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GOSPEL, GOSPELS

The standard term for the four books of the NT bearing that name: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All four show considerable similarity, despite (at times considerable) differences in content. All four start with the figure of John the Baptist, then give long accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus, leading to an extended description of his trial and execution; moreover all four conclude with some account of his tomb being found empty and (certainly in three of the Gospels) his appearance alive to his disciples after his death. In a very real sense, therefore, it is both sensible and meaningful to treat these four books as examples of a broader single generic category.

One should note, however, that the use of the word “Gospel” to refer to these books is only established in Christian history from the second half of the 2nd century. In the 1st century and in the NT itself, especially in Paul, “gospel” refers to the whole Christian message, above all that of Jesus’ death and its significance in God’s saving plan. “Gospel” for Paul has very little to do with any teaching of the pre-Easter Jesus (cf. 1 Cor. 15:1ff.). So too the “gospel” for Paul is unique: there is — and can only be — one true gospel (Gal. 1:6-7), not four! Precisely when the semantic change in the meaning of the word took place cannot be certain.

However, although terminology and ideas had become fixed by the end of the 2nd century, so that there were thought to be four and only four Gospels, the situation was much more fluid in the middle of the 2nd century. Many other texts were in existence at this time, all claiming to be “gospels,” but very different in scope and structure from the canonical Gospels. Some of these have become available in the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi (others were known already). Thus the Gospel of Thomas consists solely of a string of sayings of Jesus. There is no narrative, no account of Jesus’ miracles or other actions, no account of his trial, passion, death, or resurrection appearances. The Gospel of Truth, also from Nag Hammadi, is an extended meditation on God and the world, with no explicit mention of Jesus at all (though scholars have detected allusions to Jesus traditions embedded in the text). The Gospel of Mary, by contrast, is concerned wholly with conversations the risen Jesus has with his disciples, and includes nothing about his suffering and death, or anything of his life prior to the Passion. All these texts claim the term “gospel,” either explicitly or implicitly. It is thus clear that before the end of the 2nd century the term “gospel,” even when restricted to referring to a literary document (rather than to the whole Christian message), could refer to a wide variety of texts.

For the most part, the Gospels provide our main source for any knowledge about Jesus. The value of the noncanonical Gospels in this respect is probably mostly negligible. Rather than giving any information about Jesus himself, these texts witness to the ideas of their writers and the communities that preserved them. Many are gnostic texts from a period after the time of Jesus and reflect gnostic ideas read back onto the lips of Jesus.

The one possible exception may be the Gospel of Thomas. Several have argued strenuously that Thomas preserves an independent line of the tradition and may have authentic material about Jesus. Others have argued that Thomas in fact presupposes the finished Gospels of our NT and hence witnesses only to the development of the Gospel tradition in a later period. Certainly it seems undeniable that in its present form the text of Thomas presupposes the canonical Gospels; whether other traditions are also preserved in Thomas which may be earlier is much disputed.

If we restrict attention to the four canonical Gospels, the question inevitably arises, What kind of documents are they? To what literary category, or “genre,” do they belong?

Up to the beginning of the 20th century, it was assumed that the Gospels were in some sense “biographies,” comparable to works about Socrates (by Plato or Xenophon), Epictetus (by Arrian), or Apollonius of Tyana (by Philostratus). This changed with the work of the form critics who insisted that the Gospels were really folk literature, not to be compared with literary works; the Evangelists were simply popular storytellers who did not impose their own ideas on the work as a whole. Thus Rudolf Bultmann concluded that the Gospels had no real parallels in ancient literature: they had none of the characteristic features of biography (nothing on Jesus’ personality, his psychological development, his education or origin). The Gospels were thus without analogy and “sui generis.”

Such a claim is extremely odd in literary terms. Some understanding of the genre of a text is essential if it is to be understood at all; a text without any analogy would be almost incomprehensible. Further, the rather “low” view that the Evangelists were (just) editors of their materials has been questioned in more recent Gospel studies. There has been a swing away from the older form-critical view and revival of the theory that the Gospels can be seen (in some sense at least) as “biographies.” This does not mean that they are biographies in a modern sense of the word. Indeed, there is nothing on Jesus’ personality, very little on his background, etc. Yet ancient writings claiming to give the “lives” (Gk. bíoi) of individuals also often lacked some of these features. Taking a reasonably broad spread of ancient “lives” of individuals, the Gospels can be shown to fall within the (admittedly fairly broad) parameters which such works imply. It is probably fair to say that, at least in terms of a relatively general and broad genre, the NT Gospels can be seen as sufficiently similar to some ancient “lives” or biographies to be included in that generic category.

Such a categorization does not determine precisely how the Gospels can or should be read. Certainly the category of “biography” does not necessarily imply historical veracity. Many non-Christian “biographies” were written with an author’s own agenda. So too, as noted, it is now accepted that the NT Evangelists may have made a more significant contribution in their presentation of their traditions than the older form critics allowed.

Yet, as noted, the NT Gospels are virtually our only sources of information about Jesus. How reliable are they in this respect? One must remember that the Evangelists were all themselves Christians. (We have no records of Jesus by non-Christians.) As such they all believed that the Jesus who had lived and taught on earth prior to his crucifixion had somehow been raised by God from the dead and was now alive in a new way, directing and guiding his church. The “Jesus of history” was believed to be alive and still speaking to his followers; hence the teaching of Jesus preserved in the tradition was not only that of a past figure: it was also that of the Christian community’s living Lord. Thus any distinctions one might wish to make between a pre-Easter and a post-Easter situation would probably have been rather unreal for 1st-century Christians.

It seems clear that the Evangelists evidently did feel free to alter their tradition at times. This can be seen most clearly in the case of the Synoptic Evangelists, where one writer has almost certainly used one of the other Gospels as a source (probably Matthew and Luke used Mark), but where in the process of using the source, a degree of freedom has been exercised to change the tradition. In relation to the fourfold Gospel canon, it is widely acknowledged that one cannot accept both John’s account and the Synoptic accounts of Jesus’ teaching as equally authentic. Most probably Jesus is to be seen most clearly in the Synoptic picture, and John’s Gospel represents a reinterpretation and rewriting of the tradition in new categories for a different context. But John is probably not so qualitatively different from the other Evangelists in that all four have imposed their own ideas and beliefs on the tradition.

This does not mean that any quest for the historical Jesus is impossible. Far from it. Careful use of the Gospels can tell a lot about Jesus. But the Gospels also reveal much about the Evangelists and their concerns, and if we wish to use the Gospels to recover information about Jesus we shall have to be alive to the Evangelists’ concerns as having shaped, perhaps significantly, the way the story is now told.

Insofar as Jesus is a unique figure in the ancient world (e.g., the Christian claims about the “resurrection” of Jesus are without real analogy), then the accounts of his life, death, and resurrection are without analogy. For example, no Jew wrote a comparable life of Johanan ben Zakkai or Hillel. But the nature of the NT Gospels as in some sense “biographies,” at least as understood in the ancient world, should alert us to the riches they contain and the complexities which any reading of them involves.

Bibliography. D. E. Aune, The New Testament in Its Literary Environment (Philadelphia, 1988); R. A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? SNTSMS 70 (Cambridge, 1992); H. Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels (Philadelphia, 1990); C. M. Tuckett, Reading the New Testament (Philadelphia, 1987).

Christopher Tuckett

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

GOSPEL, GOSPELS

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)