There were many gospels and many different accounts of Jesus just as there were many types of early Christian community that produced them. Today only a few of these gospels survive. The most familiar are those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because by the tth century they had been gathered together, deemed authoritative (canonical) and included in the New Testament'. The latter written in Greek was bound together with the Old Testament the scriptures of the Jewish people written in Hebrew but appropriated by Christianity in an expanded Greek version) to form christian Bible. This was just one step in the long historical process whereby one version of Christianity came to establish itself as the authoritative, "catholic (universal) form of church, and to win out over its rivals. Once this happened, it was possible to draw a distinction between canon gospels and apocryphal ones, and to downgrade the importance of the latter, But in the earliest centuries after Jesus' death it was possible for any Christian group to produce its own gospel, thereby securing its particular understanding of Jesus and the life he inspired. A few of these apocryphal gospels have survived, including the very early Gospel of Thomas, which is considered briefly in this chapter. They serve to remind us that the Jesus depicted in the New Testament gospels was not the only Jesus who was remembered and revered in early Christian circles