CC--Christianese 17f: Gospel (part 6 of ?)

--Yesterday, we saw that there are really three different kinds of Gospels.
--There are the four Gospels of the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These are officially validated parts of the canon of Scripture and, as such, can be taken as the very Word of God and fully reliable.
--Then there are millions of unofficial gospels, which are the accounts of how Jesus has transformed individual believers over the course of history. These may or may not be written down, but every time you tell someone else the truth about Jesus as you understand it, you are conveying a gospel to that person, your account of The Gospel. Such accounts are true and extremely important, but they are not secure to anything like the degree of the Biblical Gospels.
--Then there are false gospels. These are stories about Jesus that aren’t merely different from the accounts in the Bible, but they are in some aspect fundamentally incompatible with the Gospel those accounts reveal.
--Think of it like this. If I wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln in which I recounted some personal encounter he had with an ancestor of mine, that could be true or false. And as long as the character revealed by that encounter jibed with what we know of the historical Lincoln, no one would mind very much. On the other hand, if I wrote an account that showed him to be a liar or an adulterer, that would be a false biography.
--Moreover, if I wrote a biography of Lincoln in which he wasn’t the President or didn’t oversee the Civil War or wasn’t assassinated, I would be lying. But even if I wrote an account of Lincoln in which I simply failed to mention any of these things, most historians would say that I had lied by omitting the most important things about his life.
--Similarly, when someone (now or in history) tells a story about Jesus which omits a major element of the Gospel (remember the nine basic points I mentioned a few days ago), we should be worried about that account. But if it denies any of these main points, we would call that a false Gospel.
--So if someone tells a story about Jesus and say that He didn’t come in the flesh or that He wasn’t actually killed or that He wasn’t really God or that we don’t need His sacrifice or (and this is a really big one historically) that His sacrifice isn’t sufficient to reconcile us with God, this would be what we call a false gospel.

--So there are the Four Gospels which are in the canon and reliable, there are numerous unofficial gospels which are true accounts of the saving power of Christ in His believers, and there are false gospels which omit or deny fundamental aspects of the actual Gospel and hence lead people astray from God.