into groups, or into a whole book. Papias refers to a ‘book of oracles’ which was probably such a collection of Jesus’ words, and forms (after Paul's epistles) the earliest Christian manuscript. Then, in the decade of the sixties, the progressive elimination of the first generation of Christians, the actual eye-witnesses, followed by persecution and war, which caused the dispersal of the Jerusalem circle, provided an urgent incentive to record Jesus’ teaching in imperishable shape. Mark, from the circle of Peter, first created the gospel as a literary form. From a remark by Papias we deduce that he accompanied Peter on mission, towards the end of his life, giving simultaneous translation of Peter's Aramaic sermons in colloquial Greek. His gospel, written soon after Peter's death, is a major effort to order and rationalize a number of difficult elements into a chronological narrative which marries event and theology and harmonizes the two with scriptural prophecy. The reflections in it of oral traditions - deliberate repetitions and symmetrical arrangements - and of the patterns of popular story-telling are very strong. In presenting his material in written form he had, it is true, some Greek models, and he must have been influenced by the literary doctrines of Aristotle's Poetics. All the same, he was trying to do something which had never been done before and his problems were not only those of an unpracticed writer but also those of an amateur theologian ‘trying to transmit a complex message which he himself had received from the far from lucid Peter. Hence he often does not attempt to solve the problems of comprehensibility and falls back on a constant use of a ‘secrecy motive’. He stresses that the apostles and disciples did not always understand what Jesus was trying to do; he implies that the full meaning of his person and message was not understood during his ministry, though some followers grasped more than others, and indeed that not all of Jesus’ teaching was intended for the public. Mark's gospel has thus been called a book of secret epiphanies, mysterious glimpses of a manifestation of divinity, rather than a coherent explanation of the phenomenon of Jesus Christ. The text was much altered and interpolated during the earliest period, for both good and bad reasons, and was a favorite source-book for primitive heresiarchs to justify their divergences. Matthew and Luke, quite independently, produced their own narratives. They evidently found Mark unsatisfactory, both in general and from the point of view of their own particular interests - Luke belonged to the school of Paul's gentile mission, and Matthew represented the rump of the Jewish Jerusalem Church after the murder of James and the departure of Peter. Each had Mark to work from, though probably in a carelessly copied form; and they also had another source, called by modern scholars 'Q', which may be the ‘oracles’ which Papias mentioned, but is really nothing more than an academic device to designate nonMarcan materials common to both Luke and Matthew. All these synoptic gospels, moreover, emerged from a miasma of oral tradition and counter-tradition; and it is possible that Mark's Greek gospel was itself derived from an earlier version of Matthew written in Hebrew - this would accord with the traditional view in the early Church that Matthew was the first of the synoptic, a view still held by some Roman Catholic scholars. The gospel attributed to John, on the other hand, has no demonstrable connection with the synoptic, though it also derives, naturally, from the same oral miasma. It is, however, more of a theological treatise than a historical narrative and shows strong connections both with the Pauline epistles and with the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. It has been edited, as its closing words make clear; and there is evidence of heavy tampering in the earliest manuscripts - obvious glosses, and so forth - as well as sheer muddle. Thus chapter 5 should follow chapter 6, and the final chapter, 21, is clearly an addition. These imperfections add to the ordinary difficulties of evaluation. All four gospels, being literary documents some 1,900 years old, suffer from the problems created by handwritten transmissions. For most of the history of Christianity, scholars and theologians have had to work from corrupt late manuscripts (most of them without realizing the dangers). Few medieval writers made any effort, when copying, to find ancient models; this was primarily a Renaissance concern. Even so, Erasmus's Greek New Testament (1516) and Robert Etienne's (1551) came from Greek medieval manuscripts which contained innumerable accumulated errors. Earlier manuscripts emerged only gradually. In 1581 Theodore Beza found the sixth-century 13