Within the depth-psychology and adjacent religious-studies corpus, ‘Gospel’ operates along two primary axes that exist in productive tension. The first is canonical and historical: the fourfold New Testament gospel represents, for orthodox Christianity, a theologically necessary plurality—four distinct witnesses held together by a single Spirit, their very diversity a mark of authenticity rather than embarrassment. Thielman’s work traces this from Marcion’s reductive harmonizing through Tatian’s Diatessaron to the patristic insistence, articulated most forcefully by Irenaeus and Origen, that the one gospel cannot be collapsed into a single narrative without theological loss. The second axis is pluralistic and gnostic: Meyer’s scholarship on the Nag Hammadi materials demonstrates that ‘gospel’ as a genre and theological category extended far beyond the passion-narrative paradigm, encompassing sayings collections, dialogues, and mystical discourses that privilege gnosis and interior illumination over crucifixion kerygma. The Gospel of Truth’s vision of salvation through recognition of the Father, the Gospel of Thomas’s epistemological soteriology, and the Gospel of Philip’s sacramental anthropology each redefine ‘good news’ in terms of self-knowledge rather than atonement. The key tension runs between gospel as public proclamation of an atoning death and gospel as esoteric transmission of liberating knowledge. Pauline usage adds a further layer: for Paul, the gospel constitutes the theological ground for both ethnic inclusion and ethical reorientation.