Then, in about the year 70, the evangelist known as Mark wrote the first "gospel" -- the words mean "good news" about Jesus. We will never know the writer's real identity, or even if his name was Mark, since it was common practice in the ancient world to attribute written works to famous people. But we do know that it was Mark's genius to first to commit the story of Jesus to writing, and thereby inaugurated the gospel tradition.
"The gospels are very peculiar types of literature. They're not biographies," says Prof. Paula Fredriksen, "they are a kind of religious advertisement. What they do is proclaim their individual author's interpretation of the Christian message through the device of using Jesus of Nazareth as a spokesperson for the evangelists' position."
About 15 years after Mark, in about the year 85 CE, the author known as Matthew composed his work, drawing on a variety of sources, including Mark and from a collection of sayings that scholars later called "Q", for Quelle, meaning source. The Gospel of Luke was written about fifteen years later, between 85 and 95. Scholars refer to these three gospels as the "synoptic gospels", because they "see" things in the same way. The Gospel of John, sometimes called "the spiritual gospel," was probably composed between 90 and 100 CE. Its style and presentation clearly set it apart from the other three.
Each of the four gospels depicts Jesus in a different way. These characterizations reflect the past experiences and the particular circumstances of their authors' communities. The historical evidence suggests that Mark wrote for a community deeply affected by the failure of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome. Matthew wrote for a Jewish community in conflict with the Pharisaic Judaism that dominated Jewish life in the postwar period. Luke wrote for a predominately Gentile audience eager to demonstrate that Christian beliefs in no way conflicted with their ability to serve as a good citizen of the Empire.
