Summary: Bible - New Testament Gospels

The GIST

The New Testament Gospels are the four books of the Bible that tell the story of Jesus: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Each is a loose-knit, episodic account of what he said and did, building to his trial and death and ending with reports of his appearances after the resurrection. They were written in Koine Greek between about AD 70 and 100. None of them names its author. They were attributed to apostles and their companions very early, and scholars still debate who actually wrote them.

The word gospel comes from an Old English rendering of the Greek euangelion, "good news." At first it meant the Christian message itself, and only in the second century did it also come to mean the books that carried the message. These four books are the main sources for the public career of Jesus, and they are also carefully shaped works by authors with convictions of their own. Understanding both sides of that fact is the key to reading them well.

What It Says

One outline, four portraits

All four gospels share the same basic shape. Jesus begins his public ministry alongside that of John the Baptist. He calls disciples, teaches, heals and confronts the Pharisees. He dies on the cross, and he is raised from the dead. Within that shared outline each gospel has its own understanding of who he is and of his divine role, and modern scholars prefer to recognise those differences instead of blending the four into one smooth account.

Three of them are close relatives. Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the synoptic gospels, from a Greek word meaning "seeing all together," because their content, arrangement and even wording are so alike. John stands apart.

Mark: the first telling

Mark is generally agreed to be the earliest, probably written around AD 70. It opens with the baptism of the adult Jesus and a declaration from heaven that he is the son of God. Jesus gathers followers and begins his ministry, and he tells his disciples that he must die in Jerusalem and will rise again. In Jerusalem he is first acclaimed, then rejected, betrayed and crucified. When the women who followed him come to his tomb, they find it empty.

Mark has distinctive features. It shows no interest in tracing Jesus's ancestry back to King David or Adam, and it seems to assume an ordinary human birth. In this gospel Jesus hides his identity as messiah. And in its original form the book ended abruptly, with no appearances of the risen Jesus, though a young man at the tomb tells the women that the disciples and Peter will see him again in Galilee, a hint that the author knew that tradition.

Matthew and Luke: building on Mark

Matthew and Luke, written around AD 80 to 90, took the story they found in Mark and added to it, each supplying its own account of Jesus's infancy and its own resurrection narratives. One scholar suggests that Luke rounded out Matthew's nativity by adding Mary's perspective to Matthew's focus on Joseph.

Each also adjusts Mark in subtle ways. In Mark the miracle stories confirm Jesus as an emissary of God. In Matthew they demonstrate his divinity, and the young man at the tomb becomes a radiant angel. Matthew is full of quotations from and allusions to the Jewish scriptures. Luke is less concerned with changing Mark's content than with polishing its grammar and style, and Luke is only half of a larger project, since it forms a two-volume work with the Acts of the Apostles. Its preface testifies that earlier accounts of the life of Jesus already existed.

How exactly these three relate is an old puzzle. Most scholars have held that Matthew and Luke each used Mark together with a hypothetical lost source known as Q. Alternatives in which Luke used Matthew directly, or the reverse, with no Q at all, are gaining ground, and recent scholarship puts more weight on the evangelists' own work as authors than on reconstructing sources.

John: a different angle

John, dated to about AD 90 to 100, is the most openly theological of the four. It gives a markedly different picture of Jesus's career. It says nothing of his early life, his baptism or his temptation. Its timeline is different as well: the ministry spans three years where the synoptics suggest one, the cleansing of the Temple comes at the beginning, and the Last Supper falls on the day before Passover. Where Mark's Jesus conceals who he is, John's Jesus proclaims it openly, and according to one scholar John is the only gospel to call Jesus God, though others find a divine understanding of him in the synoptics too.

Scholars increasingly think the author of John knew the synoptic gospels and assumed his readers knew their stories, which is why he chose to tell others. The gospel gradually identifies its narrator with a figure it calls the beloved disciple. Commentators debate whether that disciple is presented as the author or as the authority behind the book.

What they have in common beneath the surface

All four gospels draw on the Jewish scriptures, by quotation, interpretation, allusion and echo. Mark's description of the second coming is made up almost entirely of scriptural quotations, and even John, which uses scripture less explicitly, is steeped in it. Their source seems to have been the Greek translation known as the Septuagint, though some scholars argue that Matthew could read Hebrew.

They also share a purpose. They were written to persuade readers that Jesus was a miracle-working holy man and to hold up examples to imitate, and in doing so they present the Christian message of the second half of the first century.

Why It Matters

What kind of books are these?

There is now a broad scholarly consensus that the gospels belong to the genre of ancient biography, the Greco-Roman bios. They focus on one central person, proceed by anecdote, and give great weight to his deeds and death. Ancient biographies were usually written fairly soon after their subject died and contained substantial historical material, and like the gospels they were often anonymous. Earlier in the twentieth century the form critics saw the evangelists as mere compilers of community traditions. Today scholars regard them as conscious authors with theological aims, practising a creative literary art.

How reliable are they?

Here the research describes a real debate, and it is reported without a verdict. Biblical scholars are cautious about relying on the gospels uncritically as historical documents. At the same time they agree that the gospels give a good idea of Jesus's public career, and there is consensus that he was regarded as a miracle-worker in his own lifetime. The dates of composition place the books within the lifetimes of various eyewitnesses.

Much of the argument turns on memory and oral tradition. Some scholars hold that the earliest Christians were preservers more than innovators, that communities in an oral culture keep their stories in fairly fixed form, and that the traditions were handed down with care. On this view the gospels give fairly direct access to Jesus as he was remembered by those who went about with him, and some conclude that the texts should be treated as reliable until shown otherwise. Others are more sceptical. They stress how frail and misleading memory can be, or compare the spread of stories across the Roman Empire to a children's game of "telephone" in which a tale changes with each retelling. A middle position trusts the general impressions the gospels leave while doubting many details.

For a long time John was thought less reliable than the synoptics. That consensus has been overturned, and many scholars now see John as a real source for the historical Jesus, confirming points such as his link with John the Baptist, his choice of twelve disciples, his conflicts with religious authorities and his emphasis on love. The synoptics nevertheless remain the primary sources for his ministry.

Since the late 1990s doubts have grown about whether a historical Jesus can be reconstructed from the gospels at all. Several scholars argue that what the texts give is the remembered Jesus, and that the proper task is to understand the gospels themselves instead of sifting them for nuggets of history.

How four became the standard

The oldest known piece of gospel text is a fragment of John from the first half of the second century. The move to fix a list of approved books was probably prompted by Marcion, who set up a canon of his own with a single gospel resembling Luke. The earliest surviving list of Christian scripture, the Muratorian fragment, includes Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Irenaeus went further and insisted there must be four gospels and only four, as there are four corners of the world, and he spoke of them together as the "fourfold gospel." In the early centuries Matthew and John were the most popular, Luke and Mark less so.

Many other gospels were written, often under borrowed names and often within movements later judged heretical: infancy gospels such as that of James, sayings collections, the gospels of Thomas, Peter, Judas and Mary, and harmonies such as the Diatessaron, which wove the four into one narrative. One scholar argues that the four canonical gospels rest on independent traditions rooted in eyewitness memory, which sets them apart from these later writings.

Beyond Christianity

In Islam, the Injil is counted among the major scriptures revealed by God, a revelation given to Jesus, who is regarded as a prophet and messenger and not as the Son of God. Mainstream Islamic belief holds that the original Injil has been lost or altered, and that the four canonical gospels are not that original, though they may preserve some of Jesus's authentic teaching. The research notes criticism of that view as well as scholars who argue that the Quran speaks of misinterpretation of earlier scriptures and not of their corruption.

Who Should Read It

Read the New Testament Gospels if you want to meet Jesus through the oldest full-length accounts of him, and to see how four writers could tell the same story so differently. They are essential for anyone exploring Christianity, and just as rewarding for readers interested in ancient biography, in how memory becomes literature, and in one of the liveliest historical debates there is.