What Is the Gospel?

The Gospel of Mark begins with a title, not a sentence. “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” There is no verb. It is a declaration, a heading for everything that follows, and it lays the cards right on the table: this is what we are talking about. Before diving into what Mark wrote, it is worth pausing on that single word — gospel — and asking what the word “gospel” means, where it came from, and why it matters.

A Word Worth Understanding

The Greek word behind “gospel” belongs to a whole family of related terms: euangelion, euangelizesthai. The prefix eu means good; angelion comes from the same root as angelos, from which we get “angel.” An angel is a messenger. So, to start with, from the Greek etymology, “gospel” is “good message” or “good news. “The English word “gospel” traces back through Anglo-Saxon: god spel, a good word, a good story. Two thousand years and two languages later, the meaning has not changed.

In the ancient pagan world, the term carried real emotional weight. A general received word that he had been elected consul for the fifth time: good news. A child was born, a wedding announced, a military victory won: good news. The word attached itself naturally to moments of joy and relief. By the imperial age, it had become part of the ceremonial vocabulary surrounding Roman emperors, whose birthdays, coming-of-age celebrations, and accessions to power were proclaimed as evangels, festival occasions inscribed on pillars and recorded in papyri. But over time, especially in the fog of war, the word grew unreliable. False reports of victory were circulated to prop up tired soldiers. Good news became something people heard with a raised eyebrow, an ironic shrug. The term lost its footing. “What sort of ‘good news’ do you mean?”, the cynic would wonder.

Into that world stepped the apostles with a very different announcement, one they were convinced could bear the full weight of the word.

The Definition

The clearest summary of what the Christian gospel contains comes from Paul, writing to the church at Corinth. He puts it plainly: Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. (1 Cor 15.1-4) Three facts, a tight package. Death. Burial. Resurrection. That is the bare-bones gospel, kata Paulos, according to Paul.

A complementary statement appears at the opening of Romans, where Paul describes the gospel God promised beforehand through the prophets in the Holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, born a descendant of David, declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead. (Rm 1.1-4) The theme is the same: Jesus came, Jesus died, Jesus was raised. The details fill in around that skeleton, but the skeleton itself is unmistakable in every apostolic proclamation.

A useful definition from a Bible dictionary captures it well: the gospel is the good news that God in Jesus Christ has fulfilled his promises to Israel, and that a way of salvation has been opened to all.

How It Came Into the World

The gospel came into the world through preaching. That is not a small point. John the Baptist appeared preaching a baptism of repentance. Jesus himself came into Galilee preaching the gospel of God. The church was born in a sermon, Peter’s address on Pentecost, which drew thousands into the movement in a single day and alarmed the religious establishment enough that they arrested him and the other apostles, ordering them to stop talking about Jesus entirely. Famously, Peter replied, “”Whether it is right in the sight of God to give heed to you rather than to God, you be the judge; for we cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.” (Ac 4.19-20)

Persecution scattered the early believers out of Jerusalem and into Judea, Samaria, and up the coast of Palestine. When you try to suppress a movement like the Hydra of Greek myth, you find that cutting off one head produces more. Tertullian observed it plainly centuries later: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Saul of Tarsus, the most ferocious of the persecutors, went down the road to Damascus to crush the movement and came back a convert, standing in the Jerusalem synagogues arguing for the very faith he had been trying to destroy. The men who had cheered Saul’s work could scarcely believe it.

From there the gospel spread in all directions. Paul carried it through what is now Turkey, Greece, and ultimately to Rome, with some traditions placing him as far as Spain. Peter and the other apostles moved through the eastern regions. The Ethiopian official who encountered Philip in Acts 8 took the message south into Africa. The story runs in every direction at once.

How It Was Passed On

The first century was largely an oral culture. Books existed, but they were rare and expensive. A local congregation wanting its own complete copy of the entire Bible would have had to spend the equivalent of a full year of their pastor’s salary to have it hand-copied. Under those conditions, the apostles developed what might be called a “Jesus presentation,” a set of stories told repeatedly, with the same details, in a memorized form that could be passed from person to person reliably.

You want to know about Jesus? Let me tell you about the day he fed five thousand people on a hillside by the Sea of Galilee. Or the time he met a man covered in leprosy and touched him and made him well. Or the ten lepers, with only one coming back to give thanks, a Samaritan of all people. The stories traveled orally, consistently, faithfully.

That oral tradition explains the shape of the written Gospels. When Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are placed side by side, they share large amounts of material, including the feeding of the five thousand, which appears in all four. The variations between them are not contradictions. Each preacher emphasized different details depending on his audience and purpose. One might highlight what another omits. But all four are telling the same story about the same man.

Scholars from the second and third centuries, the Church Fathers, consistently testified that the Gospel of Mark particularly preserves the preaching of Peter. Mark shaped and edited that material, and the work is rightly called his. But the source is Peter’s eyewitness account. The tradition is strong and the scholarship behind it is solid.

On the question of reliability more broadly: there were other so-called gospels, second-century documents that circulated in various places. The Gospel of Thomas, for one, presents itself as the secret sayings of Jesus. But the ministry of Jesus was not secret. It was public. The gospel is a public gospel, a message for everyone. None of those later texts was ever accepted by the church, and for good reason. The four Gospels in the New Testament were all written in the first century, all within the living memory of the apostolic circle. They were the foundation on which the church was built.

Ongoing scholarly research into the development of the New Testament, how manuscripts were copied, how the church came to recognize which books were authoritative, and how translation has worked across centuries, only deepens the case for confidence. Those who study these questions most carefully tend to conclude that what we have is what was intended. The attacks on the biblical text do not survive contact with the evidence.

What the Gospel Requires

The gospel carries a summary definition, but its full content runs to the length of four books. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each fill out the details that Paul compresses into a sentence or two. They record what Jesus did, what he said, the parables, the miracles, the confrontations, the final week in Jerusalem, the cross, the empty tomb. Every one of those books is a sufficient demonstration that Jesus was the promised Messiah, the Savior the prophets had pointed toward for centuries, whose arrival was anticipated by both Jews and Gentiles at the time of his appearance.

This is the message that drives Christian preaching. Paul described the gospel as a sacred trust, a divine compulsion. Men who are called into ministry cannot stop preaching any more than they can stop breathing. Remove them from one pulpit and they will gather people wherever they land. The impulse is not ambition but necessity. The gospel works in them and through them.

What the gospel requires from its hearers is belief, not merely intellectual agreement that Jesus existed and was crucified and rose again, but a personal reckoning with sin and a turning to Christ as the only one who can deal with it. Every person carries a moral debt. We can seek forgiveness from those we have wronged, and that matters. But there is another party we have offended, and he will hold us to account. That other party is God. Have you settled accounts with him?

The gospel says that God sent his Son to bear that penalty in our place, and that the resurrection is his demonstration of the power to forgive. The righteousness of Jesus can be credited to the account of anyone who relies on him. That is the good news.

It is not a private message or an ethnic one. It is universal. Even you, regardless of your history, can be saved from sin and live with God in joy and gladness forever. That is what the gospel means. That is what this one word contains.

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

---

Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.

This article reproduces a sermon preached on May 17, 2026, which you can listen to here. We used Claude.AI to turn the transcript into the article. Pastor Johnson has reviewed and approved the final form of this article.

---

Photo for this post created with Adobe Express.