The Order of the Gospels

Let this extract from Clement stand here, for the sake of the history and for the benefit of those who read it. Come, now, let us point out the undisputed writings of this apostle too. First, then, let his Gospel be acknowledged, which is well known to all the churches under heaven. That the ancients had good reason to list it in the fourth place, after the other three, may be made plain as follows.

Those inspired and truly godlike men, I mean the apostles of Christ, were wholly purified in their lives and adorned in their souls with every virtue, but they were unskilled in speech. They were confident in the divine, wonder-working power given them by the Savior, but they neither knew how nor tried to present their Teacher’s lessons with persuasive and artful words. Using only the demonstration of the divine Spirit that worked with them, and the wonder-working power of Christ that was accomplished through them, they proclaimed the knowledge of the kingdom of heaven to the whole world, and gave little thought to the writing of books. They did this because they were aided by a ministry greater than human. Paul, for instance, the most powerful of all in command of words and the most capable in thought, committed no more than the briefest letters to writing, although he had countless secret things to tell; for he had touched the visions of the third heaven, had been caught up into God’s own paradise, and had been counted worthy to hear unspeakable words there. [a] The rest of our Savior’s followers, the twelve apostles, the seventy disciples and countless others besides, were not unacquainted with these things either. Yet of all the Lord’s discourses, only Matthew and John have left us written records, and tradition says that they came to write only under pressure of necessity. [b]

Matthew, who had first preached to the Hebrews, when he was about to go to others as well, committed his Gospel to writing in his native tongue, and so by his writing made up to those he was leaving for the loss of his presence. And when Mark and Luke had already published their Gospels, they say that John, who all this time had used unwritten preaching, at last came to write for the following reason. When the three Gospels already written had come into everyone’s hands and into his own, they say that he welcomed them and bore witness to their truth, but that the record lacked only the account of what Christ had done first, at the beginning of his preaching. And the account is true. One can see that the three evangelists recorded only what the Savior did during one year after John the Baptist was shut up in prison, and that they marked this very point at the beginning of their histories. After the forty days’ fast and the temptation that followed it, Matthew shows the time covered by his own book when he says, “When he heard that John had been handed over, he withdrew from Judea into Galilee.” [c] Mark likewise: “After John was handed over, Jesus came into Galilee.” And Luke, before beginning on the deeds of Jesus, marks the time in a similar way, saying that “Herod, adding to the evil deeds he had done, shut John up in prison.” [d]

They say, then, that the apostle John was urged for these reasons to hand down in his Gospel the period passed over in silence by the earlier evangelists, and what the Savior did in it, that is, what came before the Baptist was imprisoned; and that he marked this very point, once by saying, “This beginning of marvels Jesus made,” and again by mentioning the Baptist in the midst of the deeds of Jesus as still baptizing at Aenon near Salim, where he shows it plainly in the words, “For John had not yet been thrown into prison.” [e] So John, in writing his Gospel, hands down what Christ did while the Baptist had not yet been thrown into prison, and the other three evangelists record what came after the Baptist’s imprisonment. Anyone who attends to this will no longer think the Gospels disagree with one another, since the Gospel according to John contains the first of Christ’s deeds, and the others the history of what happened to him at the end of that time. It was natural, then, for John to pass over in silence the genealogy of our Savior’s flesh, since Matthew and Luke had already written it, and to begin with his divinity, which the divine Spirit had reserved for him as for the greater. [f]

Let this be what we have to say about the writing of the Gospel according to John. The occasion of Mark’s Gospel we have explained earlier. [g] Luke too, at the beginning of his book, set out himself the reason why he composed it. He makes plain that, since many others had rather rashly undertaken to compose a narrative of matters of which he himself was fully assured, he felt it necessary to free us from the uncertain opinions about the others, and so handed down in his own Gospel the reliable account of the things whose truth he had fully grasped, helped by his companionship and time with Paul and by his conversations with the rest of the apostles. [h] So much from us on these matters. At a more fitting time we will try to show, by quoting the ancients, what others too have said about them.

Of John’s writings, besides the Gospel, the first of his letters is acknowledged as undisputed both by those of our day and by the ancients. The other two are disputed. As for the Apocalypse, opinion about it is still drawn both ways among most people; but it too will receive its verdict at the proper time from the testimony of the ancients. [i]