Canonical Gospels

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 which are included in the New Testament, but the term can also used to refer to apocryphal, non-canonical, Jewish–Christian and gnostic gospels.

Christianity places a high value on the four canonical gospels, which it considers to be revelations 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 many scholars and historians, as well as some liberal Christians, believe that much of that which is contained in the gospels is not historically reliable. This position however, requires a liberal view of Biblical inerrancy. For example, professor of religion Linda Woodhead notes some scholarship reinforces the claim that "the gospels' birth and resurrection narratives can be explained as attempts to fit Jesus’s life into the logic of Jewish expectation". However, New Testament scholar N. T. Wright holds firmly to the historical authenticity of the death and resurrection of Jesus, stating that, of the whole Bible, this is the story with the most overwhelming historical evidence.

The word gospel derives from the Old English gōd-spell (rarely godspel), meaning "good news" or "glad tidings", and is a calque (word-for-word translation) of the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον, euangelion (eu- "good", -angelion "message") or in Aramaic (ܐܘܢܓܠܝܘܢ ewang'eliyawn). The gospel was considered the "good news" of the coming Kingdom of Messiah, and of redemption through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, the central Christian message. The Greek word euangelion is also the source (via Latinised evangelium) of the terms "evangelist" and "evangelism" in English. The authors of the four canonical Christian gospels are known as the Four Evangelists.

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