So what is “the gospel” again? When the New Testament writers used the language of euangelion/euangelizomai, what were they actually talking about? In this series of posts I am exploring the ways in which the New Testament actually talks about “the gospel,” arguing that fundamentally the gospel is the announcement of Jesus’ being Lord of lords, and that the NT writers did not equate the gospel with the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone. In my first post, I briefly examined the ways in which euangelion/euangelizomai language usually functioned in the Greco-Roman world for which the NT writers were writing. In my second post, I looked at the ways in which euangelion/euangelizomai language was used within the Synoptic Gospels.
Today I would like to look at the Gospels from a slightly different angle. Rather than looking for the gospel articulated within the Gospels, today I will look at the Gospels as themselves being articulations of the gospel.
3. If one reads the Gospels themselves as being apostolic narrations of the gospel, what emerges is primarily a narrative of the dawning of God’s Kingdom in and through Jesus the Messiah.
On the one hand, it must be granted that the texts of the canonical Gospels never explicitly identify themselves as being “The Gospel according to so-and-so.” Their traditional titles were later additions by the ancient Church after all and represent later interpretations of what the texts communicated. On the other hand, however, it was not at all conventional to refer to a Greco-Roman biography (a bios or vita, as they were called) as a euangelion, and so we must suppose that the ancient Church had some reason for identifying these four narratives of Jesus’ life, career, death and resurrection as to euangelion kata Matthaion, kata Markan, kata Lukan, kata Ioannon (The Gospel according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John). The reason that most naturally suggests itself is that the story that these books tell just is what the ancient Church took the gospel to be. For my part, it just seems fairly obvious that we should take the ancient Church’s judgment that the Gospels themselves narrate the good news very, very seriously.
But there is an intra-textual argument to be made for reading the Gospels as narrating the gospel, as well. The opening line of the Gospel of Mark reads:
Arche tou euangeliou Iesou Christou [huiou Theou]
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, [Son of God].
As one might expect, commentators are divided over the interpretation of just about every aspect of this verse. Is it the book’s title, suggesting that the book as a whole narrates “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ”? And if so, what would that mean? Or does it simply introduce the odd mixed quotation of Malachi and Isaiah (and Exodus?) which immediately follows it, thereby setting the stage for John the Baptist’s entrance in the book’s opening scene? Does tou euangeliou Iesou Christou refer to the gospel about Jesus Christ or to the gospel which Jesus himself preached or both? If “Son of God” is to be included in the verse (and it is missing from several important manuscripts), what does that phrase mean? Does it connote divinity or simply royalty or, again, does it somehow do both? None of these questions admit of easy answers.
In any case, here’s my two cents: Mark 1:1 is probably not the book’s title (other ancient texts do not seem to title their books this way) but its opening line. The “gospel” that is “beginning” is the gospel both about and preached by Jesus. While it was once fashionable to just say that Jesus preached the Kingdom and Paul preached about Jesus, that simply will not do here. These two messages are intertwined in Mark’s Gospel in some very important ways: First, we may note that in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus describes the cost of discipleship in terms of self-sacrifice “for [Jesus'] sake and for the gospel (heneken emou kai [heneken] tou euangeliou).” (8:35; 10:29) Both the person of Jesus and the message of the gospel together are what disciples are being called to give their lives to and for. Second, we must return to the woman who anoints Jesus at Bethany. We have already said a few words about the clear royal overtones of this passage. Here I wish only to take note of what Jesus says of the woman who anoints him: “And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel (to euangelion) is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” (Mark 14:9) It is hard to see why this anecdote about this woman’s pouring oil on Jesus would be as widespread as the gospel itself unless it was itself a feature of the gospel story, which would imply that the gospel story and the story about Jesus are one and the same.
But of course, there is no escaping the fact that the gospel which Jesus preached in the Gospel of Mark (and the rest of the Synoptics, for that matter) is the gospel of the Kingdom of God/Heaven. How, then, do Jesus’ gospel of the Kingdom and the gospel of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection fit together here? Here I think we can be helped by the Patristic understanding of Jesus as being autobasileia, as being the Kingdom himself; as being both the very embodiment and the Archimedean point of God’s eschatological reign over earth. God’s final rule over the earth is uniquely exercised through and embodied in the person, teachings, life, death, resurrection and Messianic rule of Jesus. For my part, I think that the Gospel of Mark beckons us to understand Jesus in this way, as autobasileia. And here’s the kicker: If we do understand Jesus in this way, then the Gospel of Mark does indeed narrate the gospel for us.
If, then, Mark does narrate the gospel for us, if this book truly does give us the gospel according to Mark, what sort of gospel does it narrate? We will look at that question in our next post.
Great post. I find your arguments very convincing, and I was especially impressed by a number of points you make (e.g., your point about Mark 14:9 and your point about Jesus being autobasileia).
Apart from your intra- and extra-textual arguments, which are quite strong, your thesis about the nature of the gospel also seems to gel with the general drift or tendency (using these terms in a quasi-technical sense) of the Bible. The historical narrative of the Old Testament closes with the people of Israel awaiting the messiah, the kingdom of God, and the Day of the Lord. Enter Jesus. In his first public preaching in Mark, he declares that the time of fulfillment has arrived, that the kingdom of God is at hand, and that all should repent. Surely any first-century Palestinian Jew who was educated in his religious traditions would have understood Jesus’s words in the context of the prophetic expectations of the Old Testament. True, it takes the disciples a long time in the Gospel of Mark to figure out that Jesus is the messiah, and many people never seem to get it. But the knowledgeable, alert reader will immediately understand that Jesus has announced the fulfillment of the prophetic hopes and expectations of the Old Testament. And, by the end of chapter eight at least, the same reader should understand that Jesus himself is the fulfillment that he earlier announced, and that he is the messiah. Furthermore, given that this fact – i.e., the fact that Jesus is both the messiah and the fulfillment of the OT prophecies – is the basis for every important aspect of Jesus’s birth, life, death, and resurrection (none of these things would make sense if Jesus weren’t the messiah and the fulfillment of the OT), it seems natural to say that the gospel fundamentally consists in the claim (fact) that Jesus is the Lord of Lords, i.e., that he is the true Lord, the messiah who inaugurates the kingdom of God and rules forever. I don’t know how the Septuagint arranges the books of the OT, but if the prophets come last in it, so that Malachi is the last book of the Septuagint, then I think it makes perfect sense why Mark began his book with a mixed quotation that included verses from Malachi as well as Isaiah (and Exodus).
One last thought. If the gospel fundamentally consists of a claim whose understanding presupposes familiarity with OT history and prophecy, then how well can any Christian understand the gospel without knowing the OT?
This is exciting stuff David. I hope you keep writing on it.
Posted by Leslie Wolf | August 21, 2012, 11:19 amThanks, Les! I certainly agree that Jesus’s being the Messiah and the Kingdom bringer draws together lots of OT threads and fulfills all sorts of OT hopes, albeit in surprising and paradoxical ways.
On the arrangement of the LXX, the ordering of books that we’re so used to depends on the books being bound together in a codex, which really only started to become common around the late first/early second century AD (and primarily in Christian circles, at that). So when Jesus was preaching and when the NT was written the LXX would still pretty much only have been available on scrolls. You couldn’t fit the whole LXX/Tanakh on a single scroll (it’s a stretch to even get all of Isaiah on one), so you wouldn’t necessarily have hard and fast orderings of books the way we do. You did have various enumerations of the books though. Josephus, for instance, lists a 22 book “canon” and counts Job, Daniel, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Esther among the Prophets. That’s all to say, I don’t think we should worry too much over the ordering of the books. It probably had not settled out in Jesus’ day. (As a side note, the NT order we’ve all come to know and love didn’t become standard until the 19th century!)
Posted by dmwilliams83 | August 21, 2012, 1:51 pmPersonally, I think that the first books should be Mark, Hebrews, Romans, and Galatians, and then the rest could be decided by random shuffle.
Posted by Leslie Wolf | August 21, 2012, 5:26 pm