Early on in the early church, the two Gospels that received the most attention were Matthew and John. This is because they were associated with apostles, and they also were believed to be the fullest presentations of Jesus’s teaching. Then, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mark came to have a very central role in how the Gospels were seen because Mark came to be seen as the first Gospel written. And so even though it’s the shortest of the Gospels—and certainly the most impactful in the