'...we have no evidence that the church ever sat down collectively or as individual churches and composed criteria for judging which Gospel (or other literature) it thought best suited its needs. On the contrary, the key realization which best explains our inability to find an ultimate "chooser", which best explains why the church didn't take the easy way out with some kind of singular Gospel and why it never cobbled together a set of criteria to all the Gospel candidates, is that the church essentially did not believe it had a choice in the matter! The question "why did you choose these Gospels?" would not have made sense to many Christians in the second century, for the question assumes that the church, or someone in it, had the authority to make the choice. To many, it would be like the question, "why did you choose your parents?"'
CE Hill, Who Chose the Gospels? Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy, p.231.
