The subject of this chapter is the origin and early Christian use of the noun ‘gospel’, the verb ‘to proclaim good news’ (or, ‘to gospel’), and a set of near-synonyms. Given its importance in earliest Christianity and for Christian theology more generally, discussion of this topic has not been as extensive as one might have expected. On several key points opinion has been keenly divided and no consensus has emerged. I shall revisit some of the disputed issues and hope to advance discussion by offering several fresh considerations. In particular, I shall focus on the function of the word group in the religious and social setting of the earliest Christian communities.

‘GOSPEL’ IN CURRENT USAGE

In the sixteenth century the term ‘gospel’ featured frequently in the language repertoire of Erasmus and the Reformers. Erasmus often referred to ‘the gospel philosophy’. In his ‘Prologue to the New Testament’ (1525) the translator William Tyndale included an astute summary of ‘gospel’:

In that tumultuous century the term ‘the gospel’ often functioned as a shorthand way of referring to the Reformers and their distinctive views. For example, in 1547 John Hooper noted in a letter that, if the emperor (Charles V) should be defeated in war, King Henry VIII would adopt ‘the gospel of Christ’.

The relationship of Jesus to first-century Judaism continues to be discussed vigorously. This continuing debate was sparked off initially by the publi-cation of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's Wolfenbüttel Fragments between 1774 and 1778. In deliberately provocative comments, Reimarus insisted that Jesus did not intend to abolish the Jewish religion and to introduce a new one in its place. The intention of Jesus, Reimarus claimed, was reversed completely after his death by both the actions and the teaching of the apostles. With their abandonment of the law, ‘Judaism was laid in its grave.’

In an equally influential publication two generations later, David Friedrich Strauss noted that a radical account of the origins of Christianity along these lines had been propounded by ‘the enemies of Christianity in its ecclesiastical form’, and that it had been done ‘most concisely of all in the Wolfenbüttel Fragments’, i.e. by Reimarus. Although Strauss was sympathetic to many of Reimarus's claims, he knew that any presentation of Jesus as a faithful Jew was built on a one-sided reading of the evidence. Strauss emphasized that there was clear strong evidence within the gospels to support the opposite viewpoint: Jesus was at odds with the religious leaders of his day.

Reimarus and Strauss both still have plenty of supporters, and many mediating positions are defended. After one hundred and fifty years of discussion, the relationship of Jesus to Judaism remains a contentious issue, as a cluster of influential book titles confirms: Jesus the Jew; Jesus and Judaism; Jesus and the Transformation of Judaism; Jesus within Judaism.

The transition from the roll format to the codex-book format in the early centuries of the Christian era was at least as revolutionary as its two later counterparts. Who doubts the importance of Johannes Gutenberg's mid-fifteenth-century invention of printing by using movable type? Or the late twentieth-century emergence of a CD-ROM only 12 cm in diameter yet able to hold a very large book in digital form?

In this chapter I shall refer to new evidence and try to account for early Christian ‘addiction’ to the codex along partly fresh lines. But I cannot hope to solve all the problems, for there are still too many gaps in our knowledge. I shall argue that attention to the origin of the codex forces us to reconsider several important issues. Even before Paul wrote his first ‘canonical’ letter c. ad 50, followers of Jesus were accustomed to use the predecessors of the codex-book format, various kinds of ‘notebooks’. They used them for Scriptural excerpts and testimonies, for drafts and copies of letters, and probably also for collections of traditions of both the actions and the teaching of Jesus.

I owe the phrase ‘addiction to the codex’ to Sir Frederic G. Kenyon. His publication in 1933–7 of the Chester Beatty Biblical papyri sparked off interest in the emergence of the codex which continues to this day, for all twelve Chester Beatty manuscripts are in the codex format.

There are some baffling phrases hidden in early Christian writings which are worth careful examination. The phrase ‘the law of Christ’ is one such. Although it is used only once in the New Testament (Gal. 6.2), it teases exegetes, it raises central questions of theological method, and it still forces us to ask awkward questions. Was this phrase part of Paul's Gospel? And should it be part of Christian proclamation today?

In his influential commentary, H. D. Betz insists that Gal. 6.2, and indeed all the ethical directives in Gal. 5.13–6.10, are not directly derived from the Gospel that Paul preached. Richard Hays has argued, surely correctly, that this disjunction of kerygma from conduct arises from an over-emphasis on individualistic soteriological elements at the expense of the corporate dimension in Paul's theological thought. Paul's encouragement to the Galatian Christians to ‘fulfil the law of Christ’ (Gal. 6.2) was surely part of the Gospel message he wished to convey to the Galatian churches and no mere ethical addendum.

But that leaves us with a further set of questions. Why did Paul not make good theological capital out of the phrase in his other letters? Did the apostle decide that the phrase was too ambiguous or too prone to misunderstanding to merit further use? If so, should we follow his lead and drop it from contemporary theological reflection and from liturgies? Is this a phrase which has ‘punched above its weight’ for far too long?

The main lines of inquiry pursued in this book are nearly all foreshadowed in the lengthy, wide-ranging Chapter 2, ‘Jesus and Gospel’. Here I explore the origin and the varied meanings of the ‘gospel’ word group all the way from its use by Jesus to refer to his own proclamation to its use as the title of a ‘book’ containing an account of the words and deeds of Jesus.

Although the term ‘gospel’ is as prominent in Christian vocabulary today as it ever has been, there have been very few detailed studies in English of the word group. It is difficult to account for the silence. Part of the answer may lie in the onslaught James Barr launched in 1961 against the then fashionable word studies. Only a fool would try to turn the clock back and ignore Barr's strictures. But I am not alone in thinking that it is now time to reconsider some of the most important theological terms developed by the earliest followers of Jesus. Of course, full attention must be given both to the whole semantic field of which a given word group is part and to the varied social and religious contexts in which it is used. I shall argue that, when that is done, we find that, in the decade or so immediately after Easter, followers of Jesus developed language patterns which differed sharply from ‘street’ usage in both the Jewish and the Graeco-Roman worlds.

In recent decades the question, ‘What are the gospels?’ has been discussed from three perspectives. I shall refer to two briefly, before concentrating on the third.

In discussion of this question, pride of place must always go the literary genre of the gospels. What kind of writings are we dealing with? Histories, religious novels, biographies, early Christian sermons in narrative dress, or catechetical handbooks? The very first step in the interpretation of any writing, whether ancient or modern, is to establish its literary genre. If we make a mistake about the literary genre of the gospels, interpretation will be skewed or even misguided. A decision about the genre of a work and the discovery of its meaning are inextricably inter-related; different types of text require different types of interpretation.

In this chapter I do not propose to consider yet again whether or not the gospels are biographies. I have had my say on that topic more than once. Following intensive recent discussion, broad agreement has been reached. The gospels are now widely considered to be a sub-set of the broad ancient literary genre of βίοι, biographies. Even if the evangelists were largely ignorant of the tradition of Greek and Roman βίοι, that is how the gospels were received and listened to in the first decades after their composition.

The question, ‘What are the gospels?’ has recently been given an unexpected answer: they were intended to be writings for all Christians.

For a summary of the principles and practice of Manichaean religious life see Introduction (pp. 21–5). The following extracts again give emphasis to Manichaean writings in Coptic that are not widely known, supplemented by some classic descriptions by Augustine.

The essential precepts of the elect and the catechumens

On the life of Mani see Introduction (pp. 3–8). The following excerpts are primarily taken from the Greek Cologne Mani-Codex and Coptic sources from Medinet Madi, supplemented by texts in Arabic and Middle Iranian (especially Parthian) which are clearly derived from Manichaean sources ultimately belonging to the same original literary (Syriac?) tradition.

CHILDHOOD, YOUTH AND CALLING

Mani's parentage, birth, childhood and adolescence

Muḥammad bin Isḥaq said: 'Mānī bin Fatiq Bābak bin Abī Barzām was of the Ḥaskāniyya. His mother's name was Mays, but she was also called Awtāẖīm or Marmaryam of the Ašġāniyya. It was said that Mānī was the Bishop (usquf) of Qunnī and of the kinsmen of (328) the Ḥūḥī, the Bādarāyā and the Baksāyā nearby. He had a deformed foot. It was said that his father was originally from Hamadān and had moved to Babylon, settling in al-Madā’in in the place called Ṭīsfūn (Ctesiphon) which had a temple (a house of idols).

One of the reasons why Manichaeism is sometimes termed the first ‘religion’, in the modern sense, is that it was deliberately constructed; and a vital element in the foundation for this were the revealed scriptures written down by Mani himself. Indeed, Mani repeats that this is one of the advantages of his church, that its apostle (i.e. himself) has written down the teachings, and thus it will endure and not be led astray (see e.g. 91, below). In contrast, previous apostles had not written down their teachings, and it had been left to their disciples to put down what they remembered. This important theme enabled Mani to hold fast to the principle of a line of true apostles, in which he placed himself; while at the same time explaining the corruption of previous churches, and also the reason why his own would stand fast to the end. And this provided a suitable key for polemic against other religions, and for Manichaean exegesis of their scriptures as containing both truth and falsity.

Nevertheless, just as we should be cautious in our use of the term ‘religion’, and not impose anachronistic conceptions derived from the modern discipline of the history of religions; so, we also need to consider what exactly Mani and his followers meant by the concepts of scripture and canon.

The genesis of this book was in the late 1980s when Samuel Lieu first proposed the concept for the volume and approached Iain Gardner to collaborate, especially with translations of the extensive Coptic corpus. Gardner began to prepare portions of the Kephalaia codex, but in fact that developed into an entirely separate volume which is only partly represented here. Over a number of years the authors collected texts and made translations whilst they were occupied with other projects (often these contributed entirely new or previously unavailable pieces). Then, in 2000, we finally had the opportunity to put together the translations and introductions that we had gathered for this volume. We are very grateful to our contributors, some of whom had to complete their translations to meet stringent deadlines. We are grateful too to the British Academy, the Australian Research Council, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust and Warwick and Macquarie Universities for grants over a number of years for research on Manichaean texts discovered in Egypt and in Central Asia. To Dr Malcolm Choat we owe a warm word of thanks for helping in the task of indexing and final checking of the typescript. We would also like to thank Dr Michael Sharp at Cambridge University Press for his personal interest in the project and Professor Aloïs van Tongerloo and his research assistants at Catholic University of Leuven, Mr Dieter Taillieu and Kristof D'hulster for checking the translations from the Fihrist of Ibn an-Nadīm.