The Gospel Truth

With the four Gospels the Catholic Church has gone further. Not only are these books reliable from a human standpoint, she teaches they are reliable from a divine standpoint. They have God as their main Author, and as such they should be received as canonical—that is, on the list (in Greek, kanon) of inspired books. This means that the ultimate guarantee of their truthfulness is not the accuracy and good will of the human beings who wrote them, but the accuracy and truthfulness of the Divine Being behind them. This teaching was reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, n. 11 (November 18, 1965).