THE HOLY GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW

The Title

—Gospel.] The name Gospel, from god and spell, Ang.-Sax. “good message” or “news,” is a most felicitous translation of the Greek εὐαγγέλιον. This word signifies in earlier Greek “a present made as a return for good news” [cf. Hom. Od. xiv. 152, 166; 4 Kings 4:10], or “a sacrifice offered in return for the same” [Aristoph. Eq. 658]; in later Greek it denotes “the good news” itself, as in lxx. [4 Kings 18:20, 22, 25], and in the N. T. passim, in the appropriated sense of the “good news of salvation through Jesus Christ.” Hence it came to be applied to the writings which contain the good news, very early: cf. Just. Apol. i. 66. Gōdspel, by shortening the vowel o before the three consonants, soon took the form of gŏdspel, i. e., “God-story” (the history of Christ), as is seen in Old Saxon, Old High German, and the Iceland language.

—according to St. Matthew.] This phrase does not merely signify that the original teaching was Matthew’s and that the gospel was drawn up according to that teaching. The earliest Fathers give it a different meaning: “Matthew … having delivered to writing the gospel according to him” [Euseb. H. E. iii. 24]. The expressions “the gospel according to the Hebrews” and “according to the Egyptians” do not prove the contrary, since in these apocryphal writings a certain amount of change and authorship is implied. Nor is the phrase a mere equivalent of the possessive “of Matthew”; for this possessive would have been employed, if it had been intended. Besides, the gospel has for its object not St. Matthew or any other evangelist, but the salvation through Jesus Christ. That the Greek preposition [κατὰ] rendered by “according to” can signify authorship or editorship is clear from Thuc. vi. 16; i. 54, and from such expressions as “Homer according to Aristarchus.”