Whether or not these events actually happened confirms or denies the truth of Christianity. Christianity rises or falls on the historical accuracy of key gospel events:. The gospels are not merely collections of reports or sayings of Jesus. While all four gospels are concerned with the same historical events—the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—they present different versions of these events.
They portray characters from different perspectives, sometimes using the same event to highlight something different about Jesus. They develop plot in different ways, occasionally rearranging the order of events. They emphasize different settings, including accounts not recorded by the other writers. The gospels have an agenda. They are proclaimers of the good news about the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the coming of the kingdom of God.
But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. The recognition that the gospel writers are theologians in their own right is one of the most important contributions of recent gospel research. Each evangelist has a story to tell and a perspective to emphasize. See how each gospel introduces his work:. Mark emphasizes Jesus as the Christ and Son of God. Luke tells us he wants to write an accurate historical account.
John introduces Jesus as the pre-existent divine Word, the self-revelation of God. Seeing the gospel writers as theologians has important implications for the way we read their accounts.
We ought to read each gospel seeking to discern these theological themes. Since the gospels arose in the Greco-Roman world of the first century, it helps to compare them with other writings of this era to identify common literary features and narrative techniques. At the same time, we have to remember that the gospels are unique. They arose in the context of the needs and concerns of the early Christian communities.
The gospels were written to proclaim the good news of salvation and to call people to faith in Jesus Christ, the risen Lord and Savior. The gospels are historical narrative motivated by theological concerns. Their intention is to convey accurate historical material about Jesus and also explain and interpret these salvation-bringing events. The papyrus labeled by archaeologists and papyrologists as P 75 is considered to be from the late second or early third century and contains parts of Luke followed by John.
P 45 is in some respects the most notable, however. It dates from the third century but contains large portions of all four Gospels as well as of the book of Acts. From the writings of Irenaeus and others, we know that the four Gospels of the New Testament had been accepted as Scripture by the latter half of the second century. To find that connection we must go to a well-known personage of the fourth century, church historian Eusebius Pamphilus.
Eusebius quotes directly from the writings of a man named Papias ca. Papias, identified as a bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, claimed that his knowledge came from those who had actually walked with the apostles.
His works are now lost to history, but several writers of the second century were well acquainted with them and quoted or paraphrased portions of them. Eusebius himself engages in a discussion of all four Gospels in Ecclesiastical History 3. But he nowhere directly quotes Papias with regard to the Gospels of Luke or John.
Today, however, respected New Testament scholars such as Charles E. The way in which Eusebius begins the account indicates that he is referencing an unidentified written source. The three Gospels already mentioned having come into the hands of all and into his own too, they say that he accepted them and bore witness to their truthfulness; but that there was lacking in them an account of the deeds done by Christ at the beginning of his ministry. This leads to the further conclusion that the four Gospel accounts Christendom uses today owe their authority and place within the canon of Scripture to the apostle John at the end of the first century as recorded by Papias and later paraphrased by Eusebius.
The similarity in details recorded in other second-century writings is testimony to the fact that Papias was their common source.
Even before the end of the first century various apostolic writings were considered on a par with the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament. No one knows the exact number of additional accounts written over the centuries. It was not left to the whim of Constantine or any other post-apostolic authority figure but was undertaken by an eyewitness of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. A gospel is a book of the Bible.
It is simply a different genre of literature than the other books of the Bible e. The latter. There are only four gospels in both Protestant and Catholic Bibles. There is absolutely no exception to this. Old English is a Germanic language, so both of these words are recognizable in the German "gut" and "Spiel" although "spiel" means more like "play".
Spel may have boomeranged back into our language via Yiddish in the form of "spiel", in the expression "a good spiel" - which aptly describes in American slang what "Gospel" means. The Greek word for Gospel appears 77 times in the New Testament, but it doesn't refer to the Gospel books, since these weren't written before the events they describe make sense?
The word appears exactly once in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, in a verse that describes someone who thought they were bringing good news, but weren't:.
He that reported to me that Saul was dead, even he was as one bringing glad tidings before me: but I seized him and slew him in Ziklag, to whom I ought, as he thought, to have given a reward for his tidings. The earliest mention of "Gospel" as one of the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament Matthew, Mark, Luke, John may have been by Papias of Hierapolis , who lived in the first century and died sometime after the year The earliest original work we have, I think, that refers to Gospel books is by Justin Martyr , who writes in his First Apology:.
So likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. It's not entirely clear, however, whether Justin is referring to the four canonical Gospels or - to the point of your question - the writings of the Apostles in general.
The first Church Father that I can identify who definitely spoke of the four Gospels in the same context we speak of them today was Irenaeus Irenaeus makes some interesting comments about the distortion of Biblical texts even in his time, even to the point of excluding certain Gospels in order to reinforce heresy:.
So firm is the ground upon which these Gospels rest, that the very heretics themselves bear witness to them, and, starting from these [documents], each one of them endeavours to establish his own peculiar doctrine.
But Marcion, mutilating that according to Luke, is proved to be a blasphemer of the only existing God, from those [passages] which he still retains. Those, again, who separate Jesus from Christ, alleging that Christ remained impassible, but that it was Jesus who suffered, preferring the Gospel by Mark, if they read it with a love of truth, may have their errors rectified. Those, moreover, who follow Valentinus, making copious use of that according to John, to illustrate their conjunctions, shall be proved to be totally in error by means of this very Gospel, as I have shown in the first book.
Since, then, our opponents do bear testimony to us, and make use of these [documents], our proof derived from them is firm and true. This answer is an excursus of sorts. I think the other answers may be somewhat more relevant to your question, but I think some extra information on etymology and what we know about the Gospels vis a vis the early Church is interesting. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.
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