Just What Is a Gospel?

The four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—are our principal sources of information about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. For two thousand years, they have nourished the faith of Christians across the world.

In our own, skeptical age, the Gospels still have a unique place. Even those who don’t regard Jesus with the eyes of faith acknowledge that he is the most influential man ever to have lived, having left a major mark on history, culture, and language.

There is tremendous confusion about the Gospels themselves. How are they different from one another? Do they contain contradictions or falsehoods? Who wrote them? When? Weren’t there other gospels in the early Church? How much authority should they be given?

Let us start at the beginning.

What is a Gospel?

In the simplest terms, a Gospel is an ancient Christian book about Jesus. When people refer to “the Gospels,” they’re typically referring to the four canonical ones. However, there also are non-canonical gospels that are not included in the New Testament.

The Greek term for gospel (euangelion) means “good news,” and it could be used in a variety of senses. Naturally, it could refer to hearing about any good thing that had happened. However, it often was used to refer to announcements by or about the Roman emperor.

The emperor often was regarded as the son of a god, and his person represented the peace and security of the empire. Whatever he announced was at least supposed to be good news for the people, and so it would be declared to be “good news” (whether it really was or not).

It thus was natural for Christians to announce the coming of the true Son of God and his kingdom as good news, and so St. Mark begins his book with these words: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” It is probably from this verse that the book of Mark came to be known as a “Gospel,” and from there the term spread to other canonical and non-canonical works.

Because the canonical ones are known as Gospels (Greek,Euangelia), their authors are known as the four Evangelists—with a capital E, to distinguish them from ordinary evangelists, who share the message of Jesus generally.

When it comes to the kind of books the canonical Gospels are, they are essentially biographies. That is, they tell us about the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

There are differences between modern biographies and ancient lives. Today, authors may write biographies about people just because they’ve had interesting lives. However, ancient lives had an instructional purpose. Readers were meant to learn lessons from the lives of the people they read about.

Thus, in his Parallel Lives, Plutarch wrote about similar noble figures—a Greek in parallel with a Roman—so that his readers could learn what made the men great and what they might want to imitate. Similarly, in Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Suetonius discusses both the good things and the bad things the first twelve Roman emperors did—partly so that people would know what good rulers should and should not do.

The four Gospels share this instructional quality, and we are meant to take away important lessons for our lives. John states, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (20:30-31).

Similarly, in Matthew, Jesus says, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock” (7:24).

Sometimes people wonder whether the Gospels were meant for Christian audiences or whether they were evangelistic documents meant to convince people to become Christian.

The answer is the former, and the reason is the cost involved in producing copies of the Gospels.

Today, individual Gospels and even entire New Testaments can be mass-produced cheaply and given away for free, making them usable as evangelistic tools. But before the printing press, every word had to be handwritten by a scribe, and every sheet of papyrus or parchment had to be painstakingly manufactured by hand.

As a result, a single copy of one of the Gospels was fantastically expensive, with Matthew costing the equivalent of around $2,200, Mark around $1,400, Luke around $2,400, and John around $1,900. Only rich people and congregations that pooled resources could afford them, making it clear that they could not be handed out as evangelistic tracts, so they were meant for people who were already committed Christians.