Oh, that the dear man Luther had but told us here what he meant by the
term, Gospel! That St. Paul had seen even St. Luke's, is but a
conjecture, grounded on a conjectural interpretation of a single text,
doubly equivocal; namely, that the Luke mentioned was the same with the
Evangelist Luke; and that the 'evangelium' signified a book; the latter,
of itself improbable, derives its probability from the undoubtedly very
strong probability of the former. If then not any book, much less the
four books, now called the four Gospels, were meant by Paul, but the
contents of those books, as far as they are veracious, and whatever else
was known on equal authority at that time, though not contained in those
books; if, in short, the whole sum of Christ's acts and discourses be
what Paul meant by the Gospel; then the argument is circuitous, and
returns to the first point,--What 'is' the Gospel? Shall we believe you,
and not rather the companions of Christ, the eye and ear witnesses of
his doings and sayings? Now I should require strong inducements to make
me believe that St. Paul had been guilty of such palpably false logic;
and I therefore feel myself compelled to infer, that by the Gospel Paul
intended the eternal truths known ideally from the beginning, and
historically realized in the manifestation of the Word in Christ Jesus;
and that he used the ideal immutable truth as the canon and criterion of
the oral traditions. For example, a Greek mathematician, standing in the
same relation of time and country to Euclid as that in which St.
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