What are the Gospels?
Short answer
The Gospels are the four books that open the New Testament and tell the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The word comes from the Greek euangelion, which means good news. The first three share many episodes and are called synoptic; John takes his own route.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 3 min read
Before it named a kind of book, gospel was an everyday word: the announcement of good news, the sort a messenger brings at a run. That is the sense in which Mark uses the term in his first line — he is not announcing the start of a book, but the start of an announcement. The name of the literary genre came later, borrowed from the content.
There are four, not one, because they are not four copies. Each writes for an audience and chooses where to enter. Matthew opens with a genealogy tying Jesus to David and to Abraham, which only matters to a reader who knows both stories. Luke opens by explaining his method: he researched, checked with eyewitnesses, arranged the material and dedicated the result to a reader with a name. John opens on an entirely different plane, with no genealogy and no infancy.
The first three share so many episodes, and sometimes so much wording, that you can set them in three columns and read them in parallel — hence synoptic, from a Greek word for seeing together. John tells few of the same episodes, gives whole chapters to long conversations, and organises his material around signs. This is not a clash of calendars: it is a different plan for a book.
It is also worth knowing what the Gospels do not claim to be. None of them is a complete biography, and one of them says so outright by admitting that it selected what to record. They are accounts with a declared purpose — which does not make them less historical, but rather more honest than most ancient texts, which rarely confess their own framing.
What the passages say
1The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
The first line of the shortest of the four, and the key to the vocabulary. Here the word is still the announcement and not the book: what begins is not the written work but the news about Jesus. Every later sense of the word derives from this use.
1The book of the lineage of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
An opening that already discloses the intended reader. Starting from David and Abraham only makes sense for someone who carries both promises in memory — this is a text assuming an audience formed in the Scriptures of Israel.
1Since, indeed, many have attempted to set in order a narrative of the things that have been completed among us,
2just as they have been handed on to those of us who from the beginning saw the same and were ministers of the word,
3so it seemed good to me also, having diligently followed everything from the beginning, to write to you, in an orderly manner, most excellent Theophilus,
4so that you might know the truthfulness of those words by which you have been instructed.
The only prologue of the four that describes its own working method: others had already written, he informed himself from the beginning, set things in order and addressed a named recipient. It is the page closest to a reporter’s note on sourcing in the whole Bible.
30Jesus also accomplished many other signs in the sight of his disciples. These have not been written in this book.
31But these things have been written, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and so that, in believing, you may have life in his name.
The closing in which the author admits the selection and states the criterion behind it. He does not claim to have told everything — he claims to have chosen what serves the purpose he names in the next sentence. Reading the Gospels knowing this changes what you expect from them.