking. He seems to have been both physically and mentally agile.

These are just several examples. Much more could be said about agreements over Jesus' moral character, interests, ways of handling particular types of situations, etc. I've been focused on the gospels, those documents give us the most material to work with, and some of the agreements exist only among the gospels. But we should also look for overlap among other sources (e.g., Old Testament theophanies that we think involve Jesus, Old Testament prophecies about him, Acts, comments about Jesus in the New Testament letters, Revelation).