It is Paul's letters that are by years, often decades, the first Christian Scriptures and undoubtedly influenced how the later gospels were written.
The protagonist of this 'imminent eschatology', as it is called, was Paul of Tarsus. Throughout the next two Christian generations, at least, it was presumed that the end was nigh, that the Messiah would return with a terrible swift sword. Jesus expected the arrival of the Kingdom of God within his generation. It is now generally recognised that Loisy was correct. No one was sure how to define Modernism, but the churchly authorities were certain they knew it when they saw it in the writings of Loisy. For his trouble, he was censured and eventually excommunicated from the Catholic Church for the arch-heresy of Modernism. In it he pithily phrases the central fact of early Christianity: "Jesus foretold the Kingdom, but it was the Church that came." Loisy was attempting to refute the individualism of the Protestant theologian, Adolf Harnack, by pointing to the historical necessity of an ecclesial organisation. In 1904 the French Catholic theologian, Alfred Loisy, published a book called L'Evangile et l'Eglise, The Gospel and the Church.
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