Jesus’s Gospel and Paul’s Gospel.

One or Two Gospels?

Abstract

If we had only the Pauline letters, we would not know much about Jesus and we would think that “the gospel”, the good news, was that salvation is obtained by faith placed in Jesus Christ, Messiah and Lord, therefore, accessible to all equally. The object of faith, for Paul, is Jesus Christ, and of him, his sacrificial death on the cross. We confess it: “Jesus Christ died to save us; we are redeemed by his blood”. On the other hand, Mark presents as “the gospel” the  “missionary” life of Jesus, the prophet of the Kingdom of God.

Salvation would result from the acceptance of Jesus’ proposal to make God’s reign in this world a reality. While for Paul the cross is a kind of sacrificial rite of atonement, forMark it was a consequence of his preaching of the Kingdom because of its socio-political implications. Are they complementary, opposed, correlative? But both are part of the canon of the New Testament... It is what this article explores.