Gospel

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A gospel is a narrative of the life, death, and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. The English word descends from the Old English gōdspel — gōd, “good,” plus spel, “news, story, tidings” — coined as a word-for-word rendering of the Greek euangelion, “good news,” by way of the Latin evangelium. The coinage was close enough to godspel, “God-story,” that scribes confused the two, and the long vowel of gōd shortened toward god; the modern spelling preserves the slip. Beneath the word lies a Greek term older than Christianity, used in the Hellenistic world for the glad announcement of a victory or a royal accession. What the first Christians did with it was to make that announcement a person.

A proclamation before a book

In its earliest Christian use euangelion named not a text but a message: the proclamation that in Jesus, crucified and risen, salvation had broken into the world. The oldest written witness to the word is Paul, whose letters predate every surviving gospel by a generation. When Paul reminds the congregation at Corinth of the euangelion he preached to them, he means a spoken announcement received and held fast, not a scroll. For Paul there is one gospel and many who carry it; the word is an event before it is a genre. Only in the second century, as the written accounts multiplied and had to be told apart, did euangelion migrate from the thing proclaimed to the documents that proclaimed it — so that one could begin to speak of a gospel, and then of the gospel according to Mark or Matthew or Luke or John. The plural was a late and slightly uneasy development: the church preferred to say there was one gospel in four forms.

The genre, when it crystallized, took its name from its content. Mark’s opening sentence announces the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and whether the word there means the message or the book it heads, the writer is using the older sense to christen the newer thing. The book is the good news committed to writing. That genealogy explains a feature that puzzles readers who come to the gospels expecting biography in the modern sense: they are oddly silent on most of a life. Two of the four say nothing of Jesus’ birth or childhood; all four slow almost to a standstill at the end, devoting a disproportionate share of their length to the last week, the arrest, the trial, the cross. The proportions are those of a proclamation about a death and its meaning, not the even chronicle of a career.

The four

Four such accounts stand in the Christian New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, traditionally ascribed to two of Jesus’ disciples and two of their associates — Matthew the tax collector, Mark the companion of Peter, Luke the physician who traveled with Paul, John the beloved disciple. The texts themselves name no author; the titles were attached in the second century, and scholarship treats the named authorships as later attribution rather than settled fact. The four are dated to roughly the second half of the first century, Mark earliest, near the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70, and John latest, toward the century’s close.

Three of them — Matthew, Mark, Luke — agree so closely in wording, order, and selection that they can be set in parallel columns and read across, and so are called the synoptics, “seen together.” The pattern of their agreement and disagreement is the synoptic problem, and the explanation that has held the field since the nineteenth century is Markan priority: Mark wrote first, and Matthew and Luke each drew on it independently. Where Matthew and Luke share sayings of Jesus absent from Mark — the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, much teaching in common phrasing — the two-source hypothesis posits a second, lost collection of sayings, conventionally called Q, from the German Quelle, “source.” No copy of Q has ever been found; it is an inference from the texts that survive, and a minority of scholars dispense with it, holding instead that Luke knew Matthew directly. Either way, the synoptics share a single narrative spine.

John stands apart. Later than the others and more meditative, it frames Jesus less as a teacher of parables and exorcist of demons than as the eternal Word — the Logos — made flesh, present at the creation and descending into time. Its long discourses, its seven signs, its “I am” sayings, and its high opening hymn give it a register the synoptics do not share. The early church read the difference not as contradiction but as complement: a fourth witness pitched at a different altitude, the eagle’s view to the others’ ground-level walking.

The fourfoldness itself became a theme. Irenaeus, defending exactly four, reached for the four winds and the four corners of the earth, and later tradition fixed on the four living creatures of Ezekiel’s vision and the Revelation — the man, the lion, the ox, the eagle — assigning one to each evangelist, with the eagle to John for the height of its opening. The four creatures still surround Christ in mosaic and manuscript, a visual grammar for the claim that one gospel speaks through four mouths. The gospel-book, in turn, became an object of unusual honor: copied with care, bound in metal and jewels, carried in procession, sworn upon. In the Eastern churches a gospel-book rests permanently on the altar itself. The reverence is owed not to the parchment but to what the parchment carries — the same proclamation Paul preached before any of it was written down.

The gospels the canon left out

These four were not the only ones written. The first centuries produced many further gospels that the emerging church did not receive as scripture. Some filled the silences of the canonical accounts — infancy gospels narrating the childhood Mark and John omit entirely, of which the Protevangelium of James is the most influential, shaping later devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Others were passion narratives, or harmonies, or — most distinctively — sayings-collections that dispense with story altogether and present Jesus as a voice of secret teaching. The Gospel of Thomas, a list of one hundred fourteen sayings with almost no narrative frame, is the great surviving example, recovered in Coptic among the codices unearthed near Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 — the find that gathered into the Nag Hammadi library the first substantial body of primary texts from the currents the heresiologists had called Gnostic. Some of these works, the Gospel of Judas among them, present Jesus chiefly as a revealer of gnosis, saving knowledge of the soul’s origin and its way of return, rather than as the sacrificial savior of the canonical four. Before 1945 the Gnostic gospel-literature was known almost entirely at second hand — through the hostile summaries of the church fathers, and through the three Coptic codices that had surfaced by 1900, among them the dialogue-gospel Pistis Sophia, in which the risen Christ instructs his disciples in the descents and ascents of the soul.

The line between canonical and non-canonical was not laid down at a stroke. It was drawn gradually, by argument and by use, across the second through fourth centuries. A community read what it had received from those who came before; texts that proved themselves in worship, that traced to an apostle, that agreed with the faith already held, accumulated authority, while others fell away or were ruled out. By the late second century the four were already a settled core — Irenaeus of Lyon defended exactly four, no more and no fewer, against both the single gospel of Marcion and the proliferating gospels of his Valentinian opponents. A list close to the later canon, the Muratorian fragment, dates from about the same period. But the full twenty-seven-book New Testament was not enumerated as such until the Easter letter of Athanasius of Alexandria in 367, and ratified by regional councils — Carthage in 397 — only afterward. Canonicity, in the end, was a judgment of the communities that used the books, not a property the books wore on their face. What was excluded did not vanish: the rejected gospels are the heart of the apocrypha, and several shaped Christian art and legend for centuries after the canon closed.

Inspired witness

What the church holds about these books goes beyond their history. In Christian practice the four canonical gospels are read as inspired witness — the authoritative record of God’s self-disclosure in Christ — and given a place of honor in the liturgy that the rest of scripture does not share: the gospel is read standing, processed, sometimes incensed, announced not as one reading among others but as the words of the Lord. To call a text a gospel, in that setting, is to make a claim about its truth and not only its genre. The continuity from Paul’s spoken euangelion holds: the books are valued because they carry the proclamation, and the proclamation is what is finally believed.

What kind of writing is a gospel

Scholars have long debated what kind of writing a gospel is. The form-critics of the early twentieth century treated it as something without precedent — a sui generis Christian creation, assembled from oral units of preaching and belonging to no known literary class. That verdict held for decades. It was overturned, more than by any other single work, by Richard Burridge’s What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (Cambridge, 1992), which set the canonical gospels against the conventions of ancient bios — the Greco-Roman “life,” the genre of Plutarch and Suetonius and Lucian — and found the match close on feature after feature: the focus on a single subject, the opening with origins, the topical and chronological mixture, the weighting toward the manner of death. Within a generation Burridge’s reading became the new consensus — traced and weighed in Steve Walton’s review-essay on its reception — and the gospels are now most often classed as a species of ancient biography, bent toward proclamation.

The texts and their study

The modern study of the gospels turns on three problems and a recovery. The synoptic problem — the literary relation among Matthew, Mark, and Luke — was brought to its still-dominant solution in the nineteenth century, when Christian Hermann Weisse and then Heinrich Julius Holtzmann combined Markan priority with a hypothesized sayings-source to form the two-source hypothesis; the Synoptic Problem Website maintained by Stephen Carlson lays out the hypothesis and its rivals in detail. The form-critical school of Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann, working in the 1920s, dissected the gospels into the small oral units they believed preceded them, and bequeathed the long-standing view — only lately overturned — that the gospel was a literary form without precedent. The question of genre was reopened and largely settled by Richard Burridge in 1992, whose comparison with Greco-Roman bios moved the field toward reading the gospels as ancient lives.

For the wider gospel-literature, including the texts the canon excluded, Helmut Koester’s Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Trinity Press International / SCM, 1990) remains a standard survey, treating canonical and non-canonical works within a single developmental frame and arguing that some apocryphal traditions preserve early material. Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford University Press, 2003) narrates the contest among rival Christian groups out of which the canon emerged, restoring the lost gospels to the communities that prized them. The single transforming event for that literature was the 1945 discovery near Nag Hammadi, after which a body of primary Gnostic gospels could be read directly rather than through hostile report; the standard English collections are James M. Robinson’s Nag Hammadi Library in English (3rd ed., 1988) and Marvin Meyer’s Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2007), both in copyright and consultable through libraries. The pre-1945 dispensation, when the Gnostic gospel-record reached English readers chiefly through the Theosophist G.R.S. Mead, survives in his Pistis Sophia and Fragments of a Faith Forgotten — serviceable as historical reception, not as current scholarship, and read against the reorientation of the field by Michael Williams, Karen King, and Birger Pearson.

That bending is the qualification that matters. A gospel is not disinterested chronicle and was never meant to be. Each was composed to persuade — written from faith and for it, selecting and arranging its material toward a confession the writer already held and meant the reader to share. Ancient biography itself was rarely neutral; it praised, it shaped, it argued through a life. The gospels press that tendency to its limit, making the life into the argument and the death into the climax. The word has since loosened in ordinary speech to mean any message proclaimed as certain truth — to take a thing “as gospel” is to take it as beyond dispute — a faint echo of the conviction with which the first ones were set down.

→ In the library: Pistis Sophia (Mead) — a Gnostic gospel-dialogue · Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten

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