A popular question that Muslims ask is: “Why are the gospels according to…according to…according to…?
And where is the Gospel According To Jesus?
What does gospel mean? Gospel simply means GOOD NEWS.
GOSPEL = GOOD NEWS.
Did Jesus come with good news? Yes. The good news of our salvation and reconciliation to God.
Did Jesus come with a book called GOOD NEWS? No
Was a book called GOOD NEWS sent down to Him? No
Did a book called GOOD NEWS fall on his head? No
Did Jesus walk around with a book called GOOD NEWS under His arm? No.
He preached the GOOD NEWS and this GOOD NEWS was also preached by His followers after Him. And later on it was put into writing by them.
The book that Matthew, the disciple of Jesus put into writing became known as “The Gospel According To Matthew”.
That simply means, “The Good News Recorded By Matthew”.
Likewise, the other gospels. The Gospel According to John, is simply “The Good News Recorded By John.”
The confusion of Muslims is that they think “according to” means the writers made up their accounts “according to” their whim and fancies. That is untrue.
The four writers wrote down the message of Jesus, including what He did, where He went, His miracles and healings, His parables, His teachings, His encounters, His prophecies, His instructions, and so on. By reading this we understand the Good News Jesus brought.
In fact, one of the authors, Mark, begins his writing of the Good News, this way:
“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ…” (Mark 1:1).
What did he mean? Basically, he was saying, “THIS IS the start of the good news of/about Jesus Christ…”
So, if you want to read the Good News of Jesus Christ, just open the Bible.
Why are there four accounts of the Good News?
Muslims mistakenly think that GOSPEL is the name of a book. This is because the Quran implies that a book called Injeel was sent down to Isa. This is false.
I believe Muhammad ASSUMED that the book was sent down from God when he heard the Bible being read by the Christians of his time and this false notion that it came down from allah was put into the Quran. If that is the stand of Islam, then the burden is on Islam to prove its claim by showing the world this book called Injeel, so that we can all see what it contains. No one has been able to do so and no one knows even a single chapter of this Injeel.
Muslims today say , “Well, the Injeel does not exist or is lost/corrupted and yet Allah in the Quran tells the Christians to judge by their book.” How can they when no one knows what it says?
What does Injeel mean anyway? Is it even an original Arabic word? No.
This word used in the Quran is a corruption of the Greek work, Euanggelion, which means GOOD NEWS.
Euanggelion in Greek, probably slowly became “eu-injeel-ion” and finally just “Injeel” in Arabic.
One can ask why does the word Injeel come from the Greek?
The simple answer is because the original euanggelion (gospel) was written in Greek by the authors of the gospels.
Why Greek, and not Aramaic or Hebrew?
Because Greek was the language of the world at the time (from around 300BC to 300 AD). For the Good News to go to all the world and be understood, Greek was the language to use. Not Aramaic or Hebrew, which would have merely to catered to a tiny number of speakers.