Gospel is derived from the Greek word euaggelion and means "good news." The genre of gospels include the four canonical books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as well as some extrabiblical gospels written in the second century. The good news written about Jesus the Anointed (The Jewish Messiah) organized the oral tradition about him into connected narratives to form a smooth transitional story. The chronology that the Evangelists (the anonymous authors who wrote the four gospels) used begins with John the Baptist and the baptism of the Messiah, to his ministry, arrest, death and resurrection. Although a misconception still exists that refers to the gospels as a biography of Jesus--due to Justin Marytr's reference c. 150 CE that the gospels were the "memoirs of the apostles" and the fact that early Christians came to see them that way--the evidence suggests that the Evangelists arranged the stories about Jesus in an order to suit their telling of an aesthetic story, rather than as a chronology of the events as they actually took place.
It is important to fit the gospels into an appropriate genre in order to understand them. The letter-writing genre (that the Apostle Paul used to communicate with the churches in the Diaspora) was well known in the first century. Likewise Jewish apocalyptic genre was also familiar to the readers of the time, so that books such as Daniel and Revelation were understood in the context of apocalypses. But the genre we now call "gospel" was something new to the readers of the Evangelists. Did the Evangelists mean for their work to be read as strict biographies? Or perhaps it was well understood that some amount of poetic license was expected as long as it was based on a core of truthful events?
Due to the belief by most scholars today that Matthew and Luke's gospels were based on Mark's (the Synoptic Problem) Mark's gospel has received a great deal of attention. If the author of Mark's purpose can be understood, then the gospel genre may be understood as well. Form critics emphasize that Mark's gospel is composed of many smaller units called pericopes (pronounced per-RICK-a-pee) that are linked together by Mark into a larger framework. If Mark is seen in this fashion--as an editor or an anthologist--then form critics suggest that Mark obtained his material from either the existing collections of oral traditions about Jesus, or perhaps a pre-Markan "proto-gospel" which codified this oral tradition in a very primitive manner. The early members of the Jesus movement (who would later be called "Christians") spread the stories about Jesus by preaching, referred to by scholars as the kerygma (pronounced care-RIG-muh), literally "that which is proclaimed" and the role of the kerygma was probably essential to getting the sayings and deeds of Jesus to Rome where Mark is believed to have written his gospel between 65-71 CE.
Some scholars still suggest that the gospels are derivations from other genres of the period such as the dialogue, the tragedy, or the Greco-Roman literature piece. Source-critical methods of study suggest that Mark did not intend for his work to be a Greco-Roman biography in the tradition of the period, since he concentrates heavily on the themes of foreshadowing the plots against Jesus and, later, on Jesus' death. This is where redactive criticism has become involved in determining how to understand the genre. Redaction critics study the Sitz im Leben--"situation in life" or the motivation of the gospel-writers themselves in an attempt to understand why they came to write the gospel at all. Redaction critics emphasize the language, style, date and place of composition of a given gospel in order to place it appropriately within a context in order to gain a better understanding of the gospel and the intentions of the author.
Today, it is generally agreed upon that the gospel genre must contain two elements in order to be called a gospel. The work must embody the stories and kerygma of the early Jesus movement and it must organize these elements into a narrative outline.
