How were the Gospels developed and formed?

Answer 1

The Old Testament which had been in force for some 1500 years which was composed of the old Mosaic covenant. When the Lord gave New Covenants or revelations it was called the New Testament. The old law was done away with in Christ having been fulfilled, He being the New Testament.

Answer 2

The Gospel of Mark was the original gospel on which the other New Testament gospels were based, so it is no doubt the most important of the gospels. However we have little that is certain about how it was formed. What is now recognised by most modern scholars is that it was not written by Mark, and was only attributed to him later in the second century. It is also known that the Gospel was written approximately 70 CE, based on evidence internal to the document.

Mark's Gospel was written in Greek Koine by an anonymous author who was unfamiliar with Palestinian geography and the culture of Palestinian Jews. These facts demonstrate that the book was not a literal record of exactly what happened to Jesus.

Some say that the Gospel of Mark was written for Roman Christians because it contains some words derived from Latin. However, this is a most improbable explanation, although strongly supported. The Latinisms do indeed demonstrate that the author of Mark knew the Latin language. Since we can therefore establish that he knew Latin, he would have written his Gospel in Latin if intended for a Roman audience, rather than in Greek. So there is no good reason to believe that Mark's Gospel was written in Rome or for a Roman audience. Since the Gospel was written in Greek Koine, not classical Greek, his audience probably did not live in mainland Greece. Mark was not writing for Palestinian Jews, because a Palestinian Jew would immediately detect Mark's lack of knowledge of Palestinian geography. In fact, he was unlikely to have been writing for Jews at all, because his unfamiliarity with some aspects of Jewish ritual would have been equally apparent to Diaspora Jews and Palestinian Jews. Most probably he was writing for Gentiles of the Middle East.

The analysis in the previous paragraph assumes that Mark's Gospel was originally written for the sole purpose of spreading the gospel, just as the book says. It has been argued that all is not as it seems and that Mark's Gospel was actually written solely as a work of literature, in which case his audience could have been almost anywhere. On the basis of internal evidence and this hypothesis, the most likely place for his audience was Greece, among the most prestigious schools of the Greek language.

Mark's Gospel is a complex and well-structured narrative, demonstrating a command of the Greek language, although (perhaps intentionally) written in an ungrammatical style. It has been called a story of the crucifixion of Jesus, with a long introduction. Over a third of this Gospel covers the events of the final week of Jesus' life, with over 100 verses devoted to the final twenty-four hours of Jesus' life.

Mark contains a well-defined structure, typical of an exceptional work of fiction even if actually a true account. It was written in two parts that almost mirror each other. The first part begins with John explaining the coming of Jesus, followed by the baptism and the voice of God from heaven, and ends with Jesus predicting the passion story. The second part begins with the Transfiguration of Jesus and the voice of God from heaven, and ends with his passion story, followed by the young man explaining the departure of Jesus. Everything after verse 16:8 in the modern version of Mark's Gospel is known as the "Long Ending". This was not in the earliest manuscripts and was added later to bring Mark more or less into harmony with Matthew and Luke.

There are similarly artificial structures at the lower level. The author organised the narrative of the death of Jesus in a twenty-four hour cycle, neatly divided into eight three-hour segments: three hours from 6pm for the Passover meal; three hours praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus three time rebuked the disciples, "Could you not watch one hour?"; the act of betrayal at midnight; the trial at 3:00 a.m; Peter's threefold denial of Jesus, once each hour until 6 am; It was the third hour, 9 am, "when they crucified him"; when "the sixth hour had come", darkness covered the whole earth for 3 hours, at which time Jesus died; Jesus was buried in the final period from 3 to 6 pm, before the sun went down.

Much speculation has gone into where the author of Mark's Gospel got his information about Jesus and even whether he created the gospel Jesus. Some say that Paul's Jesus was a spiritual Christ and that Mark created a human Jesus based on what he found in the epistles. Others say that the gospel Jesus was real, but that he was only a wandering preacher, whose life was elaborated by the author of Mark's Gospel. Certainly, the evidence of the 'Q' document suggests that the gospel Jesus was more likely a humble preacher than the Son of God.

Neil Godfrey suggests that Mark's Jesus was an impersonal theological construct, with a reasonable case to be made for the first gospel being written as a parable - implying that its characters and narrative are entitled to a presumption of being fictional and metaphorical only. When Mark introduced John the Baptist, he painted a vivid picture by describing his clothes and diet, but he introduced Jesus without any interest in his appearance. Mark described Jesus as having extraordinary powers and had God call him his Son, but does not appear to have believed Jesus to be God, for example: 6:5: "And he (Jesus) could there do no mighty work"; 10:18 "Why call me good. There is none good but God."

Dennis R MacDonald (The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark) argues persuasively that Mark's Gospel reflects Homeric influence, with Jesus a counterpart to Odysseus. He points to pecular names, statements or literary structures that he believes were intended as 'flags' to identify for the initiated that parts of Mark had a hidden meaning or were intended to be read symbolically.

Answer 3

Starting in about 40 AD, and continuing to about 90 AD, the eye-witnesses to the life of Jesus, including Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter and Jude, wrote the Gospels, letters and books that became The Bible's New Testament. These authors quote from 31 books of the Old Testament, and widely circulate their material so that by about 150 AD, early Christians were referring to the entire set of writings as the "New Covenant." During the 200s AD, the original writings were translated from Greek into Latin, Coptic (Egypt) and Syriac (Syria), and widely disseminated as "inspired scripture" throughout the Roman Empire (and beyond). In 397 AD, in an effort to protect the scriptures from various heresies and offshoot religious movements, the current 27 books of the New Testament were formally and finally confirmed and "canonized" in the Synod of Carthage.

The "Canon" is the actual name for our Bible. 'Canon' means the "Church's Book" and determines the life, mission, and work of the church.

The Early church had three criteria for determining what books were to be included or excluded from the Canon of the New Testament.

(1) The books must have apostolic authority-- that is, they must have been written either by the apostles themselves, who were eyewitnesses to what they wrote about, or by associates of the apostles.

(2) Second, there was the criterion of conformity to what was called the "rule of faith." In other words, was the document congruent with the basic Christian tradition that the church recognized as normative.

(3) Third, there was the criterion of whether a document had enjoyed continuous acceptance and usage by the church at large.

Answer 4

There was no single point in history when the canon was officially established. Over the first several hundred years of church history, various groupings of Gospels and letters were given prominence. The New testament canon in its present form was largely in place about AD 200, and the first exact listing of the 27 books we now know as the New Testament was included in a letter to Athanasius in AD 367. The same list was published shortly thereafter by two different church councils.

Answer 5

A:The traditional view is that the disciples Matthew and John wrote two of the gospels and that Mark and Luke wrote two further gospels, with Mark probably recording what Peter told him about Jesus. For those who hold this view, it comes as a shock to learn that we do not even know who wrote the gospels, because they were written anonymously and remained so until the second-century Church Fathers decided to attribute them to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Modern New Testament scholars say that none of the gospels could have been written by an eyewitness to the events portrayed, so that certainly rules out Matthew and John as authors.

The traditional view is also that Paul wrote the thirteen, or sometimes fourteen epistles attributed to him, and that James, John, Jude and Peter wrote other epistles attributed to them. On this view, the Book of Revelation, which is signed by someone called John, must have been written by the apostle John.

Scholars have completely rewritten the history of the New Testament over the last two hundred years, as ancient texts become available, and in the light of careful analysis of the Bible. By placing the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke in parallel and reading them synoptically ('with the same eye') in the original Greek language, they have shown that there is a literary dependency among the gospels. Analysis has established that Mark was the original New Testament gospel, based on unknown sources, and that Matthew and Luke werecopied from that original gospel. Further sayings material in both MatthewandLukeis attributed to the hypothetical 'Q' document. John's Gospel was, in turn, loosely based on Luke, with some material taken direct from Mark.

Paul did not write all thirteen epistles attributed to him, but he probably did write seven of them -Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Galatians, Philippians and 1 Thessalonians. The other epistles that carry his name were forgeries written under Paul's name, long after his death. It is also unlikely that any of the disciples wrote any of the epistles attributed to them. For example, Jude inadvertently self-identifies as a second-century work, and then 2 Petercontains almost all of Jude, somewhat reworded. It became common practice for those in the early Church wishing to influence Church doctrine to write an epistle in the name of a revered predecessor and use that epistle to demonstrate that the proposed doctrine was always the way of the Church.

Scholars say that the Book of Revelation could not have been written by the author of John's Gospel or the Johannine epistles, and is unlikely to have been written by the apostle John. For this reason, they call its author John of Patmos.