These books are called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they were traditionally thought to have been written by Matthew, a disciple who was a tax collector; John, the “Beloved Disciple” mentioned in the Fourth Gospel; Mark, the secretary of the disciple Peter; and Luke, the traveling companion of Paul.

The New Testament contains four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These books tell the stories about Jesus’ life, ministry, and death. The Gospels were written anonymously and came to be ascribed to disciples (Matthew and John) and associates of the apostles (Mark and Luke) sometime in the second century.

Tissot synthesized the four gospels into a singular narrative with five chapters: “the Holy Childhood, the Ministry, Holy Week, the Passion, and the Resurrection”. He also made portraits of each of the four evangelists to honor them.

The four Gospels are neither histories of the life of Christ nor biographies. They are portraits of the person and work of the long-promised Messiah, Israel’s King and the world’s Savior. As portraits, they present four different poses of one unique personality.

St. John’s Gospel

“The Gospel lessons of peace, love, compassion, truth, understanding, and positive activism are all things that transform our lives, and young adulthood is a particularly transformative time in life. These ancient narratives remind us of who we are and help us to intentionally shape who we want to be.”

Together with the Acts of the Apostles, it makes up a two-volume work which scholars call Luke–Acts; together they account for 27.5% of the New Testament.

Mark is generally agreed to be the first gospel; it uses a variety of sources, including conflict stories (Mark 2:1–3:6), apocalyptic discourse (4:1–35), and collections of sayings, although not the sayings gospel known as the Gospel of Thomas and probably not the Q source used by Matthew and Luke.

“There are five Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John…and the Christian.

They had unearthed several early Christian texts including gospels of Thomas, Philip and Mary that had been buried away for around 1,600 years. These gospels were some of the many alternative books about Jesus that weren’t included in the Christian Bible.

A: There are seven books in the Catholic Bible — Baruch, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach, Tobit and Wisdom — that are not included in the Protestant version of the Old Testament. These books are referred to as the deuterocanonical books.

The text’s authorship by Thomas the Apostle is rejected by modern scholars. Because of its discovery with the Nag Hammadi library, it was widely thought that the document originated within a school of early Christians, possibly proto-Gnostics.

The Gospel of Thomas also suggests that Jesus is aware of, and criticizing the views of the Kingdom of God as a time or a place that appear in the other gospels. Here Jesus says, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds will get there first.

The Gospel of Mary is a book considered non-canonical in Christian orthodoxy discovered in 1896 in a 5th-century papyrus codex written in Sahidic Coptic.

Bound in leather and written in Coptic, this was the Gospel of Mary. Like the books found at Nag Hammadi, the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene is also considered an apocryphal text. The story it contains begins some time after the resurrection. The disciples have just had a vision of Jesus.

Jesus is identified by some Gnostics as an embodiment of the supreme being who became incarnate to bring gnōsis to the earth, while others adamantly denied that the supreme being came in the flesh, claiming Jesus to be merely a human who attained enlightenment through gnosis and taught his disciples to do the same.

The Gnostics, in their reading of Scripture, acknowledged no such debt; for they believed that the Hebrew Bible was the written revelation of an inferior creator god (dêmiourgos), filled with lies intended to cloud the minds and judgment of the spiritual human beings (pneumatikoi) whom this Demiurge was intent on …

Gnostics were dualists and worshipped two (or more) gods; Christians were monists and worshipped one God. Gnostics focused on eradication of ignorance; Christian concern was the eradication of sin.