1. Look at Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem, do the bean counting of "names dropped" and this is the result:
Matthew: 9/76 = 12%
Mark: 6/76 = 8%
Luke: 42/76 = 55%
John: 19/76 = 25%
That evidently excludes John the Baptist, who gets 58 mentions. This is Tertullian raging against Marcion, and he mentions John more often than Mark and Matthew combined?
2. Then look at the bulk of early MSS found, and John overwhelms. And while Irenaeus kicks off with the canonical order when he is the very first Patristic ever to name gospels (and gets the number and names right straight away!), he later once slips into John, Luke, Matthew, Mark in Adv. haer. III 11,8.
I have taken the first 137 MSS from wikipedia, and - rather ruthlessly - assigned each MS a span of one single century. Some had 400-600, others 225-275, and so on - and I have rounded them all down to one single century, for instance changing 400-600 to 400-500, 225-275 to 200-300, and so on.
Why? To get a decent overview, no matter how incredibly crude the method is. Here is the result for the first 137 MSS totaling 183 gospels / letters that range from 100-200 to 700-800:
John 31
Matthew 27
Romans 14
Heb 13
Luke 12
Revelation 9
1 Cor 8
James 5
Eph 3
Mark 3
1 Peter 2
1 Thessalonians; 2 Thessalonians 2
2 Cor 2
Gal 2
Philemon 2
Philippians 2
1 John 1
1 Peter; 2 Peter 1
1 Thessalonians 1
1 Timothy 1
Jude 1
Titus 1
40 Acts, 31 John, 27 Matthew - that is the top 3 and number 4 are the teens of Romans (14), Hebrews (13) and Luke (12), after which we get into the single digits for counts.
Everybody knows that such a picture is impossibly skewed, and when we drop that last century alone, 700-800, we get 1 less Romans yet 24 (!) less Acts, and the new top 3 is:
John 31
Matthew 27
Acts 16
Just look at that, John beats them all; John, that anomalous outlier of the gospels, a poetic and spiritual text that even I wouldn't include in the canon even thouhg (or perhaps because) I really love the core of John.
John only got included in the NT because he couldn't be excluded, it is as simple as that. Go on then, please, make a business case for including John in the NT - I simply can't
And when we observe until 300 CE we have 19 John and 12 Matthew, and the century after that adds 3 John and 7 Matthew
Yet 1 picture says more than millions of words could:
Thomas, John, Marcion: that is the Chrestian tradition.
And it gets countered by Mark, after which Matthew redacts Marcion into Luke while writing his own on the side
And it whill take until 500 CE before Christianity starts gaining the upper hand, and it will require the Inquisition to get rid of any and all Chrestianity for good, so every record of it is wiped from the history books