GOSPEL. - From the Greek εὐαγγέλιον, which means "good news" or "glad tidings," the message of redemption and salvation that Jesus Christ brought to the world was called by this word; by extension, the same word then came to designate the book that gives an account of that message.
Jesus, the true author of the Gospel in every respect, preached, but did not write; yet the first origins of the written Gospel date, one might say, from the very day that the divine Master was taken up from the earth. In the preaching of the Apostles, in the instruction of the new faithful, the deeds and sayings of Jesus were recounted. That was the first and principal basis of the Gospels that have come down to us.
St. Luke, writing around the year 60, states that "many" before him had undertaken to narrate the deeds and teachings of Jesus. Among those many must be counted St. Matthew and St. Mark; but there is room still for others, and it is possible, though not proven, that among these should be counted at least some of the authors of those Gospels known as of the Hebrews, of the Ebionites, of the Egyptians, of which the Fathers have handed down some fragments. Be that as it may, among the many Gospels that circulated between the end of the 1st century and the beginning of the 2nd, the Christian Church soon recognized as authentic, that is, inspired by God and trustworthy, only the four which, under the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, still today form the common patrimony of all Christians. But it should be noted that both in the manuscripts, so numerous, of the original text, and in the official language of the Church, as in the liturgy, they never bear any title other than "according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John." It is thus professed that, as was mentioned above, the true and only author of the Gospel is Jesus himself, and the four canonical books are but four redactions or four aspects of that one Gospel. To this concept St. Irenaeus (2nd century) gave his sculptural formula, creating the happy expression "tetramorphic Gospel," that is, "quadriform."
In fact the Evangelists did not set out to tell everything they knew about the divine Master, but only as much as was opportune and sufficient for the establishment of the faith and the practice of Christian life. They thus present the one Gospel, each under a particular aspect according to definite purposes, and in good harmony they complete one another. As a literary form their writings belong to that historical genre of "memorabilia," which has distinguished models also in the profane literature of the Greeks. And of that genre they possess all the virtue and value: strict historical truth in the facts and sublime teaching in the doctrine (v. also CATECHESI APOSTOLICA; GIOVANNI; LUCA; MARCO; MATTEO; SINOTTICI).
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Alberto Vaccari
DEMYTHOLOGIZATION OF THE GOSPEL
Theory of the Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann (b. 1884, professor of New Testament exegesis at Marburg) under the twofold influence of the historical-exegetical school of "form history" and of the theological-philosophical current of Barthian existentialism, which is a compromise between Protestant orthodoxy and theological rationalism.
The rationalist element lies in the thesis, derived from the comparative criticism of the Christian sources, according to which the New Testament would be intimately permeated with the "mythical" conceptions concerning the structure of the world, of man and the nature of salvation, which substantiate the apocalyptic literature of late Judaism and Hellenistic Gnosticism, and would have given them development; therefore the New Testament's way of thinking in images, in radical antithesis to that of modern man who proceeds by scientific concepts, and an effective apologetic presentation of Christianity would require, as a preliminary step, its "demythologization," its re-presentation in modern scientific terms, liberating the substance of the Gospel from mythical ideas. The demand of orthodoxy lies in the fact that Bultmann maintains the reality of the supernatural, reserving however to the religious consciousness alone, and not to the historical consciousness, the perception of the saving fact of Christ, as an existential reality that responds to his despair as a lost man, to his anxiety to be saved. Therefore the existential situation above all should be presented from the New Testament.