New Testament letter composed under the guise of a presumably lost letter of the Apostle Paul, the Epistle to the Laodiceans. The books of the New Testament were all or nearly all written by Jewish Christians—that is, Jewish disciples of Christ, who lived in the Roman Empire, and under Roman occupation. Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, is frequently thought of as an exception; scholars are divided as to whether Luke was a Gentile or a Hellenistic Jew. A few scholars identify the author of the Gospel of Mark as probably a Gentile, and similarly for
Development of the New Testament canon present in none of these texts. The narrative mainly follows the chronology of John. This is called the Diatessaron ("(Harmony) Through Four") and it became the official Gospel text of the Syraic church, centered in Edessa. Irenaeus of Lyons referred directly to a defined set of four gospels (the "Tetramorph"), "c". 180. In his central work, "Adversus Haereses" Irenaeus denounced various early Christian groups that used only one gospel, such as Marcionism which used only Marcion's version of Luke, or the Ebionites which seem to have used an Aramaic version of Matthew, as well as groups that used more than