The Four Gospels Research Paper

The Gospels portion of the Bible is made up of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The time period in which these four books were written is speculated to be sometime between AD 40 and AD 100 according to the authors of Encountering the New Testament. The main reason these books were written was to spread the gospel. The book states that the essence of the gospel is “God’s offer of salvation; the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; and the call to faith in light of coming judgement”. Each of the four books records Jesus’ life on earth from different perspectives of four apostles. These books were written down for many reasons. One was so that the spreading of the gospel could be accelerated. A book can be sent to multiple locations to be read, studied, and taught; where as one person has to go from place to place, taking their time, to teach the gospel to people. Another reason was so that once the apostles who wrote the books had passed away, believers everywhere could still get the same experience without any of the story being changed. Along with the two previous reasons, believers were looking to the future and because they did not know how long it would be until Jesus came back to the earth, they wanted to have it recorded and remember from the beginning right up to the very end.
The authors of Encountering the New Testament think that the main reason for the Gospels being written was so new converts could have material in their hands to study and use as instructions of how to