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: INTRODUCTION The first Christians had no written Gospel. When they first came into the fellowship of the church they learned a short compend of the doings and sayings of Jesus which Paul calls the '.'tradition" or "traditions" because it was "handed down" from older Christians to those who later came into the churches. Paul gives two quotations from this " tradition" as he knew it (I Cor. 11:2, 23;. 15:3). Nothing more was needed, for early Christians were more interested in the glorified Christ seated at the right hand of God than in the historical Jesus of Galilee, and they were expecting his speedy return on the clouds of heaven to usher in the messianic regime. No one thought of writing books. The few letters, perhaps twelve in all, which have come down to us from the first thirty-five years of Christian history were each written to serve some immediate and pressing need, not for preservation as books. In the seventh decade of the first century something occurred to change this. The earliest Gospel was written. This was not simply the reduction to writing of the familiar "tradition," for it does not accord with the two fragments of that tradition which we find in First Corinthians. The earliest Gospel embodies a rival " tradition," differing at important points from that of Paul. How is this to be explained ? And above all how came a Gospel to be written at all when men were expecting the speedy end of the age ? The ancient explanation was, that upon the death of Peter, Mark, who had served as his interpreter in his preaching among the Greek-speaking congregations of the West, sought to preserve from oblivion the memorabilia of Jesus which he had often heard Peter relate, and so committed them to writing. This idea is clearly reflected in II Pet. 1:15, and in Justin Dial...