Lost scriptures: books that did not make it into the New Testament Read Free

Sarah Beckwith, whose insatiable curiosity and vast knowledge make her, among other things, an extraordinary dialogue partner; my graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carl Cosaert, whose diligence as a research assistant is sans pareil; Darryl Gless, my unusually supportive Senior Associate Dean, and the entire dean’s office at UNC-Chapel Hill, who provided me with a much needed academic leave from my duties as chair in the Department of Religious Studies, allowing me to complete the project; and especially my editor Robert Miller, who convinced me to produce the book and once more went above and beyond the call of editorial duty in helping me bring it to completion.

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    NON-CANONICAL
    GOSPELS

    8
    NON-CANONICAL ACTS OF THE APOSTLES

Introduction
    There were many Gospels available to early Christians—not just the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John familiar to readers of the New Testament today.
    Even though most of these other Gospels have become lost from public view, some were highly influential within orthodox circles throughout the Middle Ages. These would include, for example, the intriguing Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which tells of the miraculous and often mischievous deeds of Jesus as a young boy between the ages of five and twelve, and the so-called Proto-Gospel of James, which records events leading up to (and including) Jesus’ birth by recounting the miraculous birth, early life, and betrothal of his mother, the Virgin Mary—an account highly influential on pictorial art in subsequent centuries.
    Others of these Gospels played a significant role in one community or another in antiquity, but came to be lost—known to us only by name until modern times, when uncovered by professional archaeologists looking for them or by accident. Of these, some have been uncovered in their entirety, as is the case of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, some evidently representing actual teachings of the historical Jesus, but others conveying “gnostic” understandings of Jesus’ message. Other Gospels have been recovered only in fragments, including the famous Gospel allegedly written by Peter, Jesus’ apostle, which, among other things, records the actual events of the resurrection, in which Jesus is seen emerging from his tomb, tall as a giant. Yet others are known only as they are briefly quoted by church fathers who cite them in order to malign their views, including several Gospels used by various groups of Jewish Christians in the early centuries of the church.
    I have included fifteen of our earliest non-canonical Gospels in the collection here. They are of varying theological persuasion: some appear to be perfectly “orthodox” in their views (e.g., Egerton Papyrus 2); others represent a form of Jewish Christianity that later came to be condemned as heretical (e.g., the Gospel of the Nazareans); yet others appear to have been written by early Christian “Gnostics”1 (e.g., the Gospel of Philip). These texts are not completely representative of the various forms of early Christian belief about Jesus’ words, deeds, and activities; but since they derive from a wide range of time and place from within the first three centuries of early Christianity, they give some sense of the rich diversity of Christian views from this early period of the church.
    1For the views of Gnostics, see Ehrman, Lost Christianities , 113–34.

    The Gospel of the Nazareans
    Jewish Christians in the early centuries of the church were widely thought to have preferred the Gospel of Matthew to all others, since it is Matthew that stresses the importance of keeping the Jewish Law down to every jot and tittle (5:17–20) and that emphasizes, more than any other, the Jewishness of Jesus.1 According to a number of ancient sources, one group of Jewish Christians, sometimes known as the Nazareans, produced their own version of Matthew, translated into