<P> In Luke, apparently written for gentiles, Jesus is especially concerned with the poor . Luke emphasizes the importance of prayer and the action of the Holy Spirit in Jesus's life and in the Christian community . Jesus appears as a stoic supernatural being, unmoved even by his own crucifixion . Like Matthew, Luke insists that salvation offered by Christ is for all, and not only for the Jews . </P> <P> The Gospel of John is the only gospel to call Jesus God, and in contrast to Mark, where Jesus hides his identity as messiah, in John he openly proclaims it . It represents Jesus as an incarnation of the eternal Word (Logos), who spoke no parables, talked extensively about himself, and did not explicitly refer to a Second Coming . Jesus preaches in Jerusalem, launching his ministry with the cleansing of the temple . He performs several miracles as signs, most of them not found in the synoptics . The Gospel of John ends: (21: 25) "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written . Amen ." </P> <P> The consensus among modern scholars is that the gospels belong to the ancient genre of bios, or biography . Ancient biographies were concerned with providing examples for readers to emulate while preserving and promoting the subject's reputation and memory, and so they included both propaganda and kerygma (preaching) in their works . Mark, for example, is not biography in the modern sense but an apocalyptic history depicting Jesus caught up in events at the end of time . As Luke's attempt to link the birth of Jesus to the census of Quirinius demonstrates, there is no guarantee that the gospels are historically accurate . The gospel authors altered the traditions at their disposal (their sources) to serve their own ends--thus Matthew and Luke have frequently edited Mark, and the contradictions and discrepancies between John and the synoptics make it impossible to accept both as reliable A second problem is that the gospels as we have them are not the originals, but have been edited and recopied over time, and evidently differ from them in thousands of ways . In that long chain of transmission the texts have been corrupted, leading Origen to complain in the 3rd century that "the differences among manuscripts have become great,...(because copyists) either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please ." Despite all this, scholars are confident that the gospels do provide a good idea of the public career of Jesus, and that critical study can attempt to distinguish the ideas of Jesus from those of later authors and editors . </P> <P> The creation of a Christian canon was probably a response to career of the heretic Marcion (c. 85--160), who established a canon of his own with just one gospel, the gospel of Luke, which he edited to fit his own theology . The Muratorian canon, the earliest surviving list of books considered (by its own author at least) to form Christian scripture, included Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and Irenaeus of Lyons went further, stating that there must be four gospels and only four because there were four corners of the Earth and thus the Church should have four pillars . </P>

The literary genre that best describes the gospels is