What was the Word of God to the early church before the New Testament existed?

Before It Was Written works backward from Paul's letters to recover the faith and message the apostles actually preached — the standard they held and the covenant they lived by — before those letters were collected into a canon.

Paul was not planting churches around a hermeneutic or a collection of texts. He was forming people into the likeness of Christ. His letters were servants of that purpose — not the center of it.

The answer is both simple and unsettling: the early church was centered on Christ and His New Covenant of discipleship. When later generations began treating the collected writings as the message itself, something was quietly lost.

This book is an attempt to name what was lost — and point back toward it.

"I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you." — Galatians 4:19