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Canonical GospelsOf the many gospels written in antiquity, only four gospels came to be accepted as part of the New Testament, or canonical. An insistence upon there being a canon of canonical four, and no others, was a central theme of Irenaeus of Lyons, c. 185. In his central work, Adversus Haereses Irenaeus denounced various early Christian groups that used only one gospel, such as Marcionism which used only Marcion's version of Luke, or the Ebionites which seem to have used an Aramaic version of Matthew as well as groups that embraced the texts of newer revelations, such as the Valentinians (A.H. 1.11). Irenaeus declared that the four he espoused were the four Pillars of the Church: "it is not possible that there can be either more or fewer than four" he stated, presenting as logic the analogy of the four corners of the earth and the four winds (3.11.8). His image, taken from Ezekiel 1, of God's throne borne by four creatures with four faces—"the four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and the four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle"—equivalent to the "four-formed" gospel, is the origin of the conventional symbols of the Evangelists: lion, bull, eagle, man. Irenaeus was ultimately successful in declaring that the four gospels collectively, and exclusively these four, contained the truth. By reading each gospel in light of the others, Irenaeus made of John a lens through which to read Matthew, Mark and Luke. By the turn of the 5th century, the Catholic Church in the west, under Pope Innocent I, recognized a biblical canon including the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which was previously established at a number of regional Synods, namely the Council of Rome (382), the Synod of Hippo (393), and two Synods of Carthage (397 and 419).[1] This canon, which corresponds to the modern Catholic canon, was used in the Vulgate, an early 5th century translation of the Bible made by Jerome[2] under the commission of Pope Damasus I in 382.
Origin of the canonical Gospels
Among the canonical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke include many of the same passages in the life of Jesus and sometimes use identical or very similar wording. John expresses itself in a different style and relates the same incidents in a different way— even in a revised narrative order— and is often full of more encompassing theological and philosophical messages than the first three canonical Gospel accounts. It is John that explicitly introduces Jesus as God incarnate.
Parallels among the first three Gospel accounts are so telling that many scholars have investigated the relationship between them. In order to study them more closely, German scholar JJ Griesbach (1776) arranged the first three Gospel accounts in a three-column table called a synopsis. As a result, Matthew, Mark, and Luke have come to be known as the synoptic Gospels; and the question of the reason for this similarity, and the relationship between these Gospel accounts more generally, is known as the Synoptic Problem. Some Christians argue that this could be explained by adhering to the belief that the gospels were "spirit-breathed", i.e. that the Holy Spirit provided inspiration for every book in the Bible, and that consequently the similarities in the different accounts are due to having the same author, i.e. God. It has also been argued by certain Christian groups that since the Synoptics all tell the story of the life of Jesus, that they would naturally be similar in their accounts, though their critics argue that this explanation would then imply that the Gospel of John isn't an account of the life of Jesus, since it is quite dissimilar in the accounts. Most scholars see the similarities as being far too identical, much like three people reporting the same event, and then using exactly the same cultural references, turns of phrase, ordering of content, and on occasion even the same set of words. The understanding found among early Christian writers and scholars has been that the first account of the Gospel to be committed to writing was that according to Matthew, the second Luke, followed by Mark and the final one John; and this order is defended today by proponents of the Griesbach hypothesis. However, since then Enlightenment scholars have been proposing also many other solutions to the Synoptic Problem; and the dominant view today is that Mark is the first Gospel, with Matthew and Luke borrowing passages both from that Gospel and from at least one other common source, lost to history, termed by scholars 'Q' (from German: Quelle, meaning "source"). This view is known as the "Two-Source Hypothesis". The rediscovery of the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings gospel remarkably similar to the form that Q was thought to take, and containing many of the sayings shared only between Matthew and Luke, but in a more raw form, has given a large degree of credence to the hypothesis. Conservative Christian scholars argue that since the Gospel of Thomas is thought to be a later document than the synoptics, Thomas could have copied from them, although this requires that Thomas made the effort of removing all the narrative framework, and carefully picked out sayings shared between Matthew and Luke, and added others from an unknown elsewhere. Another theory which addresses the synoptic problem is the Farrer hypothesis. This theory maintains Markan priority (that Mark was written first) and dispenses with the need for a theoretical document Q. What Austin Farrer has argued is that Luke used Matthew as a source as well as Mark, explaining the similarities between them without having to refer to a hypothetical document. The general consensus among biblical scholars is that all four canonical Gospels were originally written in Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Orient. On the strength of an early commentator it has been suggested that Matthew may have originally been written in Aramaic, or the Hebrew, or that it was translated from Aramaic/Hebrew to Greek with corrections based on Mark. Regardless, no Aramaic original texts of the Gospel accounts have ever been found, only later translations from the Greek (see Peshitta and Aramaic primacy for a fuller discussion). DatingEstimates for the dates when the canonical Gospel accounts were written vary significantly; and the evidence for any of the dates is scanty. Because the earliest surviving complete copies of the Gospels date to the 4th century and because only fragments and quotations exist before that, scholars use higher criticism to propose likely ranges of dates for the original gospel autographs. Conservative scholars tend to date earlier than others, while liberal scholars usually date later. The following are mostly the date ranges given by the late Raymond E. Brown, in his book An Introduction to the New Testament, as representing the general scholarly consensus in 1996 (for a fuller discussion of dating, please see the articles for each Gospel):
Traditional Christian scholarship has generally preferred to assign earlier dates. Some historians interpret the end of the book of Acts as indicative, or at least suggestive, of its date; as Acts does not mention the death of Paul, generally accepted as the author of many of the Epistles, who was later put to death by the Romans c. 65. Acts is attributed to the author of the Gospel of Luke, and therefore would shift the chronology of authorship back, putting Mark as early as the mid 50s. Here are the dates given in the modern NIV Study Bible (for a fuller discussion see Augustinian hypothesis):
Non-canonical gospelsIn addition to the four canonical gospels there have been other gospels that were not accepted into the canon. Generally these were not accepted due to doubt over the authorship, the time frame between the original writing and the events described, or content that was at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy. If a gospel claimed to be written by for example, James, but was clearly authored beyond 120, then there was little chance of the authorship being authentic. This differs from the four canonical gospels which the majority of historians agree were authored before 100. For this reason, most of these non-canonical texts were only ever accepted by small portions of the early Christian community. Some of the content of these non-canonical gospels (as much as it deviates from accepted theological norms) is considered heretical by the leadership of mainstream churches, including the Vatican. This can be seen in the case of the Gospel of Peter, which was written in the correct time, 70-120, but was considered dangerous for elements which could be used to support docetism. Two non-canonical gospels that are considered to be among the earliest in composition are the sayings Gospel of Thomas and the narrative Gospel of Peter. The dating of the Gospel of Thomas is particularly controversial, as there is some suspicion in critical schools of scholarship that it predates the canonical Gospels, which would, if conclusively proven, have a profound impact on the understanding of their origin. Like the canonical gospels, scholars have to rely on higher criticism, not extant manuscripts, in order to roughly date Thomas. A genre of "Infancy gospels" (Greek: protoevangelion) arose in the 2nd century, such as the Gospel of James, which introduces the concept of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (not to be confused with the absolutely different sayings Gospel of Thomas), both of which related many miraculous incidents from the life of Mary and the childhood of Jesus that are not included in the canonical gospels, but which have passed into Christian lore. Another genre that has been suppressed is that of gospel harmonies, in which the apparent discrepancies in the canonical four gospels were selectively recast to present a harmoniously consistent narrative text. Very few fragments of harmonies survived. The Diatessaron was such a harmonization, compiled by Tatian around 175. It was popular for at least two centuries in Syria, but eventually it fell into disuse, and no copies of it have survived, except indirectly in some medieval Gospel harmonies that can be considered its descendants. Marcion of Sinope, c. 150, had a version of the Gospel of Luke which differed substantially from that which has now become the standard text. Marcion's version was far less Jewish than the now canonical text, and his critics alleged that he had edited out the portions he didn't like from the canonical version, though Marcion argued that his text was the more genuinely original one. Marcion also rejected all the other gospels, including Matthew, Mark and especially John, which he alleged had been forged by Irenaeus. The existence of private knowledge, briefly referred to in the canon, and particularly in the canonical Gospel of Mark, is part of the controversy surrounding the unexpectedly discovered Secret Gospel of Mark. EtymologyLiterally, gospel means "good news." The word gospel derives from the Old English "god-spell" or "godspell" or rarely "godspel" (meaning "good tidings" or "good news"), a translation of the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον, euangelion (eu, good, -angelion, message). The Greek word "euangelion" is also the source of the term "evangelist" in English. See also
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