The Fourfold Gospel.

        It was not so much the writing of the individual gospels of Mark, Matthew, and John, however, as the grouping of them with Luke in a collection, that stimulated the production of the uncanonical gospels. Luke-Acts was much more than a gospel, and the separation of its first volume from the second not only enriched the gospel corpus but left the Acts by itself, to form the pattern for the Acts literature that was to come. The collection of the Four Gospels showed the immense effectiveness of the gospel as a type of literature, and it seemed almost to invite the production of further gospels by its closing lines: “There are many other things that Jesus did, so many in fact that if they were all written out, I do not suppose that the world itself would hold the books that would have to be written.”

        Not that the writer of these lines intended to suggest the writing of further gospels; they are part of the epilogue of the Fourth Gospel, perhaps added to anticipate any doubt or opposition that the new gospel might encounter by its very novelty, since few of the prospective readers of the combined gospels would have known more than one or possibly two of them before and might well be suspicious of the new, unfamiliar material another gospel would inevitably offer. But as soon as the churches became familiar with a plurality of gospels, this closing sentence might well suggest that the door was still open to new gospel narratives. Certainly a whole flock of Christian writers soon undertook to write new gospels, and none of them seems to have escaped the influence of one or more of the canonical gospels. Indeed, they were all in some degree imitators of them.

        The idea that any early Christian anywhere might at any time have set out independently to write a gospel without ever having seen one loses sight of the fact that a gospel was by no means an inevitable thing, still less a commonplace or a matter of course. It was a definite literary creation for which no adequate literary precedents can be found. This is the distinction of the Gospel of Mark. It was soon improved upon and enlarged by the author of Matthew, and also imitated by Luke in his historical sketch of the beginnings of the movement. Independently — though we do not know how independently — John also made use of the gospel as a literary form. The existence of at least four written gospels obviously called the attention of Christians to the possibility of producing others-as did the words, already quoted, at the end of the Gospel of John. This situation undoubtedly lies behind the production of the uncanonical gospels.

        The makers of the uncanonical gospels apparently aimed at unifying the gospels already in existence, ridding them of their repetitions and confusions, and at the same time enriching them from oral traditions and from creative imagination. The question at once arises whether or not they were in possession of any authentic material comparable in historical value with that in the earlier books. This question is hard to answer, for the canonical books necessarily provide the tests for authenticity, and it is therefore unlikely that we could recognize trustworthy materials not paralleled by those in the books generally accepted. Often we can see that the extra materials are based upon traditions already known to us; this is true about most of what we find in the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of Thomas. Sometimes, as in Egyptians and Thomas, we can see that a Gnostic or proto-Gnostic axe is being ground.