Christ

Every message needs its medium. The revealed religions are no exception; for example, the Christian God is so called because his message was conveyed through Christ. This message of God, of salvation—through Christ—is then further disseminated through the Gospels, or accounts of his life and teaching. The word, Gospel, itself is related to the Greek word euangelizo (Richards 316), meaning “to share the good news.”

Furthermore, once the message is conveyed it must be interpreted and promulgate through out the community of believers, and with this further handling of the Good News comes a further medium—the Epistles. Both the Gospels and the Epistles (formal letters) serve the intrinsic needs of revealed religion by spreading “the message.” Here we shall not be so concerned with “the Good News” as such, but with the interrelation of its three bearers: the Christ, the Gospels, and the Epistles.

Christ, the “anointed” one, is central to the whole text of Christianity. In him the medium truly is the message: he is the “word made flesh” (John 1:14). Jesus, as the Christ, as the man that is God, is of singular importance to the religion that bares his name; and as such, all other mediums will serve to insolate— convey and protect—the fidelity of his original message. We turn to the first two layers that spread out from Jesus himself.

If Jesus was the first degree of separation from “God the Father” then the Gospels are the 2nd degree. In them, we get our view of Jesus as a person and as a message from God. The reporters Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John convey the news in slightly different ways to slightly different audiences. In this way, by being broadcasted to diverse segments of society, the miraculous message achieved maximum coverage in the ancient world. Mark, for example, speaking to uneducated members of the earliest Christian community, possibly in Rome (Bruce 1156), is able to tailor his report appropriately by explaining details of Jesus’ life that those not living in Jewish communities—as Jesus himself did—would be ignorant of (e.g. 12:42; 14;12; and 15:42). And on the other hand, the “news” as reported by John reads like The New York Times compared with Mark’s Yakima Herald. “Audience,” again, is the reason for the discrepancy in style; John is speaking to a more spiritual, philosophic, and intellectual class of ancients. In other words, John takes for granted “that the reader is familiar with the Synoptic record” (Bruce 1229). All the Gospels convey the message of Jesus directly to individual persons. However, the lines of communication expanded as the Christian community expanded.

Thus we get the Epistles, which not only speak to individuals, like the Gospels, but to groups of individuals, or institutions: as the Gospels disseminate the word of Jesus, who himself only conveys the message of God, the Epistles again amplifies and clarifies that original message as it radiates outward through time and space from Christ, the epicenter of God’s presence. Yet, though, the Letters are similar to the Accounts in that they too spread the Good News, they are also different in one important respect. Unlike the Gospels, they are in a way of speaking, memos internal to an institution that then got collected and published. Which is to say that, they serve an institutional function of regulating “the Church” as well as the personal function of brining individuals to salvation. So, for example, where a Gospel might tell us what Jesus said on the cross (Mark 15:34), an Epistle might tell us how to avoid factualism within the Church (1 Corinthians 1:10-4:21).

In sum, Christianity is a great example of how a message can be wedded to its medium. Sense Christ, the Logos, the word of God, has been revealed—its message must be disseminated and at the same time safeguarded against adulteration. God insured his message by embodying it in Jesus. The Christ then employed apostles to write the Gospels whose meaning was both vouchsafed and further disseminated by the protective scaffolding of the Epistles.

Works Cited

Bruce, F.F. ed. New International Bible Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1979.

Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Richards, Lawrence O. ed. Expository Dictionary of Bible Words. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1991.