Asia Minor appears to have been far in advance of the other Churches of Christendom in literary activity, during the second century. This pre-eminence was due mainly, we may suppose, to the fact already mentioned, that it had become the second home of the Apostles and primitive teachers of Christianity. But the productiveness of the Asiatic Christians in this respect was doubtless stimulated by the pressure of opposition. This region was the hot-bed of heresies and the arena of controversy. Nor is it unimportant to observe that the main subjects of discussion were of such a kind as must necessarily have involved questions intimately connected with the Canon. Montanism, with its doctrine of the Paraclete and its visions of the New Jerusalem, would challenge some expression of opinion respecting the Gospel and the Apocalypse of St John, if these writings were disputed. The Paschal controversy courted investigation into the relations between the narratives of the Synoptists and the Fourth Evangelist. Marcionism, resting as it did on the paramount and sole authority of St Paul's Epistles and of the Pauline Gospel, would not suffer friend or foe to preserve silence on this fundamental question. And so again, though in a less degree, the disputes with Cerinthians, with Ophites, with Basilideans, with Valentinians, with all the various sects of Gnostics, could not have been conducted, as we see plainly from the treatises of Irenæus and Hippolytus, without constant appeals to the testimony of written documents--thus indicating, at all events roughly, the amount of authority which the writers accorded to the more prominent books of our New Testament Canon. To men like Irenæus or Eusebius, who had this extensive literature in their hands, the teaching of this Church generally, as well as of the more prominent individual writers belonging to it, could not have been open to question. Their approval of its orthodoxy therefore, either by silent assent or by studied panegyric, is a fact of real moment.
Over and above this relation to the books of the New Testament generally, the two points to which modern controversy directs attention, and which therefore deserve special consideration in any review of the writers belonging to the school of St John, are--_first_, what indications the extant fragments and notices contain, that they recognized or rejected the Fourth Gospel; and _secondly_, what can be learnt from these same sources as to the degree of authority which they accorded to the Apostle of the Gentiles.