Religious Education
This site was created specifically for students of Religion in Secondary Schools and other persons who may be interested in learning more about the Gospels and some of the major world religions.
The Gospels
The Synoptic Gospels
(The Gospels of Luke, Matthew and Mark (known as the Synoptic Gospels)
Rationale:
A gospel is an account describing the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The most widely known examples are the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but the term is also used to refer to apocryphal gospels, non-canonical gospels, Jewish-Christian gospels, and Gnostic gospels.
Christianity places a high value on the four canonical gospels, which it considers to be a revelation from God and central to its belief system. Christianity traditionally teaches that the four canonical gospels are an accurate and authoritative representation of the life of Jesus, but more liberal churches and many scholars believe that not everything contained in the gospels is historically reliable. For example, according to Linda Woodhead, "the gospels’ birth and resurrection narratives can be explained as attempts to fit Jesus’ life into the logic of Jewish expectation". The word gospel derives from the Old English gōd-spell (rarely godspel), meaning "good news" or "glad tidings". The word comes from the Greek euangelion, or "good news". The gospel was considered the "good news" of the coming Kingdom of Messiah, and of redemption through the life and death of Jesus, the central Christian message.
The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are considered synoptic gospels on the basis of many similarities between them that are not shared by the Gospel of John. "Synoptic" means here that they can be "seen" or "read together," indicating the many parallels that exist among the three. The synoptic gospels are the source of many popular stories, parables, and sermons, such as Jesus' humble birth in Bethlehem, the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the Last Supper, and the Great Commission.
The fourth gospel, the Gospel of John, presents a very different picture of Jesus and his ministry from the synoptics. In differentiating history from invention, some historians interpret the gospel accounts skeptically but generally regard the synoptic gospels as including significant amounts of historically reliable information about Jesus.
Christianity began within Judaism, with a Christian "church" (from a Greek word meaning "assembly") that arose within Jesus' own lifetime according to some scholars, or, according to others, shortly after his death, when some of his followers claimed to have witnessed him risen from the dead. From the outset, Christians depended heavily on Jewish literature, supporting their convictions through the Jewish scriptures. Those convictions involved a nucleus of key concepts: the messiah, the son of God and the son of man, the Day of the Lord, the kingdom of God. Uniting these ideas was the common thread of apocalyptic expectation: Jews and Christians, believed that the end of history was at hand, that God would very soon come to punish their enemies and establish his own rule, and that they were at the centre of his plans. Christians read the Jewish scripture as a figure or type of Jesus Christ, so that the goal of Christian literature became an experience of the living Christ. The new movement spread around the eastern Mediterranean and to Rome and further west, and assumed a distinct identity, although the groups within it remained extremely diverse.
The four gospels are the earliest narrative portraits of Jesus, and were written between, broadly, 65 and 110 CE. They were written for an audience already Christian – their purpose was to strengthen the faith of those who already believed, not to convert unbelievers. Christian "churches" were small communities of believers, often based on households (an autocratic patriarch plus extended family, slaves, freedmen, and other clients), and the evangelists often wrote on two levels, one the "historical" presentation of the story of Jesus, the other dealing with the concerns of the author's own day.
Thus the proclamation of Jesus in Mark 1:14 and the following verses, for example, mixes the terms Jesus would have used as a 1st-century Jew ("kingdom of God") and those of the early church ("believe", "gospel"). More fundamentally, some scholars believe Mark's reason for writing was to counter believers who saw Jesus in a Greek way, as wonder-worker (the Greek term is "divine man"); Mark saw the suffering of the messiah as essential, so that the Son of God title (the Hellenistic "divine man") had to be corrected and amplified with the "Son of Man" title, which conveyed Christ's suffering.[18] Other scholars think Mark might have been writing as a Galilean Christian against those Jewish Christians in Jerusalem who saw the Jewish revolt against Rome (66–73 CE) as the beginning of the "end times": for Mark, the Second Coming would be in Galilee, not Jerusalem, and not until the generation following the revolt.
The Parables are recorded in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Some parables are common to all three Synoptic Gospels, such as the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:3-23, Mark 4:2-20, and Luke 8:4-15). Matthew relates ten Parables on the Kingdom of Heaven, seven of which occur in Chapter 13 and are central to his Gospel. Examples of parables unique to each Gospel are the Weeds Among the Wheat (Matthew 13:24-30) and the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16); the Growing Seed (Mark 4:26-29); the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), Lazarus and the Rich Man (Luke 16:19-31), and the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke 18:9-14) .
