The preaching of the Gospel by the apostles began on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2: 14-39). From the record of Acts and the letters of the apostles, a picture emerges of the tremendous dedication and enthusiasm of the preachers of the Gospel in the early Church. Peter and Paul and their co-workers had one aim only, to proclaim the Gospel wherever they were and to spread it as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Paul makes this very clear in 1 Corinthians 9. In 2 Corinthians 11:23-29 he describes what he suffers gladly for the sake of preaching the Gospel.

 

As we have seen from our study of the letters of the apostles, there was a fervent hope in the early Church that Jesus Christ would return very soon in glory. The early years of the Church were necessarily years in which the emphasis was on the spoken word, in preaching the Good News, instructing those who wanted to baptized, grappling with the problems that arose in the new community of the people of God, recollecting and interpreting what Jesus in his lifetime had said and done. There were many who remembered Jesus in his lifetime and many who were witnesses to the Risen Christ (I Corinthians 15:3-9). For some years there appeared to be no reason why the oral transmission of the Good News and recollections of Jesus in his lifetime was not sufficient.

 

To be in a state of constant preparedness for the return of Jesus Christ was a primary concern of the early Christians, as Paul's words in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 show. 'May the God who gives us peace make you holy in every way and keep your whole being-spirit, body and soul free from every fault at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.'

 

But between ten or twenty years after that extraordinary Day of Pentecost it must have been realized by some Christians that there was a need to write down what was to continue being transmitted orally for some further time. An event such as the death of James, the brother of John, killed by Herod Agrippa, could have been seen as a warning that others who were witnesses to Jesus Christ in his lifetime and after the Resurrection, would also disappear from the Church. It can be assumed that about this time written collections, probably short, began to be made of (i) Old Testament prophecies which predicted the coming and work of Jesus Christ, (ii) sayings and parables remembered from the teaching of Jesus and often associated with some incident in his ministry, (iii) stories which demonstrated the power of Jesus particularly in healing and exorcising evil spirits and (iv) the stories of the suffering, death and Resurrection of Jesus. It is likely that the events of the final days of Jesus' life were familiar in a connected narrative at a very early stage; every celeb-ration of the Lord's Supper and every act of Christian worship constantly recollected his death which sealed God's new Covenant with his people, and Christ's Resurrection.

By the time of Nero's mad attack on the Roman churches in A.D. 64 there were quite a lot of Christian writings in use, written probably in Aramaic in the Palestinian churches and in Greek in the Gentile churches. From the first days of the Church there had been a need to translate what had first been said in Aramaic into Greek for the Greek-speaking Jews, before the Good News reached the Gentiles. Distribution of the earliest written Christian material was probably rather haphazard. By that time, the letters of Paul and James had been written.

What led to the writing of a unique new literary form, the gospel? A great many books have been written by the New Testament scholars of the past century about the four gospels and in one chapter of this book we can say only a very little about the findings of those who have studied the gospels from every possible angle. In attempting to answer our question we shall follow a widely accepted view that the first of the four gospels was written by Mark, from Rome, and that it was written after the attack on the Roman Christians by Nero. The harsh fact of that attack with the subsequent killing of many Christians, possibly including the two great apostles Peter and Paul although the dates of their death are not exactly known, was a sufficient reason in itself for the writing of a new kind of record of the Good News. In such a record, what the Church knew, believed and taught about its Lord was carefully preserved for the future and could be copied and circulated without limitation. When no witnesses to Jesus in his lifetime or to the Risen Christ remained alive, the Gospel would still be preached. A gospel, however, was not a biography, a life-story told from beginning to end. We know very little about Jesus before the age of about thirty and what little we do know is from two only of the gospel writers, Luke and Matthew; Mark and John say nothing about Jesus' life in Galilee before he began his ministry. In whichever gospel we turn to, we find selection and interpretation in what is said about Jesus. The writers looked back to Jesus from the faith of the early Church. They drew on material that was already widely taught and circulated in the Church, putting it together in a more organized form than had been known before. Luke 1: 1-3 explains how one gospel writer did this.

It is generally accepted that after the gospel of Mark, the gospels of Luke, Matthew and John were then written, The so-called 'synoptic problem' which refers to the literary relationship of Mark, Matthew and Luke, will not be discussed in this book; explanations about it are found in many books about the New Testament.

So the name 'gospel' finally came to be given to the new kind of book which was a written account and interpretation of what was preached and taught about Jesus Christ. Comparison of the four gospels shows that the writers shared a common tradition about Jesus Christ, but each presented his own selection and interpretation of what was known and taught in the Church and had particular readers in mind. To each writer, the Resurrection is the great climax of his account.

Unlike the writers of the letters we have studied, the writers of the gospels did not put their names at the beginning of what they wrote and we are dependent on Church tradition for the names of the gospel writers. The great Church historian Eusebius who lived from A.D. 265- 339 preserved in his writings what had been said by two Christians who had lived in the second century A.D. about Mark's gospel. Papias, a bishop, said, 'Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately everything that he remembered without, however, recording in order what was said or done by Christ'. Another bishop, Irenaeus, also said, 'After their deaths [Peter's and Paul's], Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, himself also gave us a written record of the things preached by Peter.' Eusebius also quoted what Irenaeus had said about the gospels written by Matthew, Luke and John.

We may identify the writer of Mark's gospel with Mark of I Peter 5: 13, John Mark of Acts, and Mark who went with Paul on some of his travels, although some scholars question this as the identification cannot be "proved conclusively. There is no reason for doubting the tradition that the writer of Mark's gospel was a disciple of Peter and that both Peter and Mark were associated with the church in Rome.

 

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