of distance in both time and space that produced some urgency to write various things down. In the case of the Gospels, the urgency was presumably that the original eyewitnesses and earwitnesses were dying off by at least the second half of the first century A.D., and there was a felt need to preserve the traditions they had originally conveyed orally. It is certainly not impossible that in some quarters this felt need came much earlier and may have produced things like: (1) an Aramaic collection