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ntroduction Christians often ask us: “If you don’t believe in the four Gospels of the New Testament, then where is the ‘true Gospel’ that the Qur’an speaks of?” This is not an easily answered question. It is certainly true that we do not affirm that the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the words of God -- They are not even the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. History teaches us that these books were anonymous until the 180 CE at which time they were pseudonymously ascribed to two disciples of Christ, a student of Peter, and a missionary partner of Paul. These so-called “Gospels” were written many decades after the ascension of Christ (between 68 CE - 110 CE), in a language foreign to Jesus himself who spoke Syriac, by four men who never claim to be writing while inspired by the Holy Ghost. The oldest New Testament manuscripts on earth, the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, were not codified until 350-375 CE. It is also a fact that all four canonical gospels were composed after the Apostle Paul had penned all fourteen of his letters and epistles to the various European churches and were widely in circulation in the Greco-Roman world (Many scholars contend that only seven letters are genuinely from Paul while the others are pseudonymous). Although there is still a lot of useful material preserved in the four canonical gospels for us to reconstruct the original Gospel of Jesus, we must remember that despite this fact, all four accounts are heavily influenced by Pauline doctrine and Hellenistic elements. Paul’s revolutionary view of the death and resurrection of the Jewish Messiah, for instance, as atonement for the sins of mankind is apparent even as early as Mark’s Gospel: