Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I THE FORMATION OF THE GOSPEL TRADITIONS. How came our First Three Gospels to be written? Were they produced independently of each other, or did the later writers use the work of the earlier? In what order were they composed, and at what dates ? Why do they sometimes agree so closely, as in the parable of the Sower, or the story of the paralytic let down through the roof; and why do they sometimes vary so widely about important sayings of the Teacher, or no less important incidents in his career? From what sources did the author of the earliest Gospel derive his knowledge about Jesus; and what other materials were at the command of the succeeding Evangelists ? It is easier to ask these questions than to answer them. They are only specimens of the kind of problems which beset all enquiry into the origin of the Synoptic narratives. But before we seek for some clearer light upon them, let us examine first of all the general conditions under which our Gospels came into existence. How did men know anything about Jesus before the lives of him were drawn up ? They could only know what they were told by hisfriends and followers. They depended, that is, on the witness of the Church. Of what did this testimony consist, and how was it formed into a body of definite teaching ? I. The Preaching; of the Early Church. (1) Jesus committed nothing to writing. The words which he traced upon the Temple floor in presence of the guilty woman, while her accusers slunk away (John viii. 6, 8), vanished without a record. The founders of Christian sects have left behind them, like John Wesley, copious discourses to serve as standards of the faith.1 Mohammed armed his followers with revelations which were afterwards collected into the book on which Islam rests, viz. the Koran. But...