Before there were Four Gospels

There were no eye-witness reporters to the life of Jesus, writing down his every word. His words and deeds were remembered and re-told in the oral tradition, meaning that as word went out about Jesus in different directions, different stories and deeds were remember, retold, and embellished to suit the needs of the story-teller and audience.

Eventually, someone began to write some things down. Scholars have known for many years that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source for their gospels. Most scholars also recognized that Matthew and Luke had another written source at their disposal. This source has long been known as Q, for the German word quelle. Q appeared to be a collection of Jesus sayings. There was no way of knowing if there was anything else to Q, and its very existence was doubted by some because they couldn't imagine a "gospel" without narrative of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

Then in 1945, the Nag Hammadi library was discovered in upper Egypt. Among the findings in the library was the Gospel of Thomas. In Honest to Jesus, Funk says:

Of stunning importance for the study of Christian origins was the appearance of a complete text of the Gospel of Thomas. Three Greek fragments of "an unknown gospel" had been published in 1897... When Coptic (ancient Egptian language) Thomas was discovered at Nag Hammadi, those fragments were recognized at once as part of the same gospel. Coptic Thomas is a fourth-century manuscript; the Greek fragments can be dated about two hundred years learlier, thus placing them among the very earliest fragments of any of the gospels surviving from antiquity.

Thomas was a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus. There is minimal dialogue and virtually no narrative. Thomas lacks a passion narrative; it has no appearance stories, no birth and childhood stories, and it provides no narrative context for the various sayings and dialogues. Indeed, Thomas looks very much like the hypothetical Sayings Gospel Q, now embedded in Matthew and Luke. There is an approximately 40 percent overlap between the sayings found in Thomas and those found in Q. Many of the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar believe that Thomas represents an early version of Jesus' sayings that is independent of the canonical gospels.

First there were the sayings, and the Jesus communities who wrote them down, read them, and perhaps sought to live them out.