Gospel

A book that relates the life story of Jesus Christ. The four Gospels included in the Christian canon are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all of which were written in the first century by persons thought to have had some contact with the earliest disciples of Jesus or with people who had heard the traditions from them. In addition to these four canonical Gospels, other Christian writings now called “apocryphal Gospels” were produced in the first few centuries after Jesus’s death by persons and groups under circumstances difficult to identify.