Gospel - what is it? How to correctly interpret this word

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

A person who comes to the Christian faith, first of all, asks the question, what is the Gospel? Part of the Bible or a separate sacred text? On the whole, questions concerning the Gospel have excited and continue to excite the minds of not only ordinary Christians, but also priests. Let's try to figure out what the gospel is. This will help avoid mistakes and misunderstandings of the Scriptures in the future.

General information

Many sources interpret the gospel in different ways and give different answers to the question of what the word gospel means.

So, most often it is indicated that the Gospel is an early Christian scripture that tells about the life and deeds of Christ. Conventionally, the Gospel can be divided into canonical and apocryphal. When people talk about the canonical Gospel, they mean that it is recognized by the church and included in the New Testament. His creation is attributed to the apostles and is not questioned. These writings are the basis of the Christian cult. In total, there are four canonical Gospels - the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In general terms, the Gospels of Luke, Mark and Matthew coincide with each other and are calledsynoptic (from the word synopsis - joint processing). The fourth Scripture, the Gospel of John, is very different from the previous three. But everywhere it is indicated that the Gospels, in fact, are the first four books of the New Testament.

The Bible and the Gospel are synonyms or not

Misinterpreting the Bible and the Gospel as synonyms.

The gospels are parts of the New Testament, which most fully contains the world outlook, virtues and postulates of Christianity. In turn, the Bible is often referred to as nothing more than the Old Testament. Although the New and Old Testaments are presented in close connection with each other, the latter is the Jewish Holy Scripture. Therefore, in the expression "Bible and Gospel" it is precisely the Old Testament and the New Testament that is meant. The Holy Gospel, therefore, can indeed be considered early Christian writing, in which narrative (narrative) and preaching elements are combined.

History of Creation

Initially, different Gospels significantly contradicted each other, since they all began to be created in the second half of the 1st century, that is, conditionally after the crucifixion of Jesus. There is nothing strange in this, since the authors who created the Gospels that were included in the New Testament belonged to different Christian communities. Gradually, four Gospels were singled out, which more or less coincided with each other and with the Christian dogmas established by the 4th-5th century. Only the first three Scriptures included in the canon coincide with each other in the matter of the preaching of Jesus and hislife.

Coincidences in the text of the Gospels and analysis of the Scriptures

Theologians and researchers have calculated that the Gospel of Mark includes more than 90% of the material that is found in the other two Scriptures (for comparison, in the Gospel of Matthew the percentage of coincidence is almost 60%, in the Gospel of Luke - a little over 40%).

From this we can conclude that it was written a little earlier, and the rest of the Gospels simply relied on it. Scientists also put forward a version that there was some kind of common source, for example, short notes of Jesus' conversations. The evangelist Mark came closest to them in writing. The Gospels have come down to us in Greek, but it is clear that Jesus did not use this language in his sermons. The fact is that in Judea, Greek was not in circulation among the broad masses of the people, as among the Egyptian Jews. For quite a long time, the opinion prevailed among scholars that the original gospels were written in Aramaic. During the First World War, biblical scholars made the so-called "reverse" translation of aphorisms from Scripture into Aramaic. According to the researchers, the result surprised everyone. What in Greek sounds like a text with a discordant rhythm, in Ramean sounded like poetic sayings with rhyme, alliterations, assonances and a clear, pleasant rhythm. In some cases, the play on words became visible, which the Greek translators missed when working with the text. Examining the Gospel of Matthew, scholars have found direct evidence that it was originally written in Hebrew.

This, in turn, indicates that the role of Hebrew in the life of the Jews of that time was significantly underestimated. Christian literature, according to S. S. Averintsev, was born on the verge of completely different language systems - Greek and Aramaic-Jewish. These are different linguistic and stylistic worlds. The gospel is a text that belongs to the number of ritual ones. It involves memorization and understanding of parts of the text, and not just reading.

Gospel World

The gospel is centered around the person of Jesus Christ, who embodies the fullness of divine and human nature. The hypostases of Christ - the Son of Man and the Son of God - appear in the Gospels inseparably, but also without merging with each other. Evangelist John pays more attention to the Divine nature of Jesus, while the first three evangelists - to his human nature, the talent of a brilliant preacher. Creating the image of Jesus, each of the evangelists sought to find their own correlation between the story of Jesus and His deeds and the news about Him. The most ancient is the Gospel of Mark, which is placed second in the New Testament.