life and teachings of the Master. We have no distinctive history of the
process. It was gradual, and probably almost unconscious. The fact that
three of the Gospels were associated with the names of apostles and the
other with Luke, the faithful companion of Paul, undoubtedly tended to
establish their authority; but the chief canonizing influence was the
need of such records for private and public reading. The production,
early in the second century, of spurious gospels, like the Gospel of
Marcion, written to furnish a literary basis for certain heretical
doctrines, also the desire of the Church Fathers to have records to
which they could appeal as authoritative hastened the formation of the
first New Testament canon. The use of the Gospels in the services of the
church, which probably began before the close of the first Christian
century, by degrees gave them an authority equal to that of the Old
Testament Scriptures. The earliest canon consisted simply of these four
books. They seem to have been universally accepted by the Western Church
by the middle of the second century. About 152 A.D. Justin Martyr, in
proving his positions, refers to the _Memoirs of the Apostles compiled
by Christ's apostles and those who associated with them_, and during the
same decade his pupil Tatian made his _Diatessaron_ by combining our
present four Gospels.

[Sidenote: _The second edition of the New Testament_]

Meantime the natural desire to supplement the teachings of Jesus by
those of the Apostles led the Church to single out certain of the
epistles and associate them with the Gospels. Already in the first
century the apostolic epistles and traditions were cherished by the
individual churches to which they had been first directed. In time,
however, the need for a written record of the apostolic teachings and
work became widely felt. Hence, by the end of the second century, Acts