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such Gospels became most widely used—those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament—but many others were written. We still have some of the others: for example, Gospels allegedly by Jesus’s disciple Philip, his brother Judas Thomas, and his female companion Mary Magdalene. Other Gospels, including some of the very earliest, have been lost. We know this, for example, from the Gospel of Luke, whose author indicates that in writing his account he consulted “many” predecessors (Luke 1:1), which obviously no longer survive. One of these earlier accounts may have been the source that scholars have designated Q , which was probably a written account, principally of Jesus’s sayings, used by both Luke and Matthew for many of their distinctive teachings of Jesus (e.g., the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes). 7
    Jesus’s life, as we have seen, was interpreted by Paul and others in light of the Jewish scriptures. These books too—both the Pentateuch and other Jewish writings, such as the Prophets and Psalms—were in wide use among Christians, who explored them to see what they could reveal about God’s will, especially as it had been fulfilled in Christ. Copies of the Jewish Bible, usually in Greek translation (the so-called Septuagint), were widely available, then, in early Christian communities as sources for study and reflection.
    Early Acts of the Apostles
    Not just the life of Jesus, but also the lives of his earliest followers were of interest to the growing Christian communities of the first and second centuries. It is no surprise, then, to see that accounts of the apostles—their adventures and missionary exploits, especially after the death and resurrection of Jesus—came to occupy an important place for Christians interested in knowing more about their religion.One such account, the Acts of the Apostles, eventually made it into the New Testament. But many other accounts were written, mainly about individual apostles, such as those found in the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Peter, and the Acts of Thomas. Other Acts have survived only in fragments, or have been lost altogether.
    Christian Apocalypses
    As I have indicated, Paul (along with other apostles) taught that Jesus was soon to return from heaven in judgment on the earth. The coming end of all things was a source of continuous fascination for early Christians, who by and large expected that God would soon intervene in the affairs of the world to overthrow the forces of evil and establish his good kingdom, with Jesus at its head, here on earth. Some Christian authors produced prophetic accounts of what would happen at this cataclysmic end of the world as we know it. There were Jewish precedents for this kind of “apocalyptic” literature, for example, in the book of Daniel in the Jewish Bible, or the book of 1 Enoch in the Jewish Apocrypha. Of the Christian apocalypses, one eventually came to be included in the New Testament: the Apocalypse of John. Others, including the Apocalypse of Peter and The Shepherd of Hermas, were also popular reading in a number of Christian communities in the early centuries of the church.
    Church Orders
    The early Christian communities multiplied and grew, starting in Paul’s day and continuing in the generations after him. Originally the Christian churches, at least those established by Paul himself, were what we might call charismatic communities. They believed that each member of the community had been given a “gift” (Greek: charisma ) of the Spirit to assist the community in its ongoing life: for example, there were gifts of teaching, administration, almsgiving, healing, and prophecy. Eventually, however, as the expectation of an imminent end of the world began to fade, it became clear that there needed to be a more rigid church structure, especially if the church was to be aroundfor the long haul (cf. 1 Corinthians 11; Matthew 16, 18). Churches around the