How Many Gospels Are There? (Inside and Outside the Bible)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Most people, when they hear the word “gospel,” think of the four we have in the Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But what if I told you that the word originally had nothing to do with Jesus, or that there are more than 40 other gospels that never made it into the New Testament?

In this article, I’ll trace how that transformation of the word “gospel” happened — first from a general word to a theological term, and then to a literary genre. Along the way, I’ll look at how the four Gospels in the New Testament came to be, explore the many other gospels that were written and later excluded from the canon, and ask what exactly makes a text a “gospel” in the first place.

What is a Gospel?

The English word “gospel” comes from the Old English word godspel, which literally meant “good spell.” No, this is not a reference to magic. The word spel originally meant message or story, so gospel essentially means “good news.” In fact, it’s a translation of the biblical Greek word euangelion (pronounced eh-van-GELL-eeon), which simply meant any kind of good news. You might also recognize that it’s the root of words like evangelize and evangelical.

However, with the rise of Christianity, the word eventually came to refer not just to any good news but specifically to the good news Christians believed Jesus represented. The apostle Paul used it this way, for example, in Romans 1:16:

The fact that Paul uses the word euangelion so specifically here indicates that the word had already begun to take on a distinctly Christian flavor in his time. In fact, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church notes that “the way Paul uses [the word gospel] without explanation in writing to believers in Rome whom he didn’t know suggests the Christian sense was already current.” However, it’s important to note that the word gospel did not yet refer to a literary genre in Paul’s time. In fact, the four canonical Gospels would be written after Paul’s death.

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Early in the 2nd century CE, a Christian intellectual named Justin Martyr quoted from at least three of the canonical Gospels in his own writings, calling them “the memoirs of the apostles.” It isn’t until around 175-185 CE that we find a Christian writer, Irenaeus, calling these biographical books about Jesus gospels.

In The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels, Loveday Alexander writes that we can define the genre of gospels as “a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words and deeds of a Galilean holy man named Jesus.” That’s a decent general definition, at least applied to the four Gospels in the New Testament.

Let’s start, then, with a brief introduction to the four canonical Gospels.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

Although the four Gospels are ordered Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament canon, scholars know that wasn’t the order in which they were written. With that in mind, I’m going to introduce the four Gospels in the chronological order in which scholars acknowledge they were written. By the way, I’ve been asked how many Gospels there are in the Catholic Bible. While the Catholic Bible includes a few Old Testament books not found in Protestant Bibles, it still only contains four Gospels in the New Testament.

Mark, although the second book in the New Testament canon, was actually the Gospel that was written first, probably in about 70 CE. It contains no birth story for Jesus, which is likely one of the reasons some early Christians believed that Matthew, which does have a birth story, had been written first.

Instead, Mark begins with Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. It ends with Jesus’ crucifixion and the women finding his empty tomb. However, in Mark’s original ending, the women told no one about it out of fear, giving the Gospel an abrupt and confusing ending in 16:8. This was deemed unacceptable by a later scribe or scribes, who added resurrection appearances and Jesus’ ascension to heaven.

Matthew was probably the next Gospel to be written. Most scholars place its date of composition between 80 and 90 CE. After beginning with a genealogy of Jesus, Matthew contains a birth story that explains Jesus’ semi-divine origins. Matthew is also considered the most Jewish of the four Gospels, in that Jesus’ teachings often focus on interpretations of the Jewish Law.

However, Matthew also used Mark as a formative source and many stories and sayings from Mark appear verbatim in Matthew. Matthew ends with Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, as well as the Great Commission where the risen Jesus tells his disciples to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”

Luke may have been written between 80 and 90 CE like Matthew, although some scholars now put its composition as late as 120 CE. The anonymous author of Luke also wrote the book of Acts which was meant to be the second volume of his history of the founding of the church. Like Matthew, Luke follows Mark in including many of Mark’s incidents and sayings and like Matthew, it includes a birth story outlining Jesus’ conception through the Holy Spirit. Luke, however, focuses much more than the other Gospels on helping the poor and oppressed.

Finally, John was written between 90 and 110 CE according to most scholars. John is quite different from the other three Gospels in several ways. First, while there is no birth story, there is a prologue which explains Jesus has existed with God since the beginning of time. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is “the man from heaven,” as Bart Ehrman puts it in his The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. As such, Jesus in John is less concerned with earthly matters and more concerned with spiritual matters. Instead of teaching about the coming kingdom of God, as he does in all three other Gospels, Jesus focuses mostly on his identity as God’s divine agent.

So there we have it, right? There are four Gospels in the New Testament and that’s it. Or is it?

How Many Gospels Are There Outside the Bible?

While most Christians are familiar with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, fewer are familiar with the gospels that didn’t become part of the biblical canon. However, we know that many more gospels were written than the four we have in the New Testament.

While we have full copies of some of these gospels, many of them are only known from polemical treatises written against them, and then only in fragmented form. Let me give you a couple of examples.

The Gospel of Thomas, discovered along with other lesser known Christian texts, was discovered fully formed in a cache of codices (early forms of books) near the town of Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. Like the four canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas contains lots of sayings attributed to Jesus, some of which it shares with the NT Gospels.

Unlike those Gospels, however, it contains almost no narrative. In fact, the introduction to the book plainly says, “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke.” The Gospel of Thomas is usually labeled as a Gnostic gospel – one emphasizing the importance of secret spiritual knowledge – and from the point of view of our biblical canon, has some pretty unusual sayings. A few scholars have dated it to as early as 60 CE, but most put its date of composition around 140 CE.

The Gospel of the Hebrews, on the other hand, is a Jewish Christian gospel known only from seven citations of it in the work of early Church Fathers. In An Introduction to the New Testament Apocrypha, Fred Lapham writes that the fragments contain the belief that the Holy Spirit is Jesus' Divine Mother. It also contradicts the canonical Gospels in that the resurrected Jesus first appears to James his brother, thus giving James priority as leader of the Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem instead of Peter. This gospel was written in the middle of the 2nd century and except for those citations, is otherwise lost.

So those two gospels, added to the four from the NT, give us six. But there are many, many more. In fact, below is a list of all the gospels we know about that I haven’t yet mentioned, in no particular order. Scholars have all or part of these, or at least know something about them from other references. While it’s fun to attempt a count of total gospels written, it’s important to note that even scholars don’t have a consensus about how many total gospels may have existed. New gospels could still be found, as well.

By the way, in this list I won’t include the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife which proved to be a modern forgery, or the Secret Gospel of Mark, which, while not every scholar agrees, I believe has also been proven as a modern forgery.

1. Gospel of Perfection
2. Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians
3. Gospel of the Nazarenes
4. Gospel of the Ebionites
5. Gospel of the Twelve
6. Armenian Infancy Gospel
7. Protoevangelium of James
8. Gospel of the Nativity of Mary
9. Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew
10. History of Joseph the Carpenter
11. Infancy Gospel of Thomas
12. Latin Infancy Gospel
13. Syriac Infancy Gospel
14. Gospel of the Lots of Mary
15. Gospel of Peter
16. Gospel of Valentinus
17. Gospel of the Encratites
18. Gospel of Marcion
19. Gospel of Basilides
20. Gospel of Truth
21. Gospel of the Four Heavenly Realms
22. Gospel of Judas
23. Greek Gospel of the Egyptians
24. Gospel of Philip
25. Gospel of the Twelve Apostles
26. Gospel of Andrew
27. Gospel of Bartholomew
28. Gospel of Hesychius
29. Gospel of Lucius
30. Gospel of Merinthus
31. Gospel of the Adversary of the Law and the Prophets
32. Gospel of Eve
33. Gospel of Mani
34. Gospel of the Savior
35. Coptic Gospel of the Twelve
36. Gospel of Cerinthus
37. Gospel of Apelles
38. Gospel of the Seventy
39. Gospel of Nicodemus
40. Gospel of the Secret Supper
41. Gospel of Barnabas

With the six gospels I’ve already mentioned, and the 41 in this list, we have a total of 47 written gospels. This, of course, doesn’t include modern “gospels,” written in the 20th century or later, nor does it include tiny fragments which may or may not point to the existence of completely new gospels.

Conclusion: How Many Gospels Are There?

Part of the problem with counting the number of written gospels is that not everyone agrees about what constitutes a gospel. For example, if there is a papyrus fragment containing sayings of Jesus from the canonical gospels, but worded slightly differently, does that mean it’s a separate gospel? Answers vary, and uncertainties like this make it all but impossible to count the total number of gospels objectively.

The word gospel originally just meant good news — any good news at all. However, Paul’s letters make it clear that fairly early on in the life of the Christian church, the word took on a meaning specific to Christian teachings. For Paul and his contemporaries, the gospel was the good news of salvation through Christ.

After Paul’s death, the four canonical Gospels were written. Early Church Father Justin Martyr called these the “memoirs of the apostles,” believing that Jesus’ original apostles had written them. However, by the end of the 2nd century, the word gospel had become the literary genre of these “memoirs,” focusing on the life and teachings of Jesus and those around him.

Mark was our earliest written gospel, likely put together from oral traditions about Jesus that had circulated in the 40 years since his death. Next came Matthew and Luke, both of whom copied a lot of Mark but added birth stories and other material. Finally, John was the last of the canonical Gospels written, and it redefined Jesus’ role as a cosmic figure who had existed eternally with God and participated in the creation of the world.

Later, other Gospels were written, mostly starting in the 2nd century, including the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings gospel with little to no narrative content. There were also Jewish Christian gospels, such as the Gospel of the Hebrews, that we know only from quotations in other people’s writings.

However, if we define the word Gospel as a literary genre containing “a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words and deeds of a Galilean holy man named Jesus,” there are more than 40 others written all the way up to the Middle Ages.