What is the origin of the word Gospel?

Answer 1

All the New Testament gospels were originally anonymous and were only attributed to the apostles whose names they now bear later in the second century. The first gospel was the one now known as Mark's Gospel.

Scholars can demonstrate that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were largely based on Mark's Gospel, even having exactly the same words in the Greek language. Matthew and Luke also shared a sayings source, now known as the hypothetical 'Q' document. Scholars also say that John's Gospel is loosely based on Luke's Gospel, with some material taken direct from Mark. So the synoptic gospel that was the starting point for the other gospels is Mark's Gospel.

John's Gospel is now recognised as having been inspired by Luke's Gospel, with some material taken direct from Mark. Parables were omitted, as was other material not relevant to John's theology. Many events were elaborated almost out of recognition, or their sequence changed. For example, Luke mentions Mary and Martha as friends of Jesus, but deals with Lazarus separately in a parable about death and resurrection. John treats Lazarus as a real person, brother of Mary and Martha, and really has Jesus resurrect him. The 'cleansing of the Temple' is moved from the very end of Jesus' liife to the beginning. Luke has the risen Jesus meet all eleven remaining disciples at a meal in the upper room, but John splits this into two separate meetings in order to introduce the episode of 'doubting Thomas'. Luke had a minor episode before the death of Jesus, in which he tells the fishermen to cast their nets on the other side, and they caught a huge load of fish; Johntransfers this story to the period after the resurrection.

It is uncertain where the author of Mark's Gospel obtained his source material. Raymond E. Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament) simply says that Mark seems to depend on traditions (and perhaps already shaped sources) received in Greek.

Some say that there was originally a proto-Christian faith that believed in a purely spiritual Jesus, but that events in the Palestine and the Roman Empire made it necessary to present a more readily understood version of their beliefs. It is possible that Mark's Gospel could have been influenced by the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings gospel, but that is at best a minority opinion among scholars who continue to debate whether Thomas was even written during the first century.

Another view is that Mark's Gospel was inspired by the letters of Paul, written some twenty years earlier. This view is based on the parallels that exist between the epistles and Mark, but which could not have resulted from Paul having actually known about Jesus. In some cases, Paul even uses, as his own words, sayings later attributed to Jesus.

Dennis R. MacDonald has studied Mark's Gospel and found surprising parallels between this account and the Homeric epics of The Iliad and The Odyssey, which he documents and analyses in The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark. He says that first century writers often developed new stories as a mimesis of the Homeric epics, and that many of the events in Mark could be explained as a similar rewriting of the epics.

Answer 2

This Middle English word... from Old English gōdspel (ultimately translation of Greek euangelion) : gōd, good + spel, news... means good news.

Based on information from Answers.com