Jesus Christ brought the Gospel (from older English, “Good-spel,” “good news”) to the world. He announced that in His person the kingdom of God was coming to mankind and that through faith in Him people might find new and eternal life. He was Himself the Good News, or Gospel.
The word gospel was an ancient word when Christians first put it to use with their special meaning. Originally it had meant the reward given to the person who brought good news, and then came to mean the good news itself. On an inscription prepared for the birthday of Octavian Augustus (9 BC) one can still read: “The birthday of the god [that is, the Caesar] was for the world the beginning of glad tidings, which have gone forth for his sake.”
When the Christians adopted the term, they related its meaning to Jesus Christ, and they also understood the word to mean that this good news was to be spoken and proclaimed. In the New Testament, Gospel usually means to speak the Good News in the power of the Spirit. In the second century the word gradually came to mean a book containing the story of Jesus’ life.
This blog post is adapted from Lutheran Bible Companion Volume 2: Intertestamental Era, New Testament, and Bible Dictionary.
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Matthew
The first book of the New Testament begins in a manner similar to the first book of the Old Testament: focused on genealogy (cf Mt 1:1–17; Gn 5). Matthew sketches for us a human landscape from Abraham, the patriarch of Israel, to Jesus, the Savior of Israel and of the nations. He bridges us from the great eras and figures of sacred history to the climax of all history, “the birth of Jesus Christ” (1:18; cf Gal 4:4).
Matthew is keen to tell both the glorious elements of the story as well as the tragic ones. Jesus is a descendant of the great king David but also a descendant of a defeated people, deported to Babylon. Jesus will grow up in “Galilee of the Gentiles,” where a subject people struggled to make a living and to keep the Lord’s Word. Throughout the book, Matthew emphasizes how Jesus taught and fulfilled the Word of the Lord for the sake of the people.
Purpose of Matthew
The Gospel according to Matthew was apparently written for religious instruction, perhaps for Jewish Christians. Matthew helps his readers understand the Old Testament Scriptures correctly in view of Jesus’ fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies (c 35 times). Within a generally chronological framework that is common to the first three Gospels, the arrangement of the deeds and words of the Christ is more topical than chronological. The facts are massed and marshaled in impressive and easily remembered units of three, five, and seven. Thus we have in Matthew three major divisions in the genealogy of Jesus with which the Gospel opens (Mt 1:1–17), three illustrations of hypocrisy and pure piety (6:1–18), and three parables of planting and growth (13:1–32). Jesus’ words are presented in five great discourses (chs 5–7, 10, 13, 18, 23–25), and within the Sermon on the Mount Matthew records five examples that illustrate the full intention of God’s Law (5:21–48; note the repetition of “you have heard”). Jesus in this Gospel pronounces seven woes upon the scribes and Pharisees (23:13–36), and the great parable chapter (ch 13) contains just seven parables. This topical arrangement is not absolutely peculiar to Matthew; Mark, for instance, twice gives a grouping of five disputes between Jesus and His Judaic adversaries, once in Galilee (Mk 2:1–3:6) and again in Jerusalem (Mk 11:27–12:44). But it is found in Matthew in a fuller and more highly developed form than in any of the other evangelists.
Mark
The Jordan River rushes 65 miles from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. It tumbles from an elevation of 695 feet below sea level to 1,300 feet below sea level. Along its banks walked Joshua, leading Israel to the conquest; the prophets Elijah and Elisha, who ministered during the decline of Israel’s Northern Kingdom; and Jonathan the Maccabee, who fought for his life against the Seleucids. Yet the Jordan River is best known as the font for John the Baptist and the followers of Jesus who sought the Word of life and cleansing from sin.
Mark’s Gospel, which begins on Jordan’s bank, likewise rushes. Forty-one times Mark describes the events flowing around Jesus’ life with the word immediately (Gk euthus), propelling the reader toward the cross where Jesus would die, giving His life as a ransom for many. Mark uniquely focuses on the action in the story of Jesus’ life, making His account both short and compelling to read.
Purpose of Mark
The ancient tradition that Mark wrote his Gospel for Gentiles, specifically at the request of Roman Christians, is confirmed by the Gospel itself. Hebrew and Aramaic expressions are elucidated (3:17; 5:41; 7:11; 15:22), and Jewish customs are explained (7:2–4; 15:42). The evangelist himself quotes the Old Testament explicitly but once (1:2), though his narrative shows by allusion and echo that the narrator is conscious of the Old Testament background of the Gospel story (e.g., 9:2–8, cf Ex 24:12; 12:1–12, cf Is 5:1). Mark reduces Greek money to terms of Roman currency (12:42) and explains an unfamiliar Greek term by means of a Latin one (15:16, praetorium). Latinisms, that is, the direct taking over of Latin terms into the Greek, are more frequent in Mark’s language than in that of the other evangelists.
Christians lived in Rome at the time of Nero, an emperor who had ordered persecution of the Christians shortly after Rome had been largely consumed by fire. Indeed the threatening sword of Nero may have been hanging over the head of Mark and his readers when he wrote the Gospel. Perhaps his friends were faced with the real danger of losing all their possessions and even their lives. They needed to have the story of Jesus before their eyes in concrete form, and the Holy Spirit, who always knows the needs of His people, gave this picture to them in the Gospel according to Mark.
Luke
The Jerusalem temple was overlaid with so much gold that persons who saw it described its blinding effects as it glistened in the sun. Herod the Great was its builder. He surrounded it with a massive court, turning the Temple Mount into a sacred complex far larger than other temples of the ancient world. The project was ongoing when Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the temple for purification (Lk 2:22–38). It was still going some 30 years later when Jesus cleansed the temple from the money-changers at the beginning of Holy Week. During those days, Jesus would prophesy the temple’s destruction and His own resurrection.
Purpose of Luke
The third Gospel is the most outspokenly “teaching” Gospel of them all. This is already obvious from the dedicatory preface (Lk 1:1–4), in which the author promises Theophilus a full and orderly account of things that Theophilus to some extent already knows, in order that he may have reliable information concerning the things that he has been taught. Luke is not proclaiming the Gospel for the first time to Theophilus and his Gentile readers generally; rather, he intends to expand and fill in the already familiar basic outline of the Gospel message with a full account of what Jesus did and taught (cf Ac 1:1). This is borne out by the fullness and completeness of his narrative; it is likewise confirmed by the fact that Luke extends his narrative in the Acts of the Apostles to include not only what Jesus “began to do and teach,” but also the continued activity of the exalted Lord through His messengers by the power of the Spirit. The words of the preface, “accomplished among us,” indicate that Luke had this extension of the account in mind from the very beginning; he is, like Mark, going to tell the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but he is going to carry on the account of it to include that triumphant progress of the Gospel from Jerusalem to Rome, the center of the western world. He is recording the mighty growth of the Word of the Lord that he and his readers have come to know as the power of God in their own experience. The Spirit of God led the mind of Luke to see that a man has not come to know the Christ fully until he has come to know also the Church that the exalted Christ by His Word and through His messengers creates.
John
The plain bows into the Sea of Galilee where families of fishers settled and built their homes. The villagers prospered and, with the help of a centurion, built a synagogue. The settlement became known as Capernaum, “Village of Comfort” or perhaps “Village of Nahum,” though there is no clear association with the Old Testament prophet by that name. Since the settlers built no wall to defend themselves, their lives must have been peaceful until the teacher from Nazareth arrived.
Crowds followed Jesus into Capernaum, which became the hub of His travels throughout Galilee. He stayed at the home of Simon Peter and gathered about Him other fishermen as His disciples. Among them was John the son of Zebedee, who most likely wrote the fourth Gospel in his old age, while ministering at distant Ephesus.
Purpose of John
The central and controlling purpose of the Gospel is stated by the evangelist himself: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name” (Jn 20:30–31). Yet the book is not a missionary appeal; it addresses people who are already Christians, and it seeks to deepen and strengthen their faith in Jesus as the Christ. It does so by interpretatively recounting the words and deeds of Jesus, His “signs,” or significant actions. It is, therefore, like the first three Gospels, teaching in the sense of Ac 2:42. Like the other Gospels, it no doubt had behind it a long history of oral teaching; it is, as ancient tradition also indicates, the final precipitate of John’s many years of oral apostolic witness to Christ in the churches of Asia Minor.
Blog post excerpted from Lutheran Bible Companion, Volume 2: Intertestamental Era, New Testament, and Bible Dictionary copyright © 2014 Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Read more about the entirety of the Bible, including the Gospel accounts in Lutheran Bible Companion, Volume 2: Intertestamental Era, New Testament, and Bible Dictionary.
