Gospel
2. A record of a great person’s life, teachings, and works. Specifically, that of Jesus. (More specifically, one of the four books about Jesus, found in the New Testament.)
3. Something meant to share good news, such as a book, tract, or song.
In the New Testament we find four gospels, records of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Though the authors’ names aren’t indicated in these books, tradition has it they were written by two of Jesus’s Twelve, Matthew and John; and two members of Paul’s ministry team, Mark and Luke.
Though gospels have a lot in common with biographies, they’re not biographies. They’re not at all about the life of Jesus. The authors’ only interest was in presenting stories which would prove to their readers that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel.
The gospel genre.
There’s a debate among bible scholars as to whether a gospel is a certain type of Greco-Roman literature.
Y’see, the ancients liked to write books about the great heroes of their culture, like Alexander the Great or Augustus Caesar. These wouldn’t be biographies either. They’d mainly contain stories about their virtues: Their strong moral character, their great exploits or victories, and sometimes their heroic deaths. They were written to describe why these people were so great. Sometimes as a publicity stunt: If an invading general had one of these books about him, he might circulate it among the people he intended to conquer, figuring they’d be a little less likely to fight him, or even welcome him as their conqueror.
These heroic books are very, very slanted in favor of the person they were about. Unlike a proper biography, which tells you about both the good and bad in their subject, they were only about the good. If Augustus Caesar sinned, the author would either come up with a good excuse for it, or just leave out the sin altogether. Unlike a proper biography, which sometimes offers criticism of the person they cover, heroic books never criticized their subjects: They only criticized his critics, just as all the biblical gospels harshly condemn Jesus’s opponents. (So much so, Christians sometimes get the wrong idea, and assume all Pharisees were hypocrites, or all Jews were out to kill Jesus.)
So, some scholars figure these Greco-Roman heroic books are also gospels. Therefore, the gospels we have in the bible aren’t some new type of literature which Christians invented. They’re an old type of literature, which Christians repurposed to tell everyone about Jesus.
The rest of the scholars figure the gospel wasn’t a type of Greco-Roman literature. Instead, those virtue-focused, hero-worship biographies were simply biased biographies. Just like biographies today which are written for children, which only mention all the great things their subjects do, and leave out all the negative or embarrassing details. Heavily slanted, hero-worshiping hagiographies. ’Cause the gospels in the bible are quite a bit different from the Greco-Roman heroic books.
The main difference is the biblical gospels actually don’t talk about Jesus’s virtues. Yeah, there are hints, but the gospels mainly focus on Jesus’s teachings and miracles. For his virtues, we actually find out about them from the apostles’ letters. Its in there we discover Jesus didn’t sin, had a humble and submissive and self-sacrificing attitude, demonstrated fruit of the Spirit, and walked in the Light as our example. The gospels aren’t about why Jesus is good (though he is), but why Jesus is Messiah.
And, while Greco-Roman books were written for anyone and everyone, it’s clear the Christian gospels were written mainly for Christians, to inform us what our Lord taught, and tell the story of his death and resurrection.
My view is the Greco-Roman books are gospels. But as I said, the Christians repurposed the genre to talk about the unique greatness of Jesus.
Other gospels.
Not long after the New Testament gospels were written, various people tried their hand at creating other “gospels” of Christ Jesus. But properly, they’re not gospels. They’re called gospels because they’re about Jesus. People sorta got into the bad habit of calling any book about Jesus’s life and teachings a “gospel.” We tend to call these gospels apocryphal gospels, because we’re quite sure their stories about Jesus’s life never actually happened; or their “sayings of Jesus” are odd mixtures of Jesus’s actual teachings, and stuff he never taught. (Or stuff the gnostics claimed he taught.)
If you’re a fan of Historical Jesus, and are looking for ancient documents which can provide you some “new information” on him outside the bible, you can always quote the apocryphal gospels. But in doing so, you’ve demonstrated you don’t really care about where your sources come from, so long that they grant you a novel alternative history of Jesus, and permit you to escape the real Jesus. That’s why the apocryphal gospels are always so popular with both notoriety-seeking scholars and the mass media.
If you ever read them (and there are a bunch of them in the New Testament Apocrypha, included in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 8) you’ll quickly see why Christians didn’t bother to include them in the bible. They’re just silly.
But every once in a while, when someone refers to the Gospel of Thomas, or the Gospel of Judas, or the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, that’s the sort of gospel they’re referring to: Some other ancient document, supposedly written by one of Jesus’s followers, which claims to teach us some stuff about Jesus we never knew before. (In other words, gnostic stuff.) But we have no evidence they were written in the first century, and they aren’t consistent with the rest of the New Testament, nor with anything the early Christians taught.
Most importantly, they’re not consistent with logic: The “secret teachings of Jesus” tend to be nonsense gobbledygook. I’m not talking about parables, which might be difficult to interpret, but aren’t hard to follow. I’m talking about weirdness, like the authors were on mushrooms or something. (For all we know, they were.) And their stories about Jesus’s childhood often make him sound like a brat, which might suit their notions about how a boy-God had a right to behave, but has none of the compassion nor fruit of the Spirit which we do see in Jesus.
Hence they’re not in the bible, and that’s best.