Development of the New Testament canon a novelty in Irenaeus's time. "Against Heresies" 3.11.7 acknowledges that many heterodox Christians use only one gospel while 3.11.9 acknowledges that some use more than four. The success of Tatian's Diatessaron in about the same time period is "...a powerful indication that the fourfold Gospel contemporaneously sponsored by Irenaeus was not broadly, let alone universally, recognized." Irenaeus apparently quotes from 21 of the New Testament books and names the author he thought wrote the text. He mentions the four gospels, Acts, the Pauline epistles with the exception of Hebrews and Philemon, as well as the first epistle of Peter, and
New Testament apocrypha the Gospel of Thomas is heavily gnostic and likely not written by orthodox Christians. In any case, both of these documents offer insight into what the theoretical Q document might have looked like. A number of gospels are concerned specifically with the "Passion" (from Greek "pathos" (suffering) i.e.: the arrest, execution and resurrection) of Jesus: Although three texts take Bartholomew's name, it may be that one of the "Questions of Bartholomew" or the "Resurrection of Jesus Christ" is in fact the unknown "Gospel of Bartholomew". A number of texts aim to provide a single harmonization of the canonical gospels, that