Gospel

The first page of the Gospel of Mark in Armenian, by Sargis Pitsak, centuryXIV.

The Gospel (from the Latin evangelĭum, and this from the Greek εὐαγγέλιον [euangelion], «good news», properly from the words εύ, «good», and -αγγέλιον, «message») is the narration of the life and words of Jesus, that is, the good news of the fulfillment of the promise made by God to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that he would redeem his descendants from sin through the death of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, who would die in expiation for the sin of all Humanity and would rise on the third day to give repentance and forgiveness of sins to all those who believe in him. Evangelists consider these events to have been foretold by Old Testament prophets. Among others, David prophesied that Jesus would rise on the third day without seeing corruption; David died and his body saw corruption and his grave He is on Mount Zion, but Jesus rose on the third day fulfilling the prophecy of his resurrection and his tomb is empty and is known as the Saint to Sepulcher. This is the gospel that the first disciples of Jesus preached.

In a more general sense, the term gospel can refer to the gospels, which are writings of the first Christians that include the early preaching of the disciples of Jesus from Nazareth. Being the central core of his message the death and resurrection of Jesus. There are four gospels contained in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, called canonical gospels, recognized as part of the Revelation by the different Christian denominations. They are known by the name of their authors: Mateo, Marcos, Lucas and Juan.

Most scholars believe these four gospels were written between A.D. 65 and 100. C., although other experts propose earlier dates.

There are other writings, known as apocryphal gospels, not recognized as canonical by current Christian churches, so these apocryphal gospels are not accepted as reliable, nor as divinely inspired texts. But they were considered "writing" by some of the factions into which Christianity was divided during the first centuries of its history, especially by the Gnostic current, which was the one that contributed most of these texts, and by Christian communities that preserved a closer link with the Jewish tradition from which Christianity arose. The latter is the case of the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Secret Gospel of Mark, which various authors (such as Morton Smith) date as contemporaries of the canonical Gospels and even as a source of some of them. Due to this type of debate, there are authors who prefer to speak of "extracanonical gospels" instead of "apocrypha" to avoid a term that implies a priori the falsity of the texts. The Gospel of Thomas is even dated by some experts to the year 50 AD. C., a hypothesis that would make it the oldest known.

Origin of the term

The word "gospel" is used for the first time in the writings of the first Christian communities by Paul of Tarsus, in the first letter to the Corinthians, probably written in the year 57:

↓ελφοι, τ, ε αγ, ε,γγγελισάμισισάμικν,, κακαελγγγγγετε, ε,,, καί,στκατε,

I remember you, brothers, the gospel that I told you, that ye received, and in him that ye have persevered.

The Gospel is the account of the life and teachings of Jesus. It also speaks of the love that God shows humanity by sending his only Son Jesus Christ to redeem the world. It is thus that he dies for our sins; he is buried and on the third day he rises from the dead as he himself had predicted. He appears to his twelve apostles (in addition to other people), for forty days. With his death, the bonds of love broken since the disobedience of the first parents are restored and the doors of heaven (which until then were closed) are opened for the benefit of all those who follow his word, this is "El love of God above all things and love of neighbor as yourself".

With the same "meaning" The word appears in the Gospel of Matthew and in the Gospel of Mark. Possibly this word is the Greek translation of an Aramaic expression used in his preaching by Jesus of Nazareth, but there is no conclusive data. In all, the expression "gospel" is used seventy-six times in the New Testament. It is significant that sixty of them occur in Paul's letters, and that there is no mention of the term in the Gospel of John and in the Gospel of Luke, although it does appear in the Acts of the Apostles, attributed to Luke. The number of mentions of each term is as follows:

There has been speculation as to whether Hellenistic Christian communities adopted the term "gospel" from emperor worship. There is an inscription dedicated to Augustus in Priene, dated in the year 9 B.C. C., in which this word appears with a meaning very similar to the one that Christians would later give it; After celebrating the appearance (epiphanein) of this deified emperor as savior (soter) of humanity, said text ends like this:

God's birth began for the world good news (euangelion...that came for him.

The terminology used in Priene also appears in other similar inscriptions, which has led some authors to consider it highly probable that the author of Mark knew that type of language, given the parallels found at the beginning of this gospel. In In any case, the word had been frequently used in earlier Greek-language literature, including the first Greek translation of the Bible, known as the Seventy Bible.

Canonical Gospels

Of the large number of gospels written in Antiquity, only four were accepted by the Church and considered canonical. Establishing these four gospels as canonical was a central concern of Irenaeus of Lyons around the year 185. In his most important work, Adversus haereses, Irenaeus harshly criticized both Christian communities that made use of a only gospel, that of Matthew, as those accepted by several of what today are considered apocryphal gospels, such as the Gnostic sect of the Valentinians. Irenaeus affirmed that the four gospels defended by him were the four pillars of the Church. "It is not possible that they can be neither more nor less than four," he declared, presenting as logical the analogy with the four cardinal points, or the four winds (1.11.18). To illustrate his point, he used an image, taken from Ezekiel 1, of the throne of God flanked by four creatures with the faces of different animals (man, lion, bull, eagle), which are at the origin of the symbols of the four evangelists in Christian iconography.

Three of the canonical gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, share important similarities. Due to the similarity they bear to each other, they have been called synoptics since, in 1776, the scholar J. J. Griesbach published them for the first time in a three-column table, in which they could be globally covered at a single glance (synopsis, "joint view"), to better highlight your matches.

Origin of the canonical gospels

The history of the development of the gospels is confusing, and there are several theories about their composition, as explained below. Scholars' analyzes have focused on what is called the synoptic problem, that is, the literary relationships between the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Luke, and Mark.

The theory that has gained the greatest consensus is the "two-source theory."

Theory of the two sources

The differences and similarities between the synoptic gospels have been explained in different ways. One of the unproven theories is the so-called “two-source theory”. According to this theory, Mark would be the oldest gospel of the three, and would have been used as a source by Matthew and Luke, which may explain the large amount of material common to the three synoptics, however, since the gospels were written in different times and places, there would be no support for it. There have been coincidences between Luke and Matthew that do not appear in Mark and have been attributed to a hypothetical Q source (from the German Quelle, source) or protoevangelium Q, which would basically consist of a series of logia ("sayings", that is, "teachings" of Jesus), without narrative elements. The discovery in Nag Hammadi of the Gospel of Thomas, a compilation of sayings attributed to Jesus, helps to consolidate the hypothesis of the existence of the Q source.

The existence of Q was defended by the Protestant theologians Weisse (Die evangelische Geschichte kritisch und philosopisch bearbeitet, 1838), and Holtzmann (Die Synoptischen Evangelien, 1863), and further developed by Wernle (Die synoptische Frage, 1899), Streeter (The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins, treating of the manuscript tradition, sources, authorship, & dates, 1924), who came to postulate four sources (Marcos, Q, and two others, which he called M and L) and J. Schmid (Matthäus und Lukas, 1930). Although for Dibelius and Bornkann it could have been an oral tradition, it is more likely that it was a written source, given the often literal coincidence between the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It has also been considered probable that the protoevangelium Q was written in Aramaic, and later translated into Greek.

Although the Q source is a scholarly hypothesis to try to explain the synoptic problem, this collection of Jesus' sayings—also known in modern times as the Logia—was read and studied daily in the early church and is mentioned in Acts by Luke of the Apostles as “The Words of the Lord”. In this way the hypothesis of Q and Logia acquires substance.

Other theories

There are other hypotheses that ignore the existence of a Q source. Of these, some affirm the temporal priority of Matthew and others consider that Mark was the first gospel. The most prominent are the following:

• The hypothesis proposed by Farrer posts that the gospel of Mark was first written and used as a source by Matthew. Lucas, in a third stage, would have used both as sources.

• The hypothesis Griesbach gives priority to the gospel of Matthew. Lucas would have used it as a source, and, finally, Marcos would have made use of the two precedents. It was proposed by Johann Jakob Griesbach in 1789.

• The hypothesis agustiniana He maintains that Matthew was the first gospel, followed by Mark and Luke, and that each evangelist used the precedent as a source. This is the theory closest to the approaches of the Fathers of the Church, and most frequently in Catholic tradition.
• The hypothesis of the Essenes He maintains that it was this group who wrote and compiled most of the writings of Jesus' life and began the gospel of Q.

• The hypothesis Goinheix He says that the first gospel he circulated was that of Matthew in Aramaic language. Following this narrative, and helping with the document we call Q or Logia, Mark and then Luke write their respective Gospels. Then, Matthew, already knowing these two gospels, translates his to the Greek and takes elements from those. Finally it is John who makes known the gospel he was writing for years in Jerusalem first and in Ephesus finally.

Gospel According to John

John is undoubtedly the last of the canonical gospels, dating much later than the synoptic ones. In it, miracles are not presented as such but as "signs", that is, gestures that have a deeper meaning: revealing the glory of Jesus (see Rivas, L. H., El Evangelio de Juan).. The hypothesis elaborated by Rudolf Bultmann (Das Evangelium des Johannes, 1941) postulates that the author of this gospel had at his disposal a source, oral or written, on the "signs" of Christ, independent of the synoptic gospels, which has been called Gospel of Signs, whose existence is merely hypothetical.

Authorship of the canonical gospels

Traditionally, the authorship of the Gospels is attributed to Matthew, an apostle of Jesus, to Mark, a disciple of Peter, to Luke, a doctor of Syrian origin, a disciple of Paul of Tarsus, and to John, an apostle of Jesus. However, until today the actual authorship of each gospel has not yet been determined.

Within the Catholic Church, the Second Vatican Council in its Constitution Dei Verbum pointed out that «the Church has always defended and defends that the four gospels have apostolic origin. For what the Apostles preached by command of Christ, later, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they and the apostolic men transmitted it to us in writing, the foundation of faith, that is, the gospel in four redactions, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John."

Dates of the canonical gospels

There is no information about the exact dates they were written. Most scholars consider the canonical gospels to have been written in the second half of the I century AD. C., around half a century after the disappearance of Jesus of Nazareth, although many experts consider that they were written before the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (for example, J.A.T. Robinson in his book Redating the New Testament, J. Carrón García and J. M. García Pérez in their work When were the gospels written?, among others).

There is also a minority that proposes that the gospels were written after the final destruction of Jerusalem during the reign of Hadrian.

Raymond E. Brown, in his book An Introduction to the New Testament, considers that the most accepted dates are:

• Marcos: c. 68-73.
• Matthew: c. 70-100 (although some authors, who do not accept Marcos' priority, place their wording on a date prior to the year 70).
• Lucas: c. 80-100 (a majority of scholars date around the year 85).
• John: c. 90-110 (date proposed by C. K. Barrett; R. E. Brown does not offer a consensual date for the Gospel of John).

These dates are based on the analysis of the texts and their relationship with other sources.

Regarding the information provided by archaeology, apart from papyrus 7Q5 whose context is unknown, the oldest manuscript of the canonical gospels is the so-called papyrus P52, which contains a brief section of the gospel of John (John 18: 31-33,37-38). According to papyrologists, and based on the Hadrianic style of writing, it would date from the first half of the II century, although there is no there is complete consensus on the exact date. However, the gap between the date of the tentative writing of the original manuscript of John and that of papyrus P52, considered the oldest surviving copy, is extraordinarily short, when compared with the from other preserved ancient manuscripts. And this is verified —to a lesser degree— in all the gospels whose oldest copies are less than a century apart from the estimated date of writing of their originals.

Harmonization and concordism

“harmonization” was a resource used when looking for a way to “force” gospel texts that seem to contradict or do not fully agree with each other, so that they seem to express what same. Hence the name "harmonic problem", which refers to the difficulty in bringing together the four Gospel accounts into one.

One of the most famous examples was the “Diatéssaron”, a Greek name that could be translated as “formed by four”. It is a Greek work written between the years 165 and 170 by the Syrian author Tatian, which consists of a single gospel composed of elements taken from the four canonical gospels, and possibly also from some apocryphal source. Tatian eliminated the repetitions and harmonized the texts to hide the possible discrepancies found in the gospels.

This work was very popular in the Aramaic-speaking Church, until it became the gospel of the Churches of Syria. Ephrem of Syria (306-373) wrote a commentary on Diatéssaron which is preserved today. But due to harmonizations and omissions, Tatian's work does not faithfully reflect the text of the gospels. On the other hand, by showing a "unique" gospel, he does not allow us to see the own message offered by each of the evangelists. For that reason, it was mandated in the V century that the gospels be reread separately.

The «concordism» was another resource that was used when certain biblical texts in general, which reflect scientific concepts from times in which the sciences were much less developed, are presented in a forced way so that express the same thing that science says today.

These resources, used in other times with some frequency until they became popular, have been totally left aside today. The gospels collect the apostolic preaching that developed from the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and its purpose is linked to the announcement of salvation, not to the proclamation of scientific truths in general. This does not prevent the gospels from being analyzed as well as any ancient material (historical-literary criticism, textual criticism, etc.), but the objective of their writing is on another level.

Apocryphal Gospels

Fragmentary texts

• Gospel of the Hebrews
• Greek Gospel of the Egyptians
• Gospel of Martion
• Secret Gospel of Mark
• Gospel of Judas
• Gospel of Mary Magdalene
• Gospel of the wife of Jesus
• Oxyrhynchus Fragments

Nativity Apocrypha

• Protoevangelio de Santiago
• Gospel of the Pseudo Matthew
• Book on the Nativity of Mary
• Salvatoris Infantry Freedom

Childhood Apocrypha

• Gospel of the Pseudo Thomas
• Arab Gospel of Childhood
• History of José the carpenter
• Armenian Gospel of Childhood
• Book on the Children of the Saviour

Apocrypha of the Passion and Resurrection

• Gospel of Peter
• Acts of Pilate
• Gospel of Bartholomew

Nag Hammadi Gnostic Apocrypha

• Gospel of Thomas
• Gospel of Philip
• Gospel of Mary Magdalene