(06) The Writing of the Gospels

The Writing of the Gospels

The Apostles set out - a handful of men to “teach all nations”. Their first teaching was oral. The Apostles based their authority on Our Lord’s command to ‘teach all nations’. When preaching to a Jewish community, they proved from the Scriptures - the Old Testament - that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. To pagans, Paul simply preached the story of Our Lord’s life death and resurrection. As we see from the Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles, and from later Church history, the Christian preachers invoked the unbroken traditions from the days of Christ. They placed the eyewitness authority and word-of-mouth teaching of the apostles on the same level as the written word.

S.Jerome tells us that the first to write a Gospel was Matthew the tax-collector, writing about 8 years after the Ascension. He wrote in Hebrew, for Jewish converts, and refers often to the Prophecies that Our Lord fulfilled. He was soon translated into Greek, then the universal language, and we have no copies of the Hebrew original.

Next was Mark, Peter’s secretary. He wrote down accurately, but not in order, the vivid preaching of Peter. Mark’s Gospel has more vivid descriptions than Matthew. Somebody then sorted his collection into the same order as Matthew. Mark leaves the long discourses of Jesus to Matthew.

Later Luke, the physician and companion of Paul, wrote “an ordered account” in excellent Greek, for the Gentiles. There were already many unauthorised preachers and written accounts in circulation, and Luke is setting the record straight.

At the end of the first century John wrote his Gospel, supplementing and reflecting on Our Lord’s life, before the last of the eyewitnesses had died. “We touched Him with our own hands...And we saw His Glory...full of Grace and Truth” (1Jn:1; Jn 1:14).