The Gospels

The word "Gospel" means good news, and the four books that carry the name (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), exist to tell one story from four angles: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. They are not four different stories. They are one story told by four witnesses, each writing for a different audience and drawing out different threads of the same truth.

Matthew opens by rooting Jesus in Israel's own history: "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham" (Matthew 1:1). Mark strips the introduction down to its bluntest form: "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (Mark 1:1). No genealogy, no birth story: just action, moving fast from the first page.

Luke writes like a historian, and says so. He tells his reader Theophilus that he has investigated everything carefully, so that Theophilus might know the certainty of the things he had been taught (Luke 1:4). Luke's Gospel is not legend passed down loosely; it claims to be a careful account, checked against the record. He carries the same care into Acts, picking up where the Gospel left off: the former treatise having covered all that Jesus began both to do and teach (Acts 1:1). The Gospels, in other words, are the beginning of a story still unfolding.

John writes last, and writes differently. He reaches back before Genesis itself: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). Then he brings that eternal Word down into ordinary history: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). John is not just recording events; he is telling his reader what those events mean.

All four books converge on the same center. After the resurrection, Jesus himself walks with two discouraged disciples on the road to Emmaus and shows them how the whole of Scripture had been pointing to him, beginning at Moses and all the prophets, expounding the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27). The Gospels are, in one sense, the payoff of everything written before them.

John states the purpose plainly near the end of his own account: these things are written so that a reader might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, might have life through his name (John 20:31). The Gospels were never meant to be read as distant history. They were written so that a reader, centuries later, could meet the same Jesus the first disciples met.

And John closes with an admission that no book could ever be big enough to hold the whole of it; the world itself, he says, could not contain the books that would need to be written to tell everything Jesus did (John 21:25). Four Gospels, four witnesses, one Savior, and still, by their own admission, only the beginning of what could be told.