There are four Gospels in the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Our English word Gospel comes from the ancient Anglo-Saxon work “God-spel’, which literally means “Good News”. It is a translation from the Greek word “Evangelion” which means Good News.
It is tempting to see the Gospels as a short biography of Jesus. After all, they tell about His birth, most of His adult life, including His death, resurrection and ascension into heaven. However, the Gospels are not biographies in the modern sense. Biographies talks about the person’s childhood. In the Gospels, except for Christ’s birth and his finding in the temple, we are told nothing of his boyhood and teenage years. We know Jesus had an education because he could read the Bible in Hebrew in the Synagogue, which does require quite a bit of knowledge. Beyond that, the Gospels don’t say much else about His early life. A modern biography would tell us how that person spent his time. Of course, the Gospels tell us about Christ’s preaching, miracles and encounters with various people. A modern biography would go into much more detail. For example, what did Jesus eat, how did He spend his time when He wasn’t preaching or teaching? But the Gospels tell us nothing of this.
This is because the Gospels don’t pretend to be ‘objective’ about Christ’s life. They were written by men who were aflame with their love of Jesus Christ and their desire to bring Christ’s message to the world. That is why this is ‘Good News’; actually, the best news that a suffering humanity could hear, is the news that sin and death have been overcome. As St. John wrote in his Gospel: “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.” (John 20:30-31)
The first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, are called the “synoptic” Gospels. Synoptic means that if you put these three Gospels next to each other in parallel columns you can immediately see similarities in the order of events in Christ’s words, his miracles and so on. It is clear that there is a relationship between them and scholars debate how they are related. However, these scholarly questions do not take away from the “Good News” of the Gospel.
St. John’s Gospel, the last of the four, is rather independent of the first three. Christ’s words and miracles are described rather differently than the first three. All four Gospels were written in the second half of the 1st century. But St. John’s Gospel was written much later, perhaps in the mid-to-late 90s of that century. Traditionally, it is said that St. John, who lived to a great old age, wanted to supplement the first three to bring out the deeper meaning of Christ’s words and deeds. Sometimes it is difficult to tell where Christ’s words end and St. John’s begins.
If we look at all the gospels, we can see varieties in Christ’s words. This does not mean the writer of the Gospel did not pay attention to what Christ said and did. We should remember that most of the time Christ and the people in the Gospels were speaking in Aramaic, the everyday language of the Jews for that time. These words were then translated into Greek by people who were not native Greek speakers (except St. Luke) but rather had learned Greek as a second language. Except for St. Luke they certainly were not Greek scholars. So it is not surprising that the Gospels they left has some discrepancies. To the contrary, this shows that we have several views of Jesus Christ and they were not coping each other word by word. We have four writers describing Christ’s words and deeds. We know how much eye-witness testimony can vary, but that does not mean that the Gospels are inaccurate. We should be glad that we have several different accounts of the same words and deeds. The Gospel writers ere not trying to falsify the record but they were giving the sense, if not the exact meaning, of Christ’s activities. Again, we should remember that Christ was speaking in Aramaic, which was then put into Greek.
Fr. John