Category — Irenaeus

I quoted Irenaeus (c. 202), in a previous post regarding the question— one being asked by many people these days— “What is the Gospel?”. There are literally hundreds of answers floating around, and men are leading conferences based around the single question. The results? “Here’s my Gospel”… “Oh yeah, well here’s my Gospel”… and so it goes.

Any way, my point is, for some reason everyone wants to reduce the thing to an easily digestible series of steps or literary snippets. But, why did the Apostles not think this necessary? They just wrote the four accounts and left them to the church. They expected us to read them and digest the multi-faceted contents. In the totality of these four aspectual accounts, we get the Good News. Perhaps it is high-time that we do stop trying to reduce the size and substance of the four— even refuse to do “Gospel presentations”— and instead demand that the entirety of the Apostle’s testimony be heard. Otherwise, we are reducing the maximal nature of the Word of God. Just start reading and save your conference allowance for a good movie.

“τετράμορφον εὐανγγελιον” (fourfold or four-form good news)

Irenaeus did not so much abstract a short-hand definition of the Gospel, as point to the four books— Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — as being the Gospel.

In other words, the question, “What is the Gospel?” would be answered in this way: “These four books”. So, answering the question for someone would entail sitting down and reading aloud the four accounts. How revolutionary. Just read and interact with the text.

Paul, of course, gives us many instances of the shorthand version— but these are derived from the accounts of the four.