New Testament the Anchor Bible Dictionary), may be the earliest known New Testament canon attributed to mainstream Christianity. It is similar, but not identical, to the modern New Testament canon. The oldest clear endorsement of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John being the only legitimate gospels was written "circa" 180 AD. A four gospel canon (the "Tetramorph") was asserted by Irenaeus, who refers to it directly in his polemic "Against the Heresies", "It is not possible that the gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live,
Hebrew Gospel hypothesis (1915) in its article "Gospel of the Hebrews" noted that Nicholson cannot be said ...[to] have carried conviction to the minds of New Testament scholars." Rudolf Handmann (1888) proposed an Aramaic Gospel of the Hebrews but reasoned that this was not the Hebrew Matthew and there never was a Hebrew Ur-Matthew. James R. Edwards, in "The Hebrew Gospel and the development of the synoptic tradition" (2009), suggested that a lost Hebrew Ur-Matthew is the common source of both the Jewish-Christian Gospels and the unique L source material (material not sourced from Mark or Q) in the Gospel of Luke. A