The so-called "lost gospels"

The next chapter in Jonathan Morrow's book Questioning the Bible is an intriguing one: "Why Were Some Gospels Banned from the Bible?" Today we hear comments that early Christians suppressed some Gospels and that there were early Christianities with various viewpoints about Jesus. After a struggle only one story was allowed to continue – the one we see in the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But is this revisionist history true? Nope.

The author starts by giving us a background of discovered Gospels. In 1945, fifty-two papyri were discovered at Nag Hammadi in lower Egypt. Some of these had the word "gospel" in their title. These have caused quite a bit of controversy and speculation. People began to wonder if there had been a cover-up by the church. These so-called "lost Gospels" were made up of New Testament Apocrypha and Gnostic writings. The apocryphal stories dealt with the childhood of Jesus and the three days between death and resurrection, the parts of his life not covered by the four gospels we have today. For example, one apocryphal work is called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in which we find a story about Jesus getting angry at a child and striking him dead.

Most people are unfamiliar with the idea of Gnosticism, which is seen in many of these newly-found documents. Gnostics said there were multiple creators, the world and body are evil, only spirit and soul are good, Jesus was a spirit being rather than a human being, ignorance rather than sin is the ultimate problem, and special knowledge brings salvation. The most famous example of Gnostic writings is the Gospel of Thomas, which is made up of sayings of Jesus rather than a chronology of his life. Here's one of them: Simon Peter wants Mary to leave the group because he believes women are not worthy of life. Jesus says in response, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven." How's that for a sexist remark?

Here's the bottom line. These Gospels were not lost to the early church. Instead, Christians knew about them and rejected them for good reasons. We learn nothing significant about the historical Jesus. In addition, these writings are dated long after the time of Jesus and his earliest followers. Even Bart Ehrman, a famous skeptical critic of the New Testament, admits that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John provide the earliest and most reliable witnesses to the words and works of Jesus. Here is what he says: "The oldest and best sources we have for knowing about the life of Jesus are the four Gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This is not simply the view of Christian historians; it is the view of all serious historians of antiquity of every kind, from committed evangelical Christians to hard-core atheists."

OK, more from the book next week.