Why were many of the epistles written before the gospels?

A:Epistles are letters, or at least supposedly so. Since Paul was preaching and writing to his churches in the fifties of the first century, and perhaps a little earlier, his genuine epistles were written at that time. The Book of Hebrews is generally called an epistle, but it is clearly an encyclical or a sermon, altered afterwards to appear as if an epistle from Paul; nevertheless its primitive theology brands it as a very early Christian book.

That leaves the issue of why the gospels were written so much later than Hebrews and the epistles of Paul. They were all written anonymously and only attributed to the apostles whose names they now bear later in the second century. Even if those attributions are correct, the gospels now known as the Gospels of Mark and Luke would have been written somewhat later than Paul's epistles, since Mark and Luke were students of Paul.

However, biblical scholars say that the attributions to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were unlikely to have been correct - in fact none of the gospels could have been written by an eyewitness to the events described. By a parallel reading in the original Greek language, scholars have demonstrated that Matthew and Luke were based on Mark, with Matthewcontaining some 600 of the 666 verses in Mark, often using exactly the same Words in Greek. John can also be shown to be loosely based on Luke. Thus, the answer for the three Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John is that they simply could not have been written until some time after Mark was published and distributed.

Mark can be dated to approximately 70 CE, but we can not be sure what the author's sources were. Raymond E. Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament) says that Mark seems to depend on traditions (and perhaps already shaped sources) received in Greek. But it could be more than that. Parallels have been discerned between Paul's epistles and Mark. Since there is no doubt among scholars that the epistles were written first, then the original gospel could indeed have been written around some key events, persons and ideas identified in those epistles. On this view, the gospels were written after Paul's epistles because they drew material from the epistles.