Here’s Jimmy! 3

J.D.G. (Jimmy) Dunn’s newest book, Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels, is nothing short of an introduction to his seminal theories and proposals, and we looked at one of those proposals Monday and a second one Friday and now today we’ll look at a third. Chp 3 in this book, called “The Birth of a New Genre: Mark and the Synoptic Gospels,” traces how the word “gospel” morphed into a genre – — that is how it morphed from “good news” into a kind of book, a Gospel (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John).

Would you say The Gospel of Mark is the “gospel” itself? Which book in the NT best explains the gospel itself?

Jimmy opens by observing a common tendency today to connect “gospel” to that word in the Roman empire, namely, for declarations of good news about Caesar. Jimmy doesn’t deny this connection, but he thinks the term was first used among early Christians by Paul and that Paul got it not from Roman declarations but from Isaiah 52:7 and 61:1. I quote them:

⁷ How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace,
who bring good tidings,
who proclaim salvation,
who say to Zion,
“Your God reigns!”

¹ The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners…

These passages were being discussed among Jews of the 1st Century and it is likely that Paul got his term from Isaiah. Then Jimmy briefly mentions what gospel means and then draws us into what is for me a very significant topic.

When, he asks, did the Jesus tradition (stuff about Jesus, his life and his teachings) become “gospel”?

He argues that already with Paul the Jesus tradition is beginning to be part of Paul’s gospeling. In the oral form, then, gospel and Jesus tradition were connected.

But it was Mark’s Gospel that took the decisive step. Mark uses the term at 1:15; 8:35; 10:29, and then most notably at 1:1 … and here we see both Jesus tradition and the whole account (the whole book of Mark) are now called gospel. Jimmy then delves into characteristics of the Gospel of Mark, Matthew and Luke … and observes that Matthew and Luke took over the gospel shape of Mark, inserted Q (which was not a gospel but a source for Jesus’ teachings).