Introduction

The fourfold Gospel

With this post we introduce the reading of the New Testament, starting from the gospels. The word “gospel” translates the Greek “euaggélion”, which means “good news” (single form). To know why the first Christians chose the Greek language for their writings, I invite you to read the post about Judas Maccabaeus.
The term is already present in the previous pagan culture, but only in the plural form; the “good news” to receive with joy are indeed many in a polytheist society: the victory in military battles, an important sovereign’s birth, his great deeds... We have a first variation to these meanings with the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint); it maintains the plural form, but it starts associating the “good news” to the coming of God who brings the salvation to His people (see Isaiah - episode 5: God takes back home the exiles). In the New Testament instead the word is only in the single form and it indicates Jesus’ message: God Himself came in Jesus to bring the full Revelation and the definitive salvation, this is the one “good news”.
The Gospel is firstly the preaching by Jesus, joined with His concrete person. Then it is the preaching about Jesus, spread in the world by His disciples. Finally, it is what they wrote about Jesus’ words and deeds, to make it possible to know Him and to believe in Him even to those who could not meet Him or be eyewitnesses of His story personally.
The written Gospel is a specific “literary form”: it is not a complete report of Jesus’ story or a mere biography, otherwise we could not explain why it lacks any physical description of the main character or the presence of a huge “blank” in the narration from the twelve to about the thirty years of Jesus’ age. It is instead a writing which comes from the Faith that Jesus is the dead and resurrected Lord, and which has the purpose to arouse the same Faith in the reader. The oldest and original part of the gospels is in fact the narration of His Easter. « Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his 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» (John 20,30-31).
The Gospel acknowledged by the Church is fourfold and it is attributed by the Tradition (the names were added on the ancient manuscripts by the copyists) to four persons: Matthew, Mark, Luke (their gospels are “synoptic” because they have many similarities) and John. They are not authors in the actual sense of the word, but editors who collected preexisting materials (oral and written) to compose their work. They were not alone in this task: every one of the gospels is intended for a specific Christian community (local Church) that contributed to its development; that community considered the evangelist and his preaching as a landmark.



In ancient times, in fact, it was common to put a text under a famous person’s authority, even if the real authors were more than one or they were different: this is called pseudepigraphy. They did so to grant authenticity and solidity to the contents of their works and to state that what they wrote represented the insights of the quoted author as applied to their time. In the Old Testament we can remember the cases of the Books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs and the Wisdom, that are all attributed to King Solomon, the wise man par excellence. This is even explicit in the final chapter of the gospel by John, where the “we” of his community joins to the disciple’s testimony: «This is the disciple who testifies about these things, and wrote these things. We know that his witness is true» (John 21,24).
Do the gospels write the truth? How can we interpret the present differences among the four of them? We have to remember the two points we have just underlined: those texts are not biographies, they do not intend to make a full report of Jesus’ life or to provoke only marvel and astonishment with the narration of extraordinary deeds (other “apocryphal” writings on Jesus’ story, not acknowledged by the Church, do it). The purpose of the gospels is to convey the Faith in Jesus the Lord to a particular Christian community, where specific problems are present: from here comes the necessity to adapt the materials to the recipients. Who grants that the evangelists did not betray Jesus’ message doing this? In the period in which the gospels were composed, the eyewitnesses of Jesus’ story were still alive and they would have easily showed up the diffusion of false news. Among them, the apostles had a special place: as we will see with the reading of their Letters, they did not hesitate to intervene firmly with their authority against the deviations from the right doctrine and they often visited the local Churches to establish their Faith. Finally, in the Christian communities there is the idea that in the things regarding the Faith they cannot invent anything, but they can only receive it like from a precious deposit (Tradition), which starts from Jesus, passes by the apostles and arrives to all the believers. To say it with Apostle Paul’s words: «For I received from the Lord that which also I delivered to you» (1Cor 11,23); from this deposit the gospels draw.
Why did the Church choose to keep in the New Testament four gospels and not only one? The Fathers suggest two explanations: the inexhaustible wealth of Christ’s mystery, that we can investigate from different points of view without depleting it; the Church universality, which gathers in one community many different peoples (see 1Cor 12: they are like the different parts of the same body, all contributing to the common good).
In the next post we will read the gospel of Matthew.