HKB
The Greek word for "gospel" means "good news." Nowhere in the New Testament, however, is that word applied to a book. There is no reference in the New Testament to a "Gospel" of Matthew or of Mark or of Luke or of John. In the New Testament the word "gospel" has a more general reference. It designates the "good news" which lies at the basis of Christian preaching, however that news may be known. Christianity is based upon "a piece of information." The subject of that information is the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without Christ we should have been hopeless, but Christ has saved us. Information about what he has done for us, however that information be conveyed, is the gospel.
This broad use of the word "gospel" appears even in the titles "Gospel according to Matthew," "Gospel according to Mark," "Gospel according to Luke," and "Gospel according to John," which are not due to the original authors of the books. "Gospel according to Matthew" did not originally mean the same thing as "Gospel of Matthew." It did not mean the Gospel which Matthew produced, but the one Gospel of Jesus Christ as Matthew narrated it. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John produced simply four accounts of the same thing. That common subject of the four accounts is the gospel, the good news, of what Jesus Christ has done for his followers.
At a very early time, however, books which had the gospel as their subject came themselves to be designated as "Gospels." The usage is convenient, and will be freely adopted in these textbooks. We may speak indiscriminately of the "Gospel according to Matthew" and of the "Gospel of Matthew."
=(1) Not Indicated in the Gospel Itself.=--The Gospel of Matthew should be sharply distinguished from those books which themselves make definite claims as to their authorship. The Epistle to the Romans, for example, claims to have been written by the apostle Paul. If it was not written by Paul, it is a forgery. The book of The Acts, also, though it does not mention the name of the author, claims at least--through the use of the first person plural--to have been written by some companion of the apostle Paul. Even the Gospel of John, as we shall see, really affords clear indications about its own authorship. The Gospel of Matthew, on the other hand, lays no claim to any particular authorship. We might believe that it was written by some other person than Matthew and yet be perfectly loyal to the book itself. The self-witness of the book is confined merely to a claim of truthfulness. If we believe that the record which the book contains is true, then we might, in perfect loyalty to the Gospel, believe that it was written by some one like Luke or Mark, outside of the company of the apostles. Such a view, however, would display an unreasonable distrust of Christian tradition.
=(2) Papias on the First Gospel.=--The earliest extant information about the authorship of the First Gospel is to be found in a fragment which Eusebius, the church historian of the fourth century, has preserved from a lost work of Papias. Papias was bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor in the former half of the second century.
The fragment from Papias, which is found in Eusebius, Church History, iii, 39, 16, may be translated as follows:
"Matthew accordingly wrote [or compiled] the oracles in the Hebrew dialect, and everyone translated them as he was able."