What Are the Gospels? Four Accounts, and the Question of Where They Came From

The traditional order is not the order of composition, and each has a distinct character:

• •Mark, the shortest and generally dated earliest at around AD 70, written in plain urgent Greek, with no birth narrative, a Jesus who is frequently emotional and misunderstood, and an original ending at the empty tomb with the women afraid and saying nothing
• •Matthew, from the 80s, which uses most of Mark and adds a genealogy, a birth narrative, five long blocks of teaching including the Sermon on the Mount, and constant quotation of Hebrew scripture to present Jesus as its fulfilment
• •Luke, from the 80s or 90s, also using Mark, addressed to a named patron and announcing itself as an orderly account, with a strong interest in the poor, in women and in outsiders, and continuing directly into the book of Acts
• •John, usually dated latest at around AD 90 to 100, with a different chronology, long discourses instead of short sayings, seven signs rather than many miracles, no parables, and an explicit theology of Jesus as the eternal Word present from the beginning
• •The names were attached in the second century by church tradition rather than claimed in the texts, and scholarly opinion about their accuracy ranges widely

The first three are called the synoptic gospels because they can be set in parallel columns and seen together, and when they are, the overlap is too exact to be coincidence: long passages agree word for word in Greek, and the order of episodes largely matches. The problem is explaining the pattern of agreement and difference. The dominant solution holds that Mark was written first and used as a source by both Matthew and Luke, since it is hard to explain why an author with Matthew in front of him would produce Mark's rougher Greek and shorter account. But Matthew and Luke also share about two hundred and thirty verses of material absent from Mark, mostly sayings, in similar wording, and since most scholars judge that neither used the other, the standard explanation posits a lost collection of sayings, referred to as Q from the German for source. Each also has material unique to itself. Alternatives exist, including the view that Luke used Matthew directly and Q never existed, and the debate is active.

Before anything was written there was oral transmission, in Aramaic among the earliest followers and then in Greek as the movement spread, over a period of perhaps thirty to forty years. The material circulated as individual units, sayings, parables, healing stories and controversy narratives, shaped by the settings in which they were repeated, preaching, teaching, worship and argument, and the discipline of form criticism examines those units and their typical shapes. The authors then selected, arranged and edited, and the study of what each one chose to change reveals their concerns directly: Matthew softens passages where Jesus appears limited, Luke expands the role of women and of Samaritans, and John reorganises the chronology so that the cleansing of the temple comes at the beginning rather than the end. Papias, writing in the early second century, describes Mark as recording Peter's preaching without order, which is the earliest surviving external comment on how any of them came about.

Other gospels were written and were not included in the canon. The most significant is the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in Egypt in 1945 among the Nag Hammadi codices, which is not a narrative at all but a list of one hundred and fourteen sayings, many closely paralleling the canonical ones and some quite different, and its existence supports the idea that collections of sayings circulated independently. Others include the Gospel of Peter, the infancy gospels that fill in Jesus's childhood with miracle stories, and a group of texts associated with gnostic movements, including the Gospel of Judas published in 2006. The four were being treated as an authoritative set by the late second century, when Irenaeus argued that there could be neither more nor fewer than four, and the formal lists came later. The reasons the four were preferred include early date, wide use across scattered congregations and association with apostolic figures, and the popular claim that a single council selected them and suppressed the rest does not match the evidence, since the process was gradual and largely settled before any council addressed it.

Two technical points matter for reading them. First, no original manuscript survives of any of them, and what exists is a very large number of copies, from small second-century fragments to complete fourth-century codices, containing thousands of variant readings, most trivial and a handful substantial: the longer ending of Mark and the story of the woman taken in adultery in John are both absent from the earliest manuscripts and are marked as such in modern translations. Textual criticism reconstructs the earliest recoverable text by comparing these witnesses, and the sheer number of manuscripts makes the New Testament by far the best attested text of the ancient world. Second, the genre question has largely settled: after decades of treating them as a unique literary form, most scholars now read them as a variety of ancient biography, a genre that selected and arranged material to display a subject's character and significance rather than to compile a chronological record, which is what they do and what modern readers frequently expect them not to.

Four Greek accounts written between roughly AD 70 and 100, none naming its author, describe the life and teaching of Jesus. Matthew and Luke both used Mark along with a probable lost sayings collection, which is the standard solution to the synoptic problem, while John differs in chronology, style and theology. The material passed through decades of oral transmission before being selected and edited by authors with visible concerns, other gospels including Thomas circulated outside the canon, and the four were treated as an authoritative set by the late second century.