How did the Christian believers record the teachings of Jesus in the first and second centuries?

Answer 1

Mark's Gospel is now recognised as the original source of information about the life and mission of Jesus. The gospels now known as the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John were copied or inspired from that original. A further original sayings document is the hypothetical 'Q' document, which both Matthew and Luke used for sayings attributed to Jesus. Q was the second important step in defining the teachings of Jesus.

The Q document itself seems to have been written in three distinct layers, with the earliest layer very possibly predating Mark's Gospel, perhaps around 50 CE:

• The earliest layer, Q1, consists largely of sayings about the wisdom of being a true follower of Jesus. The authors had been been deeply involved in defining exactly what it meant to belong to the school of Jesus and had spent a great deal of thought and intellectual effort in finding arguments for a certain set of attitudes and actions as definitive for the kingdom of God.
• Q2 introduces prophetic and apocalyptic pronouncements of judgement upon those who refused to listen to the Jesus people. The mood in Q2 is drastically different. The process of social formation had taken its toll and loyalty was now the issue, with some people having to decide between Christianity and their families.
• Q3 registers a retreat from the fray of public encounter to entertain thoughts of patience and piety for the enlightened ones while they wait for their moment of glory in some future time at the end of human history. This all suggests that it was written some time after the First Roman-Jewish War. Q3 introduces a number of new ideas about the relationship to the history of Israel, and upgrades Jesus to the level of a divine being who could be imagined talking to God as his Father and debating with Satan as his tempter.

Possibly around the same time as Q, came the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings gospel similar in many ways to Q. Although at one stage favoured for inclusion in the New Testament canon, it was eventually rejected.

By the second century, there was an explosion of gospels, many of which were attributed to one or other of the apostles. Most of these were sayings gospels, rather than narrative gospels, and dealt with what Jesus might have taught, rather than the events in his life. Others are known as infancy gospels because they dealt with the early period in the life of Jesus.