Question

Please discuss the meaning of the term, "gospel" in the greco-roman world and christian use.

Answer 1

Answer:

A conference in Dublin this coming weekend is intended to heighten public awareness of a jewel in the crown of the remarkable collection which is the Chester Beatty gospel papyri. Or P45 to give them their official scholarly designation.

They form a substantial part of one of the earliest known codices of the four gospels, dating from the third century (circa AD 250) and are a direct link with the Christian Church while it was still a persecuted sect within the Roman empire.

They also put us in touch with the earliest period of a movement destined to shape much of Western and global civilisation.

The papyri are then cultural artefacts of the highest significance, of interest to the concerned secularist as well as being worthy of respect from the committed Christian.

Like all such artefacts, the papyri call for contextualisation within their own world if their significance for ours is to be properly assessed. Jesus and the first Christians were heirs to the tradition of the Torah as a written collection of Israel's sacred writings. Yet, unlike some other Jewish reform movements, such as the Essenes whose library is now known from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the early Christians were not a scholastic community.

Jesus's Pharisee opponents accused him of being "unschooled" (John 7, 15). His earliest followers were described as "ignorant" and "illiterate" (Acts of the Apostles 4,13). But it is important to judge these statements as vilification by the small literate elite in Jerusalem.

True, Paul used letter-writing as a way of communicating with the communities he had established in various cities, and a collection of his letters must have been made shortly after his death. An early version of this is also represented in the Chester Beatty collection (P46). The case of Paul indicates a shift in the social standing and urban context of some at least of his new converts, as distinct from Jesus's own ministry which was largely concentrated on the rural villagers of Galilee. Yet even Paul insists that his preference was for the spoken rather than the written word