Is there a gospel older than Mark?

Answer 1

To attempt to answer this question, we need to understand the background of the synoptic gospels. In spite of the later attribution to the apostles whose names they now bear, all the New Testament gospels were written anonymously. As the question implies, Mark's gospel was the first New Testament gospel to be written, followed by Matthew and Luke. Moreover, the authors of Matthew and Luke relied on Mark for everything they knew about the mission of Jesus. But they also relied on another document known as the hypothetical 'Q' document or Q Gospel for sayings material attributed to Jesus.

Scholars of the Q Gospel say that it was written in four stages over a period of several years. It is very likely that the earliest form of this document was written before Mark's Gospel.

There is a division of opinion on the sayings gospel known as the Gospel of Thomas. Although there is a view that GThomas was written in the second century, the weight of scholarly opinion now is that it was written in the middle of the first century, possibly before Mark's Gospel. The 'late view' for Thomas points out that there is no known early mention of the gospel. The 'early view' sees similarities between Thomas and Q - in fact at an early point in Q scholarship it was thought that they might have been the same document.