early Christians as having been those writings which God inspired the Christians to view as real, as opposed to other writings of the period, e.g., the so-called "apocryphal Gospels," which are regarded even today by the Catholic Church as relevant to Jesus' teachings, but not inspired (and not to be viewed as truth, or sacred) (Gundry, 1970, pp. 55, 65).
The order in which the Gospels of the New testament were composed has provided many arguments among scholars, but there is some agreement that the Gospel of Mark is pre-eminent, that it was composed in Rome about 70 A.D., and that it drew from a source known as "Q", which was a collection of sayings by Jesus circulated much earlier in the Christian community at Rome. The Gospel writers Matthew and Luke, authors of the other "synoptic" Gospels, probably took Mark and/or "Q" as their source, altered the material to suit their own needs, and circulated their own Gospels. The Gospel of John, however,
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