Before we open the Gospel of Luke, there's a question worth answering: what exactly is a gospel? Most of us have read these four books without ever stopping to ask what kind of writing they are, and that one gap changes everything about how we read them. Gospel is a genre. These are ancient biographies of Jesus, written by four different men to four different audiences, and they were never meant to be read the way we read a modern news report. This episode covers why there are four, why they don't always line up, why we can trust them, and how to actually read them well. Join me on an immersive Bible Study Experience. Learn more at BibleStudyLive.org Have a question about the series? Leave me a voicemail: SpeakPipe SEEDS: Download the free SEEDS app and take one small step today. Plant your first seed and see what God can grow. SEEDS What does the word gospel actually mean? Gospel is a genre, and genre simply means the kind of writing a work is. The Bible contains poetry, letters, prophecy, law, and historical narrative, and each one asks to be read differently. The four gospels sit together at the front of the New Testament, and they are essentially biographies of the life of Jesus. Knowing that changes your expectations before you read a single verse. Why are there four gospels instead of one? Think about walking into a library and looking for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. A search on Amazon turns up more than ten thousand books about him. Some cover his presidency, some his politics, some his character, some only his childhood, some his views on the Bible, some his war years. Every one of those historians chose what to emphasize. Ancient historians worked the same way. They wrote with clear moral, political, and theological purposes, and readers were expected to draw lessons from the work. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each had a lens, and a different audience in mind. Can we trust the gospels? Yes, and the reasons are worth knowing. These books were written while eyewitnesses were still alive and still holding positions of authority in the church, which means the oral tradition could be checked by people who had been there. They were written within the first two generations, while the teachings of Jesus were still fresh. And the culture itself was built for careful preservation. Students learned their teachers' sayings rigorously, taking notes and memorizing, with some repeating the previous day's lecture before getting out of bed. The disciples of Jesus treated His words that way, and many of them became the teachers passing those words on. Why don't the gospels always match up? This is where a lot of readers get stuck, and it usually comes from applying modern expectations to ancient writing. Three things help. First, no one in that culture expected teachings to appear in chronological sequence. Teaching was situational, the way a grandmother's saying comes back to you in the moment it fits rather than in the order she said it. Second, word-for-word repetition was not the standard. Most people could not read, so teaching passed down orally, and paraphrasing was a normal and accepted practice. On top of that, Jesus often spoke Aramaic while the gospels were written in Greek, so His words were being translated. Third, ancient biographers had genuine freedom to arrange their material. When critics point to an event appearing earlier in Matthew and later in Luke, they are holding the text to a standard nobody in the first century used. The heart of the message is what carries. Why only these four, and not the other gospels people mention? By the time Luke wrote, other accounts of Jesus were already circulating, and Luke tells us so. Mark was already in use, and many scholars believe Matthew, Luke, and possibly Mark drew on a common written source. The four that the church preserved were kept for reliability, access to eyewitnesses, and accuracy. The apocryphal gospels came much later and read more like novels, drawing from oral tradition that had drifted over generations. The Gnostic collections attributed sayings to Jesus, but the earliest of them date to roughly 120 years after His public ministry, far too late to verify. The early church knew what it was doing. What is the best way to read a gospel? Read one all the way through before moving to another. There is a method called a harmony of the gospels that weaves all four together story by story, and it has its place, but it is hard to follow and it is not how these books were meant to be read. Each gospel was written separately, to different readers, with its own flow of thought. Reading one at a time lets you catch what makes that writer distinct. Luke was a doctor, so when you stay inside his gospel you start noticing what he noticed: the women, the healings, the people on the margins. Those details are easy to miss when you are jumping between books. What should I be looking for as I read? A few things to carry into the series. Ancient biographies had morals to their stories, setting characters up as positive or negative examples, so ask what the story is showing you about the character and nature of God. Learn to tell the difference between what Scripture describes and what it prescribes, because someone's story appearing in the Bible does not mean we are meant to copy them. And remember this one: Scripture was written for us, but it was not originally written to us. It went first to an ancient audience in a particular culture. Most of them heard it read aloud rather than reading it themselves, which is why it helps to think of them as an audience instead of readers. Before we can understand how the teachings of Jesus apply to our lives, we have to understand what they meant to the people who heard them first. Featured quote "Scripture was written for us, but it was not originally written to us. It was written to an original audience that lived a long time ago." Terms explained in this episode Genre, synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap significantly, while John is distinct), harmony of the gospels, descriptive versus prescriptive, apocryphal and Gnostic gospels. Timestamps (approximate) 00:00 What is a gospel, and why start here 01:00 Gospel as a genre, and what that changes 02:00 Why the gospels are not chronological 03:20 The Abraham Lincoln analogy: ten thousand biographies, ten thousand angles 04:50 Who were these writers, and why trust them 06:40 How sayings were preserved in an oral culture 09:00 Why sequence was never the point 11:00 Word for word, Aramaic, and Greek 15:00 The freedom ancient biographers had with their material 17:30 Why only four gospels survived 19:50 How to read a gospel, and why not to jump around 21:20 Descriptive versus prescriptive 22:30 Reading versus hearing, and the original audience 25:00 Synoptic gospels explained 26:20 We learn by teaching Frequently asked questions What does the word gospel mean? It refers both to the good news about Jesus and to a genre of ancient writing. In this episode we're focused on the genre, meaning the kind of literature Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John belong to. What are the synoptic gospels? Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which overlap heavily in content and often tell the same events. John stands apart with a different structure and emphasis. Should I read the gospels in chronological order? Not for this study. We'll read Luke straight through so we can follow his particular flow of thought and notice the details that are uniquely his. When does the Luke study begin? Right after this episode. We'll start with an introduction to who Luke was and why his account matters, then move through the text at a spirit-led pace, with Luke and Acts studied together as one work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
