In the early to mid twentieth century, form critics thought finding oral "laws of development" within the New Testament would prove the form critic's assertions that the texts had evolved within the early Christian communities according to "sitz im leben". Since Mark was believed to be the first gospel, the form critics looked for the addition of proper names for anonymous characters, indirect discourse being turned into direct quotation, and the elimination of Aramaic terms and forms, with details becoming more concrete in Matthew, and then more so in Luke. Instead, in the 1970s, New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders wrote that: "There are no hard and fast laws of the development of the Synoptic tradition... On all counts the tradition developed in opposite directions. It became both longer and shorter, both more and less detailed, and both more and less Semitic".