Transcription
We've looked at a lot of background information, and we're going to take, uh, some time and just look at the word gospel for a while. We're going to introduce that word, and we most already know that the word in Greek is euangelion, made up of eu meaning good and angelion meaning news or report. In classical Greek, and actually it refers to the reward or compensation for a messenger. And so that word, uh, mostly referring to reward of compensation for good news brought by someone, that goes all the way back to the 5th Century BC. All, all referring in classical Greek mostly to a like a thank offering, a euangelion—notice the plural there, it's not singular—in classical Greek. Um, even crowning the messenger, uh, as giving him a reward for the good news that he brought. The word is used for that as well.
Then in the Septuagint, it dovetails into that classical idea and uses it for both the reward for the good news and the content of the good news itself. We see both of those ideas in Second Samuel 4:10 when a man told me, "Saul is dead," and thought he was bringing good news, euangelion amonoi. There I seized him and put him to death in Ziklag. That was the euangelion, the reward I gave him for his news. So in, in the New Testament and early Christian literature, uh, it shifted the meaning exclusively to the content of the message. So we're, when we're in the New Testament and post-New Testament early Christian literature, they used the word primarily for the content of the message. It is used 75 times in the New Testament, but always in the singular. That's important; there's only one, not many gospel messages. In classical and Septuagint, it's mostly used in the plural.
There are two dominant perspectives, though, in the New Testament about that singular one gospel. One is from the vantage point of Salvation history, when looking at the Jewish chronicle of God's salvation in the Old Testament. The good news is that now God is in Christ Jesus's son, fulfilling the redemptive promise made to Israel. And as a result of those promises being fulfilled, salvation is now available to all. Then there's the more narrow, but just as important perspective, we might call this the ecclesiastical perspective, and that is that it refers to the proclamation, the kerygma, that the church was proclaiming—the good news of God's salvation provided for in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And so we want to look at that wonderful passage in First Corinthians 15: "The gospel, the euangelion, I preach to you—this gospel by this gospel you're saved if you hold firmly to the word I preach to you." For he goes on to say—now he's getting into the content in verse 3—"that Christ died for our sins, that's the atonement according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures." So it's important that the death of Christ on the cross be front and center in our preaching the gospel—that is the provision of our release and forgiveness. It's important that we know that he didn't just appear to die, but that he actually died. And I think that's why Paul inserts that he was buried; he wasn't just mostly dead, but fully dead and raised on the third day according to the scriptures.
The New Testament teaching on the gospel—sometimes this word is used in the broad sense for the gospel enterprise or the evangelistic enterprise. Paul was talking to the Corinthians when he said, "I became your father in Christ through the gospel." This is the entire enterprise of bringing the gospel to them. He spent 18 months in Corinth preaching and teaching, and through that work, he says, "You believe that message and I became your spiritual father." Later on in chapter 9, "The Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel." That's the enterprise, the whole conduct and activity of preaching the gospel. But the vast majority of times the word in the New Testament is, is, it's all about the object or the message of what is preached; that's the primary focus. So we might ask the question, "What is the content of this gospel?" And let's just do a little exercise. You come across an accident. You can identify yourself as a minister to the paramedic. The person's critically injured, and he's going to die. He has two minutes to live, and you ask, "Can I go and be with him and comfort him?" And they say, "Yeah, I'll go ahead." And so you kneel down beside him, and you find out, "Are you a Christian?" "No, I am not," he says. Now you've got two minutes to give him the message of the Gospel. Could you do it? What would you say in two minutes?
So the word gospel in the New Testament, it always includes this idea of the content of the message. It can include the idea of the work, the larger gospel enterprise, but even there there is the idea of the content that's preached. Thus in the New Testament, there is just one gospel, and that's why you never see it in the plural. In Galatians 1:8, he says, "I'm shocked that you're uh, quickly deserting the one who called you, uh, and turn, turning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all." So evidently some people were throwing them into confusion and trying to pervert the gospel of Christ, he says. Then he says, "But even if we are an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God's curse." We've already said this: "If anybody's preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God's curse." So in the New Testament, it is not used—the word gospel is not used for a literary work like we talk about the four Gospels.
So we might ask ourselves, "What is this message then?" Well, the central figure, this key components of the Gospel message is always about Jesus Christ. Mark 1:1, "The beginning of the Gospel of or about Jesus Christ, the Son of God." This is the personal focus of the Gospel. Jesus Christ is in fact the gospel; he is the good news that is proclaimed that brings salvation to the world. He embodies not only the message but is himself the message. [Music] What else can we say is the essential component of the Gospel? It's the kingdom of God. It's the good news about the kingdom. Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the good news of God. What did he preach? "The time has come; the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news." So preaching the gospel and preaching the kingdom of God are inseparable; you can't preach one without the other. The coming and arrival of the kingdom of God is the good news. This is the redemptive object of the Gospel. The gospel expounds the kingdom of God. So this phrase, "Kingdom of God," in saying that it's near, we're saying that God is offering us a new realm of authority in which he is king. So to embrace or accept the kingdom of God is to accept the rulership, the authority, and the reign of God in our lives, and that is what the gospel expounds. Okay, I have salvation. Hands on our response to the gospel. "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned," Mark 16:15. So whether or not we are saved or enter into a relationship with God, you know, is, is contingent upon our faith, believing. This is the condition, our contingency of the Gospel. So in John 20:31, it says, "These things are written that you might believe, and so that by believing you might have life in his name." And in First John 5:11, "God has given us eternal life, and this life is in the Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son does not have life."
So another key component of the Gospel is its power. The gospel has a certain character or nature; it not only comes in power but comes with power. Because he says, Paul, "Our Gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit, with deep conviction"—the power to bring people to conviction and assurance of the truth of the Gospel, with the result that they are given the opportunity to, to accept or believe in the message. "You know how we lived among you," he said, for your sakes. Paul says, "But it's not just with power; it is the power of God." The subtle, newest nuance here, but very important: the gospel possesses inherent power to bring salvation to the lost. A Church Father used the analogy: the gospel's like a lion; don't try to defend it; just let it out of its cage. It has the innate, innate, intrinsic power to bring salvation to humanity. And this is the nature of the Gospel. It also has something to do essentially with the righteousness of God, at least to those who believe to salvation; that's the work of the Gospel. But that idea of salvation has righteousness involved in it. Paul says, "I'm not ashamed of this gospel, this message, because it's the power of God for leading a person to salvation of everyone who believes—first, it is Jew and Gentile. And then notice what he said next: 'For in it, the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed—from faith for faith, or as the NIV has it, 'faith from first to last. The righteous will live by faith,' quoting Habakkuk 2:4." Also in Philippians 3:9, he says, "To be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ—the righteousness from God that depends on faith." So the outworking of the Gospel is that people turn from their sins to practice a new ethos, an ethos of righteousness. Now that we're, we're not talking about works salvation; we're describing the inherent character of the new life revealed in the gospel—what life in the kingdom of God looks like is a life characterized by righteousness, for lack of a better word. It's what I call the work of the Gospel.
Now the gospel is also the word of truth; it is actually called that. You might say it's the character of the gospel. Paul, Ephesians 1:13, "You also believed, included in Christ when you heard the word of truth—that is the gospel of your salvation—he marked you then with the promised Holy Spirit." So what is truth? Well, truth is that which conforms to fact or reality as God determines and sees it. The gospel defines reality with regard to salvation, with regard to our life and relationship with God. Now there's many, I know, who ascribe to New Age ideas of spirituality and claim that they have their own way of being spiritual, of being connected to God. I point out that they don't get to determine or define that; only God defines how to have a right relationship with him, and that is given in the gospel. So it's not having their own kind of relationship with God that will help them after judgment, but a right relationship based on the truth of the Gospel. Okay, now we will transition to the idea of the gospels as literature. We'll look at Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John kind of in a summary way. When people start talking about literary gospels, when do they start doing that? Well, it was with Justin Martyr, uh, in the post-Apostolic period. It was never in the literature of the New Testament itself. So we've already noted that the plural term gospel does not appear in the New Testament. The first person that used the term in a literary sense was about 150 A.D. He, Justin Martyr refers to, to this in his First Apology, uh, to the Memoirs of the Apostles and says he called gospels these Memoirs and are read in the churches along with, quote, "the composition of the Apostles," which is probably a reference to the Epistles that apply the gospels to different situations in life, uh, other than what we see in Palestine in the gospels themselves. So the gospels and the Epistles—it's easy to see how Acts became the bridge from the gospel to the Epistles.
Let's talk about the literary function of the Gospel genre. As you know, the major literary genres are gospels, history—that's Acts—Epistles, prose letters, and apocalypse—the Revelation of John. Those four genres, each of the major forms in the New Testament, have ancient models that are somewhat analogous. Two questions we could ask about the gospels: What's the relationship to early Christian writings? You may find it strange to learn that there are many more gospels that were written in the first two centuries of the church than our four canonical Gospels. For instance, there was the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Jude, the Gospel of Thomas. So we know that there were gospels that didn't make it into our New Testament Canon. What was their relationship to Greco-Roman writings? There were gospel-like writings in the Greco-Roman world, the first century, and yes, so there were some precursors to our New Testament Gospels. Let's take a look. Greco-Roman biographies were to perpetuate the theos anaires, Divine man myth. They were generally directed at the heroes, the mythological heroes of the Greek world. They were legendary figures that were created by the writers of the Greek period—Archilles and Hercules. These biographies gave the exploits of their heroes and perpetuated the idea of them as divine, uh, Eric, uh, totally tautologies. These were auditory stories, miracles of the gods or the Greek heroes. So archeologies are similar to what we find in the miracle stories of Jesus, uh, not in character or words, but similarities are there. And then there's lectionaries—that is a collection of writings read during the religious calendar of the year. In the early church, they were just snippets out of the gospels that were read in the church on a regular basis so that they could get through all the gospels in a three-year period, usually. They had similarities in structure to our gospels that informed—that is, the lectionaries, of course, they were right out of the gospels, but they were meant for liturgical readings during worship. And some of these readings, with excerpts directly from the gospels, are like Jewish midrash—actually theological commentary on the law. Well, there are some of the forms in the New Testament assessment that we have literary similarities to the Jewish midrash commentary only God on the scriptures themselves. And then others, when you look at the gospel, it certainly looks like the preaching of early Christians in an expanded form, so in an expanded kerygma. So all of these have some parallels to elements within the gospel.
So here's my conclusion: Some writings have context that parallel parts of the gospels. Other writings have literary features that are similar to certain features in the gospels. But when you do a comprehensive analysis, you look at all the facets of what gospels are in their genre, the literary form, function, and the purpose of why they're written and their actual content, I think we have to agree with Hanselmann that, quote, "The gospels have no exact literary analogies in Antiquity." Antiquity—there's nothing like the New Testament gospels anywhere in ancient literature. They're somewhat like biography, somewhat like artificiologies, somewhat like historiographies, but none of them are exactly the same. Okay, so what are the literary purposes of the Gospel? Why were they—they're only four of these—they're not histories in the way ancient biography was done, nor were they strictly biographies the way ancient Greco-Roman biographies were done. But we could say they were like histories or like biographies in that they contain history and they focus on a singular person. But they are what I would call a historical theological portrait. And remember our textbook, *Encountering the New Testament: A Text, A Historical, Theological Approach to the New Testament*, and that is exactly the, I think, the correct approach, um, of the approach toward the person in ministry and the work of Jesus. They, they have both a historical and a theological aspect to them. They're historical because God came into the world in the person of Jesus in the Incarnation. God was in Christ reconciling the world himself. God broke into the time-space continuum that we call this world, and that the historical reality of the Gospel was—these are historical events that can be verified from outside that, that actually happened. Only the canonical gospels have definitive historical data for the setting of the Gospel. Non-canonical gospels do not put their gospel into definitive, definite historical settings, and none of them that even tried to do that can be verified by outside ancient sources or can't be verified by, by archeology. All the historical realities of the Gospel can be verified and has been verified and continue to be verified by archeology. So when you go to the land of Israel and you see where certain things happen, there's actually artifacts of those things, and the places are actually described accurately. The gospel is also theological, though. They reveal God's perspective, purpose, and interpretation of this cross-in-time event. So it's not simply telling a story of Jesus; it's giving the theological interpretation of that story. The Gospel culminates in the mega-story of God's revealing himself and his plan, his activity to redeem humanity—the full revelation of his plan of salvation. So Hebrews 1:1 says, "In the time has God spoken to our ancestors through the prophets at many times in various ways, but in these last days"—there it is, that last days—"the kingdom is near. He has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things and through whom also he made the universe." So it's clear God spoke in many ways in the Old Testament; we could make a long list of those ways, uh, but, uh, you know, there's, uh, audibly theophanies, fire, winds, circumstances, miracles and deliverance, even the finger of God writing on the tablet or on a wall. But the author of Hebrews says that in these last days, the eschaton, he speaks by his Son. So Jesus Christ is that last and most complete word, the last and final revelation of God.
Well, why four then? Four evangelists were chosen to point, uh, uh, to Jesus and paint their own theological portrait as a medium of showing who Jesus is and what word he brought. These literary portraits offer a diversity of perspectives that even the synoptic gospels, which have a similar view, they're not identical; they have their own distinct characteristics and content that you, that are uniquely their own. But put together, they provide a complete, comprehensive, complementary picture of Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God, the savior of humanity.