Canon Westcott writes of the three Synoptic Gospels, that “they represent, as is shown by their structure, a common basis, common materials, treated in special ways.  They evidently contain only a very small selection from the words and works of Christ, and yet their contents are included broadly in one outline.  Their substance is evidently much older than their form....  The only explanation of the narrow and definite limit within which the evangelic history (exclusive of St. John’s Gospel) is confined, seems to be that a collection of representative words and works was made by an authoritative body, such as the Twelve, at a very early date, and that this, which formed the basis of popular teaching, gained exclusive currency, receiving only subordinate additions and modifications.  This Apostolic Gospel—­the oral basis, as I have endeavoured to show elsewhere, of the Synoptic narratives—­dates unquestionably from the very beginning of the Christian society” ("On the Canon,” preface, pp. xxxviii., xxxix).  Mr. Sanday speaks of the “original documents out of which our Gospel was composed” ("Gospels in the Second Century,” page 78), and he writes:  “Doubtless light would be thrown upon the question if we only knew what was the common original of the two Synoptic texts” (Ibid, p. 65).  “The first three Gospels of our Canon are remarkably alike, their writers agree in relating the same thing, not only in the same manner, but likewise in the very words, as must be evident to every common reader who has paid the slightest attention to the subject.... [Here follow a number of parallel passages from the three synoptics.] The agreement between the three evangelists in these extracts is remarkable, and leads to the question how such coincidences could arise between works which, from the first years of Christianity until the beginning of the seventeenth century, were understood to be perfectly independent, and to have had each a separate and independent origin.  The answer to this question may at last, after more than a hundred years of discussion, be given with tolerable certainty, if we are allowed to judge of this subject according to the rules of reason and common sense, by which all other such difficulties are resolved.  ’The most eminent critics’—­we quote from ‘Marsh’s Michaelis,’ vol. iii., part 2, page 170—­’are at present decidedly of opinion that one of the two suppositions must necessarily be adopted—­either that the three evangelists copied from each other, or that all the three drew from a common source, and that the notion of an absolute independence, in respect to the composition of our three first Gospels, is no longer tenable’....  The alternative between a common source and copying from each other, is now no longer in the same position as in the days of Michaelis or Bishop Marsh.  To decide between the two is no longer difficult.  No one will now admit that either of the four evangelists has copied from the other three, 1.  Because in