1.B 07. The Gospels Win their Place

The Gospels Win their Place We can now turn to the story of how the Gospels won their place as sacred Scripture.

Jesus Himself wrote nothing and left no written book. It was not His writing but His words which were always quoted. "Remember," said Paul, "the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35). "Remember," said Clement, "the words of Jesus, which he spoke, when he was teaching gentleness and long-suffering" (i Clement 13: i). The gospel began by being a spoken gospel, and for long it remained so. The gospel, as Irenaeus says, was first proclaimed by the eye-witnesses of the saving events, and it was only afterwards that it was by the will of God handed down to us in the Scriptures to be the foundation and pillar of our faith (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3:1:1). In the early Church it is persons and not books who dominate the scene. It was not through books but through persons that the gospel went out, and that the work of the Church was done. It was not a letter but Peter and John that the apostles sent to Samaria when the power of Christ began to work there (Acts 8:14). It was not a letter but Barnabas who was sent to Antioch when the great experiment of taking the gospel to the Gentiles began there (Acts 11:22). Paul wrote letters, but again and again he used Timothy or Titus or Mark as well as the written word (1 Corinthians 4:17; 1 Corinthians 16:10; 1 Corinthians 16:12; 2 Corinthians 7:6; 2 Corinthians 8:6; Php 2:19; Colossians 4:10; 1 Thessalonians 3:2). The very words used of the spread of the gospel are all speaking words. To receive the gospel and its facts is paralambanein, and to pass it on to someone else is paradidonai (1 Corinthians 15:3), and these are the Greek words which are characteristic of and special to oral tradition. The gospel itself is euaggelion which is goo d news, glad tidings, and which only later came to mean a kind of book. To preach the gospel is expressed by the word kerussein, which literally means to proclaim as a herald. The supreme function of the Christian is marturia, which is personal witness. The gospel itself is logos akoes, which literally means the word of hearing, the word which is heard (1 Thessalonians 2:13; Hebrews 4:2). Certainly in the beginning it was in terms of speech and not of writing, in terms of persons and not of books that the Church thought and it still remains true that the best epistle of all is a living epistle known and read of all men (2 Corinthians 3:2).

It may be that in the early Church the order of teachers has never been given its true importance. The teachers are mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12:28; Acts 13:1; Ephesians 4:2; Hebrews 5:12. The teachers must have been the men in every Christian community who knew the Christian story and who taught it to those who entered the Church long before there were any Christian books. The teachers must have been the living repositories of the gospel story. But as we have seen the day came when a written gospel became a necessity. We know that the Gospels as we have them are not first attempts. We know, for instance, that before the Gospels emerged in their completed form there must have existed a kind of source book on the teaching of Jesus on which both Matthew and Luke freely drew. To that source book, which of course does not now exist, scholars give the symbol Q, which stands for the German word quelle, which means a source. We know also that it is highly probable that there was a book of Testimonia f that is, a collection of Old Testament prophetic passages with their fulfilments in the life of Jesus. We know that there must have been many Gospels in circulation, for Luke tells us that many had set their hands to the task of setting out the Christian story, and Luke’s implication is that none of these earlier Gospels was wholly satisfactory. We know that the Gospels of our New Testament must have had their rivals and competitors, for we have already noted that Jerome spoke of those "who have attempted without the Spirit and the grace of God to draw up a story rather than to defend the truth of history." Cyril of Jerusalem says: "The four Gosepls alone belong to the New Testament; the rest are pseudepigrapha (that is, written under assumed names and falsely attributed to great apostolic figures) and harmful" (Cyril, Catec Hebrews 4:36). Just what the steps in the process were we do not now know, but it is clear that it was not long before our four Gospels triumphed over all their rivals and became supreme. We may say that from the beginning our four Gospels had a ring of truth and the Spirit of God about them, which was obvious to every honest reader and seeker.