Adapted from “The Holy Scriptures: God’s Word, Written in Human Words,” an updated version of Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith, trans. Henry Zylstra (Eerdmans, 1956), chapter 7.
Why does the Bible come in two parts? And why does the New Testament have four Gospels rather than one? The answers take us to the heart of how God’s Word fits together.
Lock and Key
Just as a promise reaches its goal in its fulfilment, the Scripture of the Old Testament reaches its goal in the New. Neither is complete alone. The Old is only fully revealed in the New, and the New is already contained, in core and essence, in the Old. The relationship is like that of pedestal and statue, lock and key, shadow and body.
The names “Old” and “New Testament” first referred to the two dispensations of the covenant of grace, before and after Christ,1Jer. 31:31ff.; 2 Cor. 3:6ff.; and Heb. 8:6ff. and only later to the writings that describe them.
In Exodus 24:7 the law, which declared God’s covenant with Israel, is called the book of the covenant (compare 2 Kings 23:2). And in 2 Corinthians 3:14 Paul already speaks of a reading of ‘the old covenant’, meaning the books of the Old Testament.
Because the English word ‘testament’ means a statement about a covenant or agreement, it gradually came to be used for the collection of the biblical writings about the two dispensations of grace, before and after Christ.
Twenty-Seven Books in Half a Century
The New Testament contains five historical books (the four Gospels and Acts), twenty-one doctrinal books (the letters of the apostles) and one prophetical book (the Revelation of John). And while the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament came into being over more than a thousand years, all twenty-seven books of the New were written in the second half of the first century.
The Gospels come first. The order is based on content, not chronology: many letters are earlier, but the Gospels deal with the person and work of Christ, the foundation of everything the apostles later did.
“Gospel” originally meant a message of the glad tidings of a victory; in New Testament times it is the good news of the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus Christ (Matt. 4:23, Mark 1:1). Only later did writers such as Ignatius and Justin Martyr use it for the books themselves.
Four Portraits of One Christ
There are four Gospels in the New Testament. But they don’t contain four different gospels. There is only one gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ (Mark 1:1 and Gal. 1:6-8). That one message is presented by four people, from four viewpoints and in four forms. That’s why our Bibles title them “The Gospel according to Matthew,” “according to Mark,” and so on.
The early church compared the evangelists to the four living creatures of Revelation 4:7: Matthew the man, Mark the lion, Luke the calf and John the eagle, portraying Christ in his human, prophetic, priestly and divine nature respectively.
There is but one Gospel, exhibited in four different ways, by four different persons, from four different points of view.
Meet the Writers
Matthew, the tax collector Levi whom Christ chose as an apostle (Matt. 9:9; Mark 2:14; and Luke 5:27), originally wrote his Gospel, according to Irenaeus, in Aramaic, in Palestine, around A.D. 62. He wrote especially for Jews and Jewish Christians in Palestine, to show them that Jesus truly was the Christ and that all the Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in him (Matt. 1:1).
Mark was the son of Mary (Acts 12:12), who very probably had her own house in Jerusalem (Acts 1:13 and 2:2). He served first with Paul and later with Peter (1 Peter 5:13). Tradition says the Christians at Rome, knowing he had lived in Jerusalem and travelled with Peter, invited him to give an account of the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Mark 1:1). He presumably did so in Rome around 64–67.
Luke, “the beloved physician,” as Paul calls him (Col. 4:14), may have come from Antioch and belonged to the church there as early as the year 40. He travelled and worked with Paul and stayed loyal to him to the end (2 Tim. 4:11). He wrote of Christ’s life and work (his Gospel) and of the gospel’s first spread through Palestine, Asia Minor, Greece and Rome (Acts), writing Acts for Theophilus, a person of some standing.
These first three Gospels are closely related, based on the tradition about Jesus’ teaching and life that lived on among the first disciples. The fourth is different in kind.
John, the disciple Jesus loved, stayed in Jerusalem after the ascension and, with James and Peter, was one of the three pillars of the church (Gal. 2:9). Later he left Jerusalem and towards the end of his life came to Ephesus as Paul’s successor. Under the emperor Domitian he was banished to Patmos in 95–96, and he died in the year 100 as a martyr [note: a dominant tradition has John dying naturally at Ephesus]. John wasn’t a church planter. He gave his energy to preserving existing churches through a pure knowledge of the truth.
By then the struggle over Israel, the law and circumcision was over, and the church was moving deeper into the Graeco-Roman world, where it met other spiritual currents, especially Gnosticism. Gnosticism saw created matter as inherently inferior, flawed, and corrupt, and unable to convey truth. Jesus’ humanity was thus downplayed as mere appearance, like a ghost, which interacted with our minds to deliver secret spiritual knowledge (gnosis). So, John’s aim was to lead the church safely past the anti-Christian tendency to deny the incarnation of the Word (1 John 2:22 and 4:3). In his writings, all from the years 80 to 95, he draws the full picture of Christ as the Word, the real inner truth of God’s personal being, made flesh, truly human as we are, yet without sin. John stresses the beginning and continuity of Jesus true humanity in his Gospel, as Jesus was on earth; in his letters, as Jesus still is in the church; and in Revelation, as Jesus will be in the future.
Letters With a Pastor’s Heart
All these writings, like the letters of Paul and Peter, James and Jude, were prompted under the Spirit’s guidance by real historical occasions. After Jesus’ ascension and the persecution of the Jerusalem church, the apostles didn’t just preach; they stayed connected with the churches they founded. They received reports on them and carried the care of all the churches on their hearts (2 Cor. 11:28). So they visited when they could, and when they couldn’t, they wrote letters to instruct, comfort, warn and encourage, leading the churches deeper into saving truth.
This writing was an organic part of their apostolic work and so foundational for the church. Like the books of the prophets, the Gospels and letters are “occasional” writings. Yet they reach far beyond the local concerns of their day and speak to the church of every age.
As Augustine put it, the whole of Scripture, though historically formed, is a letter sent by God from heaven to his church on earth. Far from threatening its divine character, historical study of how these books came to be, apart from its abuse, shows us the marvellous ways God brought his work of art into being.
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- 1Jer. 31:31ff.; 2 Cor. 3:6ff.; and Heb. 8:6ff. ↩︎