Gospel of Peter to be the work of the Apostle Peter: However, scholars generally agree that Gospel of Peter is pseudepigraphical (bearing the name of an author who did not actually compose the text). The true author of the gospel remains a mystery. Although there are parallels with the three Synoptic Gospels, Peter does not use any of the material unique to Matthew or unique to Luke. Raymond E. Brown and others find that the author may have been acquainted with the synoptic gospels and even with the Gospel of John; Brown ("The Death of the Messiah") even suggests that the author's source
New Testament Writings attributed to the apostles circulated among the earliest Christian communities and the Pauline epistles were circulating, perhaps in collected forms, by the end of the 1st century AD. One of the earliest attempts at solidifying a canon was made by Marcion, "circa" 140 AD, who accepted only a modified version of Luke (the Gospel of Marcion) and ten of Paul's letters, while rejecting the Old Testament entirely. His canon was increasingly rejected by other groups of Christians, notably the proto-orthodox Christians, as was his theology, Marcionism. Adolf Harnack in "Origin of the New Testament" (1914) observed that the church