The gospel of Jesus, i.e., the gospel Jesus preached, is quite different from the gospel about Jesus which the early church preached. The church's gospel is rightly summarized as the proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus; but as crucial as that focus is, it makes little sense apart from the gospel Jesus proclaimed. The preaching of Jesus is not inferior to the preaching about Jesus and is not merely an antecedent necessity or presupposition for the church's message. The message of Jesus was and had to be the foundation of both the thought and the life of early Christians, a reality attested by the existence of the canonical and apocryphal Gospels, even though outside the Gospels reference to the sayings of Jesus is not as direct as we would expect. It is a privilege to address this topic in honour of someone whose career has contributed so much to the discussion.

The concern must be for the message, the good news, of Jesus and not for his possible use of the Aramaic word besora' or some other equivalent to our word ‘gospel’. Whether he used such an equivalent to refer to his message cannot be determined, given the freedom with which the evangelists framed their material.

The choices of the evangelists with regard to the Greek noun euangelion and the verb euangelizesthai merit attention.