one gospel of Jesus Christ. At least by the time that the titles were affixed to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, many Christians believed that these gospels were different renderings of this one, unalterable core. By the time of Irenaeus, and probably earlier, the common ground among precisely these traditional four witnesses was the standard against which Christians measured religious claims. Attempts to add other compositions to their number or to trump their significance with a single composition
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