GOSPEL denotes primarily the "good news" of Christianity (0. Eng. godspel, i.e., good news, corresponding to Lat. evan gelium, Gr. EUa'yyiXLov). See CHRISTIANITY. In the Greek New Testament "evangel" and "evangelize" are used especially in the Pauline and Lucan writings ("evangel" also in certain passages in Mark) to denote the preaching or the message of Christianity, and would seem therefore at a very early date to have become technical terms in the vocabulary of the Gentile Christian Mis sion. An inscription of the year 9 B.C. found at Priene describes the birthday of the Emperor Augustus as having been "for the world the beginning of things which owing to him are glad tid ings." The Christian use of such language probably goes back, however, to the LXX. version of Is. lxi. 1, in which the Gr. verb "evangelize" is used to translate a corresponding Hebrew ex pression. In Mk. i. 14, 15 Jesus' own preaching is described as a "gospel." It is possible that He may have used some Aramaic phrase for "glad tidings," or quoted Is. lxi. 1 (cf. Mt. xi. 5, Lk. iv. 18, vii. 22).
The use of the term "gospel" to denote a written work setting forth the story of Jesus is derived probably from the fact that the word happened to occur in the opening sentence of the Gospel according to St. Mark, which appears to have been the earliest work of the kind. Christian usage was influenced by Jewish, and among the Jews it was a common practice to refer to books by their opening words. "Gospel" became consequently a kind of title, and when other similar works came to be compiled, the same title was extended to them by analogy. When it became neces sary, later still, to distinguish the different "Gospels" from one another, they were described as the Gospels according to Mark, according to Luke, etc. The four "Gospels" recognised by the Church were not regarded as rivals, but as parallel versions of the same fundamental message—the "good news" about Jesus. The heretic Marcion, early in the second century A.D., described St. Luke's Gospel (edited with modifications by himself) as "the Gospel," in contradistinction to "the Apostolicon" (a col lection of Pauline Epistles) ; and Justin Martyr (c. A.D. 145-16o) speaks of "memoirs" of the Apostles, "which are called Gos pels" (Justin, Apol. I. 66). The use of the term by Ignatius of Antioch (c. A.D. IIO; see Ignat. ad Philad. viii. 2) in the sense of a written Gospel is less certain. A number of more or less imaginative lives of our Lord, not accepted by the Church as canonical, are known as the "apocryphal gospels" (see APOCRY PHAL LITERATURE) . The Syriac writer Tatian, not long after the death of Justin, produced a harmony of the four Gospels, known as the Diatessaron ("through four") ; and in the treatise of Irenaeus Against Heresies (c. A.D. 180; see esp. III. i. 1 sq., and x., xi.) the four Gospels since recognised as canonical are clearly regarded as being uniquely authoritative. For further information as regards the diffusion and reception of the Gospels in Christian antiquity see BIBLE, N.T., § 1, CANON; and for individual ac counts of the Gospels see the articles MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE and JOHN. The present article deals only in general terms with the beginnings of Gospel-literature, and with the mutual rela tions of the four Gospels received by the Church.
The Beginnings of Gospel Literature.—The Church did not depend originally upon written accounts of our Lord. Chris tianity was proclaimed as a "Gospel" before any Christian lit erature existed at all, and the first Christian writings are not "Gospels"; they are the Epistles of St. Paul. From the date of the Crucifixion to the date at which the earliest of our Gospels was written (see MARK, GOSPEL OF) appears to have been almost exactly a generation. The substance of the narratives and sayings which eventually went to make up the contents of the Gospels circulated originally in the form of oral tradition.
The attempt has been made by recent New Testament criticism to infer back, behind the present literary forms of "the Gospel," to the pre-literary stage of the tradition. According to Paul, the "Gospel" received by him and handed on to his converts in cluded "first of all" the assertions that "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he hath been raised on the third day according to the Scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas : then to the twelve" (I Cor. xv.
1-5). The story of the Passion and Resurrection was regarded therefore from the first as being of primary import ; a fact which accounts at once for the connected and continuous character of the Passion-narratives in the existing four Gospels, for the elabo ration of detail which they display, and for the large proportion of space which they occupy in relation to the contents of the Gospels as a whole.
The interest, however, of the Christian Church in the story of Jesus was not confined to the fundamental story of the Passion and Resurrection. Apart from the theological interest in Christ the Redeemer from sin, there was a purely human interest— those who had been personally in contact with Jesus could never allow His memory to fade. There was further a moral and spirit ual interest—the sayings and deeds of the Lord were regarded as supplying the key to the solution of the moral and practical problems confronting the Church. The ideal of life which was everywhere set before converts was that of "living in accordance with the words of the Lord" ; and the experiences which befell the Church, whether of success or of failure, the sharp onset of persecution and the call to face martyrdom, the problems of early Church discipline, the necessities of early apologetic and polemic against the Jews— all these were illuminated and dealt with, as far as possible, by reference to the remembered words and example of Jesus. The church was interested further to know the story of its own beginnings and of the origin of its char acteristic institutions—the Apostolate, Baptism, the Eucharist. Stories moreover appear to have been preserved which exhibited Jesus more particularly in the characters of Wonder-worker, Teacher and Prophet.
With all these considerations in view, the new school of "f orm criticism" attempts to throw light upon the pre-literary history of the Gospel-material by means of an analysis and classification of its "forms." The material can, as a matter of fact, without difficulty be classified or grouped under such headings as (I) dialogues, (2) stories of miracles, (3) parables, (4) narrative paragraphs, (5) poem stanzas, and (6) groups of short sayings. It is noticeable that all these represent "forms" of which the contents would be easy to memorize ; and it may be presumed that it was in these "forms" that the material of the Church's tradi tion about Jesus was in circulation before it came to be written down.
Precisely how early the material, or any part of it, was com mitted to writing is a matter of dispute among scholars. The Greek of St. Mark, and to a large Pxtent also the Greek in which the sayings of Jesus contained in the non-Marcan Gospels are ex pressed, is strongly Semitic in colouring, and bears all the marks of what is described as "translation Greek." The story of Jesus must of course have been originally told, and His sayings re ported, in the vernacular Aramaic language of Palestine. Was the Aramaic stage of the tradition a purely oral one? Or are there Aramaic documentary sources behind our Greek Gospels? On the whole it appears to be the more probable view that the literary stage in the transmission of the Gospel materials belongs, in the main, to Greek-speaking Christianity, the evi dences of "translation Greek" being due not to actual transla tion from documents, but to the originally Semitic character of the tradition, and to the fact that it was in the first instance "done into Greek" by interpreters whose native speech was Semi tic. The Aramaic-speaking Church of Jerusalem, the original fountain-head of the tradition, was in all probability for a con siderable period of the same mind as the early second century writer Papias, who believed that he "would not be so much profited" by "what came from books" as by "the living and abid ing voice" (Papias ap. Euseb. H.E. III. 39, 4).
On the other hand, it is probable that in Greek-speaking circles the work of Christian teachers and catechists was at a very early stage helped by the use of written materials as an aid to the mem ory. Collections of the sayings and parables of Jesus were prob ably made, and perhaps collections of short narratives also. There were therefore written materials available when the Gospels came to be compiled (cf. Lk. i. I sq.) , for the most part probably in the form rather of catechists' notes than of "books" in any lit erary sense. The later Gospels of Matthew and Luke are depend ent on Mark (see below), but on other documents also. A spe cific tradition with regard to the words and deeds of our Lord probably tended to crystallize in each of the main centres of early Church missionary work—Jerusalem, Caesarea, Antioch, and eventually Rome. St. Mark's Gospel represents the tradition of Rome (see MARK, GOSPEL OF) . It has been suggested of late that a great part of the special material peculiar to Luke may have been derived from the tradition of the Church at Caesarea; that the document "Q," used in common by Matthew and Luke (see be low), represents the tradition of Antioch; and that the matter peculiar to Matthew is derived, in the main, from the tradition of the Church at Jerusalem. (B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels, pp. 23o sqq.) The conjecture is not without probability, but it does not follow that we can to-day reconstruct these supposed sources with any exactness, since it is likely that in respect of their contents all or most of the documents to a certain extent overlapped.
(I) Of the 661 verses contained in the authentic text of Mark, it has been calculated that more than 600 are reproduced or represented in substance in Matthew, and about 35o in Luke, while the material contained in Mark which is wholly unrepre sented in either Matthew or Luke amounts to only 31 verses in all. The agreements are largely verbatim, sometimes in all three Synoptists, more often either between Matthew and Mark or between Luke and Mark, only rarely between Matthew and Luke against Mark; and it is to be observed that this latter type of agreement (Mt. and Lk. against Mk.) tends either to disappear, when the true text of the Gospels has been critically determined ! in the light of the most recent discoveries of textual criticism (i.e., the supposed "agreements" are the result merely of the erroneous assimilation of the texts to one another in the course of scribal transmission), or to be fairly easily explicable (e.g., Mt. and Lk. have concurred in correcting in the most obvious way the defective grammar of Mk., or in the substitution of the most obvious Greek word for a rare or unsuitable word used by Mk.). It is to be observed, further, that the actual order of the materials in Mk. tends to be reproduced either in Mt. or in Lk., and sometimes in both Mt. and Lk. It is true that the two non Marcan writers both in different ways alter the order at times, and that they both modify and edit, transpose, change and abridge the material contained in Mk. very freely. The conclu sion nevertheless follows from the facts summarized above that they both employed Mark as a source.
(2) Apart from the Marcan material, the Synoptic tradition includes also a considerable amount of material—chiefly though not exclusively consisting of sayings of Jesus—which is common to both Mt. and Lk. The agreements here also extend not in frequently to the actual wording of the sayings in Greek, and are of such a kind as to suggest literary dependence, though not directly the dependence either of Mt. upon Lk. or of Lk. upon Mt. Scholars therefore assume the existence at one time of a second source, no longer extant, which was used in common by Mt. and Lk., and which is conventionally designated "Q" (from the Ger man "Quelle" = "source"). Attempts to reconstruct "Q" have been numerous, but the procedure is necessarily speculative, and the results are not valuable. The "Q" material which is common to Mt. and Lk. cannot safely be taken to represent the whole con tents of the document, but we cannot tell what more it may have contained. The attempt based on the statement, ascribed by Eusebius to Papias (Euseb. H.E. III. 39, 16), that "Mat thew wrote" (or "compiled") "the oracles in the Hebrew lan guage, and every man translated them as he was able" to iden tify "Q" with a document supposed to have been written by the Apostle Matthew in Aramaic, is more unfortunate still. By the logia or "oracles" it is probable that Papias meant the canonical Gospel of Matthew, of which he gives an erroneous account. The supposed source "Q" was a Greek document, and it is extremely unlikely that Matthew was the author. It has been suggested of late (see above) that the "Q" material in our Gospels may repre sent more particularly the tradition of Antioch. It is in any case wiser to regard "Q" as a mere symbol, a convenient designation for the non-Marcan material which is common to Mt. and Lk.
(3) The compilers of Mt. and Lk. clearly drew also upon other sources, oral or written, for at least some proportion of their ma terial. The two infancy-narratives (Mt. i.–ii., Lk. i.–ii.) are inde pendent ; and apart from these, there is a good deal of material which is peculiar to one or other of the Gospels. For the view that the compiler of Mt. may have had access to materials de rived from the tradition of Jerusalem, and for the possible con nection of the specific Lucan material with Caesarea, see above. On the "special source" of Luke and the recent "proto-Luke" the ory see further LUKE, GOSPEL OF.