Gospel

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A gospel is a narrative of the life, death, and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. The English word renders the Old English gōdspel, “good news,” itself a translation of the Greek euangelion — a term that in early Christian usage named not a book but the message of salvation, and only later came to label the texts that carried it.

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. Scholarship dates them to roughly the second half of the first century and treats the named authorships as later attributions rather than settled fact. Three of them — Matthew, Mark, Luke — overlap so closely in wording and sequence that they are called the synoptics, “seen together”; the dominant explanation holds that Mark came first and that Matthew and Luke drew on it, alongside a hypothesized collection of sayings scholars call Q. John stands apart, later and more meditative, framing Jesus less as teacher of parables than as the eternal Word made flesh.

These four were not the only ones written. The first centuries produced many further gospels that the emerging church did not receive as scripture: infancy narratives filling in the silent childhood, passion accounts, and sayings- collections such as the Gospel of Thomas, recovered among the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945. Some of these belonged to the currents later labeled Gnostic, and present Jesus chiefly as a revealer of secret knowledge. The line between canonical and non-canonical was drawn gradually, by argument and use, across the second through fourth centuries; it was a judgment of the early communities, not a feature of the texts themselves.

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 are given a place of honor in the liturgy that the rest of scripture does not share. To call a text a gospel, in that setting, is to make a claim about its truth and not only its genre.

Scholars have long debated what kind of writing a gospel is. Older study treated the form as something new, a Christian invention without precedent; more recent work tends to read the canonical gospels against Greco-Roman biography, which they resemble in shape while bending it toward proclamation. The texts are not disinterested chronicle. Each was composed to persuade, written from faith and for it, selecting and arranging its material toward a confession the writer already held. The word has since loosened in ordinary speech to mean any message proclaimed as certain truth — 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

→ Related: New Testament · Christianity · Paul The Apostle · Bible · Gnosis · Mary