Hey, this is John at the Bible Project.

If you've been around Christians or you are one yourself, chances are you've heard the word,

the gospel. Like, do you believe the gospel? So, what does the gospel mean? The gospel is a Greek word

that means good news. And that raises the question, good news about what?

Jesus goes on to the public scene announcing that God's kingdom has come near, has arrived,

and that he is its anointed herald. The good news is that God's kingdom has come near

and Jesus is bringing it. But here's the thing, many of us have grown up in Christian culture,

and we're taught that the gospel was something more specific than that. The gospel was about how

I personally become saved. That is how I can make sure I go to heaven when I die.

In the mid-20th century, the word gospel, because of some really influential and positive

movements, I think, the word gospel kind of got narrowed down to refer specifically to the moment

of the cross as a substitutionary death for my sin so that I can go to heaven. That became the

gospel. Help someone understand that they are a sinner, that they need Jesus to die for them,

so that they can go to heaven after they die. That was what the word gospel meant to me when I first

became a follower of Jesus in my 20th. And let's just stop and just say what a strange thing,

that that word came to mean that when we're reading a New Testament that has this word,

and it refers always to the story of Jesus launching the kingdom of God,

dying, being raised to bring the kingdom of God. That's what the word gospel means in the New

Testament. The good news is about the reign of a new king, and this has implications for us.

But first, we have to understand who this king is, why he thinks he's king, and that's what the

first four books of the New Testament are all about. Ancient biographies of Jesus. The historic way

the church has talked about these four texts is to use one singular noun to describe all of them.

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