Jesus warned us to beware of another gospel, and there’s been many gospels contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ, but today another gospel has materialized, and that gospel is a very dangerous threat to Christianity. This other gospel is being taught by the New Age Movement, and is also the testimony of those who’ve received it from demonic aliens in UFO’s, and other channeled entities.

The question of the nature of Paul’s gospel has been raised in a lengthy comment by samlcar. This seems important enough to deal with in a separate post. The suggestion is made that the word is used in two distinct ways: i) as referring to the ‘actual traditions of Jesus’; and ii) as a summary of what is ‘believed’ in order to become part of the Jesus community. Neither of these appears to be ‘apocalyptic’ or temporally delimited. Rather than attempt a full survey at this point we’ll begin by looking at the use of the word in Romans, which by any reckoning must have central relevance for Paul’s thought as a whole. I think we will find that the term ‘gospel’ has a distinctly eschatological (rather than apocalyptic) meaning.

Recently, a Christian friend who is working in East Asia, and with whom I correspond, has been asking timely, for him, questions about how to talk about Jesus to people who have no religious background. In our dialogue, and spurred on by much that I have been reading at this site, I spent a day re-reading Acts with particular emphasis on what Luke recorded was actually said during ‘proclamation events.’ I have added below the summary I sent my friend. Some of the formatting is awkward, and someday when i have time i will come back and make it better!

Proclamation in Acts

The following is an attempt to summarize the core of each of the different proclamation events in Acts. The idea is that perhaps we can understand better what we should be saying to people by looking at the little bit of information we have of what the early church was saying to their contemporaries.