In the last issue I shared information about how the present four gospels that make up the New Testament (NT) was finally chosen. These four gospels ac-quired importance because of the names attached to them: John was an important figure among the Twelve and in the church; Mark’s Gospel was related to Peter; Luke’s Gospel was related to Paul in some vaguer way; and the First Gospel was quickly related to Matthew, one of the Twelve. Of course the importance of the communities with which the Gospels were associated may also have figured in their survival. Matthew was probably directed to a Syrian community in the Antioch area. Mark was composed at Rome. Sometimes scholars relate Luke to Rome, sometimes to Greece. John was composed at Ephesus or in Syria.

Alongside the four Gospels, oral and written material from the first century seems to have survived into the second century and even later. Some of this was incorporated into apocryphal gospels. In one interesting case, the story of the adulteress in John 7, an early narrative survived, ultimately to be incorporated into a canonical Gospel, at least 100 years after the Gospel was written.

The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, not included, contains sayings of Jesus that may well be authentic. How many of these apocryphal gospels existed in the second century we do not know, but in his first homily on Luke, Origen mentions that many had attempted to write gospels but had not been guided by the Spirit. He mentions five in particular. Origen, of course, wrote at a time when four and only four Gospels were accepted, but was it thus during the second century? Were some of the gospels now considered apocryphal used by certain communities as their gospels, even as the canonical Gospels were used by their respective communities? The traditional view is that throughout the second century, only the four canonical Gospels were accepted by the Church at large.

In the mid-2nd century, however, Papyrus Egerton combined sayings from the Synoptics, John and a noncanonical source – an indication that the author did not think exclusively of four Gospels. The presence of various endings in the manuscripts for Mark’s Gospel may also betray a feeling that the standard four Gospels did not contain all that was to be said. Evidently, too, there was considerable freedom in copying the text of the Gospels throughout the 2nd century, for we know that by CE 200, different textual traditions of the Gospels already existed. There is some evidence that the four Gospels did not gain an exclusive position until the second half of the 2nd century.