PROTO-GOSPELS
According to this view, Matthew was one of Jesus' Twelve Disciples and wrote his Gospel in Aramaic or Hebrew. It was translated into Greek and this was the version used by Mark and Luke to write their Gospels, with Mark abbreviating Matthew to create a shorter Gospel (but adding in some material based on the preaching of Peter) and Luke using Matthew and Mark to create an expanded Gospel.
This theory makes sense and explains why the earliest Christian writers regard Matthew as the earliest Gospel and why there's no mention of an earlier proto-Gospel. This is sill the view taken by the Catholic Church.
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YES
The Synoptic Gospels must have gotten their testimony about Jesus from somewhere and the similarities between them suggest that they didn't all come up with it independently. A lost proto-Gospel would explain the similarity in language and structure between the Synoptic Gospels.
A proto-Gospel is a 'stepping stone' between the word-of-mouth preaching of Jesus and his Disciples (called the kerygma) and the eventual composition of the Synoptic Gospels. Since the Gospels were written decades after Jesus' time, the authors would need a 'source' to base their stories on.
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NO
No proto-Gospel that matches the Synoptics has been discovered: it's pure theory. The Gospel of Thomas doesn't fit the bill (lack of apocalyptic themes or crucifixion) and Matthew can't be the proto-Gospel that Mark uses because too much stuff is missed out.
Liberal scholars date the Gospels late in the 1st century CE but traditionalists date them much earlier. If the Synoptics are independent eyewitness accounts of the events of Jesus' life, they don't require an intermediate 'source'. There was no need for proto-Gospels because actual Gospels were written straight away.
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