The Christian canon - what is the Gospel?

What is the Gospel? The word "gospel" is a calque (direct translation) of the Greek word "evangelion", which literally means "good news". The Gospel is the texts that describe the life of Jesus Christ. The most famous of these are the four canonical Scriptures - the Gospel of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. However, this definition can describe apocryphal or non-canonical texts, Gnostic and Jewish-Christian gospels. In Islam, there is the concept of "Injil", used to refer to the book about Christ, which sometimes translates as "The Gospel." This is one of the four sacred books of Islam, which is considered a divine revelation according to the Qur'an. Muslims hold the view that over time, the Injil was reworked and distorted, as a result of which God sent the prophet Muhammad to the earth to show the people the last book, the Koran.

Traditionally, Christianity very much appreciates the four canonical Gospels, which are considered a revelation and are the basis of the religious belief system. Christians argue that such a Gospel gives an accurate and reliable picture of the life of Jesus Christ, but many theologians agree that not all scripture episodes are historically reliable.

What is the Gospel: Christian Canonical Writings

In ancient times, many texts were written that claimed a reliable description of the life of Christ, but only four of them were recognized canonical, that is, included in the New Testament. The insistence that these books, and not any other books, enter the canon, was put forward by one of the Church Fathers, Irenaeus of Lyons, in 1855. " In his main work Against Heresies, Irenaeus condemns various early Christian groups that recognized only one of the Gospels. Thus, the Marcionites relied only on the Gospel of Luke in the version of Marcion, and the Ebionites, as far as is known, followed the Aramaic version of the Gospel according to Matthew. There were also groups that adhered to writings of later origin.

Irenaeus declared that the four tests he had put forward were "a pillar and an affirmation of the Church." "It is impossible that there were more or less than four," he claimed, referring to the analogy with the four sides of the world and the four winds. His metaphor for the divine throne, supported by four beings with four faces (a lion, a bull, an eagle and a man), was borrowed from the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel and referred to the "quadrangular" Gospel. Eventually, Irenaeus succeeded in the fact that such a Gospel, including the four scriptures, was recognized as the only true one. He also supported the study of each script in the light of the rest.

At the beginning of the 5th century, the Catholic Church in the person of Innocent I recognized the biblical canon, which included the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which had already been approved in some regional synods: the Roman Church Council (382), the Ipponian Council (393) and the two Councils in Carthage (397 and 419). Thus, translated by St. Jerome in 382 on the instructions of Pope Damas I, the canon became generally accepted.