was the Son of God, his miracles and his words of superhuman authority would be strong arguments; and in preaching to any class of hearers, the story of his death and resurrection would be the best means of winning converts. And in their own daily life the Christians would be constantly turning back to the example and teachings of Jesus for guidance and comfort, or pondering upon his deeper sayings for light upon the mysteries of the present and the future. So the story of Jesus, or at least portions of it, would be in constant circulation from the earliest days.

At the outset the story was, of course, wholly oral. The presence of eye-witnesses obviated the necessity of resorting to written documents; and, moreover, the Jews shared the Oriental feeling, that religious truth ought to pass from teacher to learner by word of mouth and not by writing. All the great mass of the Talmud was for generations handed down orally, and its final reduction to writing was opposed by many. And the same preference for oral teaching is expressed by Papias, a Christian of the second century, when speaking of learning about Christ's life: "I did not think that what was to be gotten from the books would profit me as much as what came from the living and abiding voice." Such oral accounts of what Jesus said and did would have a more or less stereotyped form, partly because any account often repeated grows stereotyped in form, and still more because the tenacious Oriental

memory reproduces exactly whatever has been delivered to it.

As time went on, and Christianity spread, the need of written records would be felt, especially by Gentile converts, who were away from the eye-witnesses, and did not share the Oriental feeling about books. In response to it there would be produced, not biographies of Christ, but written copies of these oral groupings of his teachings on some special subject, or of his deeds as illustrating or confirming some point of Christian faith. His words would naturally be put in writing first, because it is more important, and also more difficult to retain them exactly in their original form. Accordingly, we may suppose that by the middle of the Apostolic Age there had come into existence in various places little books of Christ's sayings upon various topics (e. g., his parables about the kingdom, his teachings about the second coming, his missionary instructions, his lessons on the greatness of service), with or without some brief statement of the circumstances under which they were spoken, and also little books telling of certain of his deeds that bore upon some special matter of interest (e. g., miracles that displayed his love or his divinity, acts that showed his attitude toward the Sabbath, the story of his passion or of his resurrection), all put together with no thought of chronology and no aim at a complete history.

The decade A. D. 60-70 wrought a marked change in

Christian thought. Nero's persecution of the Christians in A. D. 64 was the first great act of hostility on the part of the Roman government; and while it was brief and confined to Rome, it must have caused a shock of horror and a sense of fear in every Christian circle. And the destruction of Jerusalem in A. D. 70 both made an end of the church which had stood as the mother of them all, and forced a reconstruction of Messianic ideas and expectations.

It was at this period that the importance of putting in permanent form some record of Christ's earthly years seems to have been suddenly and strongly felt. The expectation of his speedy second coming had grown less keen, so that men began to arrange for the prolonged existence of the church before that event. The sense of his spiritual presence was perhaps less strong, so that the guidance to be drawn from his earthly words and deeds assumed new importance. And, above all, the apostles and eye-witnesses were rapidly dying off; and unless means were taken to preserve their story, it might soon be garbled or wholly lost. So men began to write gospels, impelled to this not by the historical spirit, but by practical wants, aiming not at completeness or exact chronology, but at the preservation of whatever they considered most important and helpful in the life of Christ.

They took the material that lay at hand-the written records that they possessed and the oral accounts that were in their memories-and they wove it together as

best they could. And when their work was completed, they offered it to the Christian circles in which they lived as their humble contribution toward keeping alive the memory of what the Lord had said and done in the precious years of his earthly ministry. There was no thought that in thus writing down the story of Jesus they were doing a work more sacred or requiring more inspiration than the work of their companions, who simply told orally the same story. And Luke sets forth very clearly what he considered the essential qualifications and also the purpose of an evangelist, when he says, "It seemed good to me, also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty concerning those things wherein thou wast taught by word of mouth."

How many such gospels were written, both before and after Luke wrote his, we shall never know. Of some we have fragments or quotations in early writers; of some we have only the names; and doubtless there were still others. There is always the hope that somewhere in the sands of Egypt they may be waiting discovery; but probably they have served their day and wholly passed away. For a time they had more or less circulation—indeed, some of them were popular; but eventually they were discarded for our canonical gospels. The reason for this was because either they contained nothing except what could be found in bet

ter and more complete form in the canonical gospels, or else there had crept into them statements and teachings which the good judgment of the orthodox church could not endorse. When thus discarded, their disappearance was natural. Copies would not be multiplied, and those in existence would be worn out or lost. And in the time of Diocletian, when a special attempt was made by Roman persecutors to destroy the Christian sacred books, these discarded gospels would be cheerfully surrendered to the inquisitor's fire, if by so doing the canonical gospels could be kept back.

The Gospel according to the Hebrews is the most famous of these discarded gospels. It is quoted by writers from the end of the second century to the fifth century; and there is some evidence that it was in existence five centuries later. Possibly we may yet find a copy of it; but all that we know about it now is from the quotations and statements in these writers. It seems to have been a gospel written in Aramaic, and circulating among the Hebrew Christians. Apparently there were various forms of it-revisions and additions from time to time; and it was eventually translated into Greek. There has been much discussion as to its origin and value, and it still remains "one of the problems and enigmas of early Christian literature" (Moffatt). Some scholars set it aside as a compilation from the first three canonical gospels, with worthless addi