I am well aware that the damning sign of an amateur scribe is to start off a treatise with a trite dictionary definition, but when thinking about what gospel means to me, I’m at a loss to think of a better one.
The first definition listed is tripartite: the teaching or revelation of Christ; a thing that is absolutely true (the gospel truth); and a set of principles or beliefs. One can’t argue with the first, at least as we have been handed down the interpretations of his words and acts in the first four books of the New Testament, an official biblical inclusion not decided by Constantine’s Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, come to learn, but later at the North African Synod of Hippo in 393 AD, and reaffirmed at the Council of Carthage in 397 AD.
As far as “a thing that is absolutely true,” being that is widely accepted the four books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not personally composed by the apostles—Luke the tax collector the only one who possibly had an understanding of Greek—but written anonymously decades later, this is where the question of faith first arises.
Do I think that these books represent the best record of Christ’s teachings that we have? That is absolutely the case so far. Like any witness testimony passed down by mouth for 40–90 years since the event, did we lose some details and gain some embellishments along the way? That is certainly possible, although these were pretty life-changing events and sure to stick in the mind.
I added a caveat of “so far” as the discovery off the Nag Hammadi Library in 1946 and the Dead Sea Scrolls a year later certainly blew the minds of scholars of all sorts at the time. Might we be lucky enough to uncover a yet buried record of the time of Christ? Obviously, stranger things have happened.
I do find it interesting that these records revealed themselves at precisely the time that the world needed a little mystery. The horrors of the Second World War certainly left many spiritually bereft, and for good reason. As I understand it, writers and intellectuals like Camus, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir responded to a world that lost its moral lodestar by placing the onus on the individual to decide their fate. It is almost as if the manuscripts jumped up out of the desert at the right moment saying, “Maybe we can help!”
Certainly, the claim of the gospels being “a set of principles or beliefs,” cannot be disputed, however one might feel about it. One could easily argue that the writings found in the Judean Desert and Upper Egypt were also gospels in the same sense, allowing for the word to be used in a wider meaning. I think that any teachings, if profound and able to spur contemplation of one’s spiritual nature can only be a positive addition to the journey.
Román Leão 
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