What Is a Gospel?

“To the gospels as a whole there is no known parallel or analogy.” So wrote Harold Riesenfeld, drawing attention to a commonplace of scholarship, but one whose significance is not always kept in mind. The evangelists evolved a completely new literary form. Why?

They did not write biographies. Biographies of great men are known from antiquity, but this is not the form of the Gospels. They omit too much for that to be true. There is no personal description of Jesus. Very little is said about his early years and nothing at all about the formative influences to which he was subjected. Even when we come to the time of his public ministry, the only period of Jesus’ life for which there is anything like complete information, there are huge gaps. Long ago F. C. Burkitt pointed out that at a minimum Jesus’ ministry must have lasted for four hundred days (it may have been much more) and we have information about what happened on perhaps forty. His teaching as it is recorded in the Gospels could all have been delivered in about six hours. T. W. Manson maintained that Jesus lived for thirty to forty years but about twenty-eight of them we know nothing at all. He held that we cannot fix with certainty one single chronological point in Jesus’ life.

Probably the best description of the Gospels is “passion narratives with long introductions.” Basically they are books about Jesus’ death on the cross and its associated events. They contain also a certain amount of introduction in which we learn important things about Jesus’ life and teaching.

None of them claims the title “Gospel.” Indeed, not until the end of the second century was this word used as a book title. Previously, and for that matter for some time afterwards, the word was applied to the four as a whole. To this day we call these books “The Gospel According to …,” thus bearing implicit testimony to the truth that there is but one Gospel.

There were other books that claimed the title “Gospel.” Some of them, like the “Infancy Gospels,” are frivolous accounts of what some members of the early Church thought the divine Christ might have done. Others, like the various Gnostic Gospels, were written with serious purposes. But they are so different from the canonical Gospels that they do not merit the same name. They are really accounts of Gnostic teaching, attributed to Jesus. The four canonical Gospels form a class of their own.

Perhaps the nearest we come to seeing “Gospel” as a title is in the opening words of Mark, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” At any rate the evangelist leaves us in no doubt that the Gospel is his theme. He goes on to report that, after the arrest of John the Baptist, “Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel’ ” (Mark 1:14, 15). Jesus came to preach God’s Gospel, or good news, and Mark mentions some of the important points. In this respect the evangelists follow their Master. There would be little disagreement in current discussions with the contention that the evangelists were preachers. In their Gospels they record the Gospel as taught and lived by Jesus and preached by his apostles.

People who heard the Gospel preached would ask questions: “Who was this Jesus in whom we are asked to believe?” “What did he do?” “What did he say?” Jews would inquire about his forerunner and about his relation to the prophecies of the Old Testament generally.

The demand for faith in Jesus made information about him a necessity.

In recent discussions this does not seem to receive the attention it merits. There cannot be the slightest doubt that the first Christians demanded far-reaching faith in Jesus. They called on men to commit themselves to him so wholeheartedly that, if necessary, they would die for him. It is unreasonable to ask for such commitment to a Person of whom one knows nothing or next to nothing. Men do not give that kind of commitment without knowing to whom they give it.

Bultmann and some of his followers dismiss the quest for historical information about Jesus. If I understand them rightly, they hold that to look for such historical knowledge is to depart from simple faith and to rest instead on historical proof, a device of the natural man. But is this so? We may concede the point that final authority does not rest with the historian. The believer is not compelled to adjust his beliefs daily to comply with every new verdict of the contemporary historian. And to rest on the petty certainties of the natural man is not the Christian way.

But when this is said, we must add that faith is not credulity. Faith does not mean accepting uncritically whatever the preacher says about the divine Christ. Granted that we should not try to establish such a historical approach that we replace faith with scientific proof, it still remains that a mere credulity, resting on nothing, is not Christian faith. We cannot and we ought not to trust a person of whom we know nothing.

To use a simple illustration: when I went overseas I gave a legal friend a power of attorney to enable him to look after my affairs. Some time after I returned I discovered that I had forgotten to revoke it. At any time he could have gone down the street and emptied my bank account! But I was not troubled. I know my friend. I trust him. But if a stranger were to ask me to entrust the management of my affairs to him I would certainly refuse. I cannot trust a man I do not know. I may be optimistic about him, but I cannot trust him.

Some historical knowledge is necessary for genuine faith. It is this that the evolution of the gospel form points to. The men of the New Testament could have made (and did make) their theological points in other ways than writing Gospels. The epistle, for example, was a powerful means of teaching. Thus Romans has a strong exposition of the meaning of the cross, and (after a section on the place of Israel) it goes on to the life expected of a follower of Christ. In these two sections it takes up much the same position as the Gospels. But it is not a Gospel, and it does not take the place of the Gospels, for it does not contain historical information about Jesus.

When theological writing sits loose to the historicity of Jesus, as so much of it does today, it is false to essential Christianity. The daring thought of the New Testament is that God has committed himself to history. It is this that makes the Gospels so important. They record that part of history that matters. They enable us to have saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. As John puts it: “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 20:31).

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