Ancient authors and readers did not work with manuscripts the way we work with printed texts. It is thus all too easy to fall into anachronistic assumptions about how the Gospels were written.

Writing the Gospels challenges such assumptions in the light of recent work on ancient media studies and suggests more appropriate models for the composition of the New Testament Gospels.

While many aspects of ancient composition are addressed, the main concerns of this study are first to establish the centrality of memory in ancient composition and secondly to explore the implications of assuming that Evangelists worked mainly from memory, as many of their contemporaries did.