MARKUS BOCKMUEHL
Ancient Apocryphal
Gospels
INTERPRETATION Resources for the Use of
Scripture in the Church
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© 2017 Markus Bockmuehl
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Names: Bockmuehl, Markus N. A., author.
Title: Ancient apocryphal gospels / Markus Bockmuehl.
Description: Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 2017. | Series:
Interpretation: resources for the use of scripture in the church | Includes
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ISBN 9780664235895 (hbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611646801 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Apocryphal Gospels—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Apocryphal
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CONTENTS
Series Foreword vii
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xii
CHAPTER 1: ANCIENT CHRISTIAN GOSPELS 1
The Four Gospels—and the Others 8
Who Read What in the Early Church? 10
The (Re)Discovery of Noncanonical Gospels 14
“Gnosticism”?—A Definition 18
Gospels of the Original Jesus, Suppressed by
an Authoritarian Church? 21
The Design and Approach of This Book 28
How Many Apocryphal Gospels? 31
What Makes a Gospel “Apocryphal”? 38
How to Organize the Texts: A Taxonomy 48
Where to Read the Noncanonical Gospels Today 51
CHAPTER 2: INFANCY GOSPELS 55
Why Infancy Gospels? 55
The Infancy Gospel of James 58
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas 72
Other Infancy Texts 80
Conclusion: Infancy Gospels 84
CHAPTER 3: MINISTRY GOSPELS 87
The Problem of “Fragmentary” Gospels 87
A Note on Q 89
“Jewish Christian” Gospels? 92
Ministry Gospels on Papyrus 104
Papyrus Egerton 2 (+ Papyrus Köln 255) 106
“Papyrus” Oxyrhynchus 840 110
Other Papyrus Fragments 114
A Secret Gospel of Mark? 120
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The Abgar Legend 121
Alternative Whole Narrative Gospels? 123
Conclusion: Ministry Gospels 132
CHAPTER 4: PASSION GOSPELS 137
The Gospel of Peter 137
The Unknown Berlin Gospel/Gospel
of the Savior (P.Berl. 22220) 152
The Strasbourg Coptic Papyrus (P.Argent.
Copt. 5, 6, 7) 154
The Discourse on the Cross (Nubian Stauros Text) 155
Passion Gospels Associated with Pilate, Nicodemus,
and Joseph of Arimathea 156
Gospels of Gamaliel? 158
Conclusion: Passion Gospels 159
CHAPTER 5: POST- RESURRECTION
DISCOURSE GOSPELS 161
New Testament Origins? 162
The Gospel of Thomas 163
The Gospel of Philip 183
Other Dialogue “Gospels” or Gospel- Like Texts
from Nag Hammadi 190
The Gospel of Mary 199
The Gospel of Judas (Codex Tchacos) 204
Gospels of the Egyptians 210
Gospel of Bartholomew 212
The Epistle of the Apostles 215
Conclusion: Post- Resurrection Discourse Gospels 220
CHAPTER 6: HOW TO READ APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS 225
Glossary of Technical Terms 239
Bibliography 243
Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources 291
Index of Subjects 302
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1
Christians since antiquity have grounded their faith on its authen-
tic attestation in the gospel of Jesus Christ received from his first
apostles. This grounding is already explicit in the Bible itself and
has remained an uncontroversial aspect of historic Christian praxis
and worship since antiquity.
Throughout their history, churches of virtually every stripe
have—for all their tacit or fiercely contested differences—shared
a core conviction about Jesus of Nazareth as in some sense both
a human being in history and yet also “God with us.” Jesus has
always been encountered and experienced in a variety of ways.
Most prominent since antiquity have been practices of prayer and
common worship that include a liturgical meal celebrating both his
memory and his presence, accompanied by the public reading of
the four gospels—authoritative writings about his teachings and
ministry received in the names of his earliest disciples.
But the early Christian use of gospels also has a fascinating
dynamic of its own, operating in theologically powerful and yet sur-
prisingly polyvalent ways in diverse periods and communities.
The term “gospel” surfaces in the earliest tradition as character-
izing Jesus’ message. Matthew and Mark both present “the gospel”
(to euangelion) as the radical message and praxis of Jesus about the
imminent coming of God’s kingdom (see esp. Mark 1:14–15; 8:35;
10:29; 13:10; Matt. 4:23; 9:35; 24:14). Luke, who is more aware of
CHAPTER 1
Ancient Christian Gospels
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the public, imperial context of his writing, does not seem to like this
noun, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment. He never
uses it in his gospel, and in Acts it appears only once each on the
lips of Peter and of Paul (Acts 15:7; 20:24). The verb “to announce
good news” (euangelizomai), on the other hand, occurs frequently
in both Luke and Acts.
Even Matthew and Mark, however, already show a transition in
meaning that evidently occurred at a very early stage in the tradi-
tion—it is in fact already complete in the Letters of Paul, which
predate all four New Testament gospels. Whereas “the gospel” in
Matthew and Mark almost invariably reports what Jesus himself
preaches and enacts, even here there are signs that by the time
of these evangelists “the gospel” has become the content of the
message he entrusts to his disciples, and indeed the message about
him. So Matthew’s Jesus himself can promise that “this gospel of
the kingdom” will be proclaimed throughout the world after his
death (Matt. 24:14; 26:13). And Mark 1:1 opens with the words,
“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ”—a famously ambigu-
ous phrase that leaves unresolved whether the gospel here in view
is Jesus’ message (as in 1:14), the message about Jesus (e.g., 13:10;
14:9), or perhaps even—by a kind of metonymy—Mark’s own book
that sets forth this message. But it clearly involves the person of
Jesus, including his message and ministry as well as his death.
Additionally, and well before Mark writes his account, it
is already clear that when in the early 50s Paul preached to the
Corinthians the gospel by which they are saved, this entailed at a
minimum a narrative passion and resurrection sequence involv-
ing “Christ died for our sins, . . . he was buried, . . . he was raised
on the third day, . . . he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve,
then” to many others in succession (1 Cor. 15:1–6; cf. 2 Tim. 1:10;
2:8). There seems moreover to be continuity here with the simi-
larly sequential narrative, quoted a few chapters earlier, of words
and actions of Jesus “on the night when he was betrayed” (1 Cor.
11:23–25).
A few decades later, in a more retrospective account of Peter’s
first preaching to the Gentiles during the mid- 30s, the narrative
of Acts has Peter assuring his audience at the house of Cornelius
about “the word” God sent to the children of Israel, “proclaiming
the good news [euangelizomenos]” of peace through Jesus Christ
(Acts 10:36, my translation). That “word” (logos), he goes on to say,
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came to expression through the “message” (rhēma) associated with
certain particular events that recently transpired in Jewish Palestine,
beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how
God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with
power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were
oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses
to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to
death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third
day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who
were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with
him after he rose from the dead. (Acts 10:37–41, NRSV)
In other words, even the earliest stages of the tradition, both
as attested in Paul and as attributed to the remembered Peter in
Acts, envisaged the gospel to include a narrative about Jesus’ public
ministry and message, culminating in his death and resurrection.
(Significantly, Luke places a Mark- like apostolic gospel outline
on Peter’s lips. This is despite its obvious divergences from the
structure of Luke’s own gospel account with its addition of birth,
infancy, and ascension stories.)
Readers familiar with the gospels and with cognate English
words like “evangelical” are sometimes surprised to discover the
extent of scholarly debate and controversy about the origin and
precise meaning of the early Christian use of the term euangelion.
One school of thought has long stressed the conviction that the
term must be understood as originating in connection with the
Hellenistic use of euangelia (Greek plural) to denote “happy news”
or “good news”—as used in the eastern empire most publicly
in relation to official Roman imperial announcements about
good news like the accession, birthday, or victory in battle of the
emperor as “Savior” (sōtēr, a word the New Testament uses much
more sparingly than later Christian tradition). The most famous
pre- Christian example is an inscription in praise of the birthday
of Caesar Augustus that was erected at Priene and other cities in
Asia Minor in 9 BCE. He is celebrated as “our God” whose birth
“signified the beginning of happy news [euangelia] for the entire
world.” Even without using the word “gospel,” the Roman poet
Virgil’s famous Fourth Eclogue, composed around 42 BCE, deploys
Isaiah- like imagery in anticipation of an age of eschatological peace
and salvation associated with the birth of an unnamed child (though
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not perhaps identifiable as the hoped- for son of Mark Antony and
his wife Octavia, as scholars used to think).
The notion of public good news had been common currency
for many centuries, being attested ever since Homer (Odyssey
14.152, 166: euangelion, singular). Indeed the commonplace
inflation of such terminology could even become the butt of jokes:
the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (ca. 446–386 BCE)
already had a sausage seller poking fun at bawdy market hyperbole
by intoning, “Hey, Senators, I’m the first with tremendous news
[euangelisasthai]: never since the war began have sardines been so
cheap” (Knights 642–45; trans. Roche 2005). The familiarity of such
terminology can be gauged too by its adoption as a Latin loan word:
the Roman writer Cicero repeatedly and somewhat informally does
this, as when writing to his friend Atticus in 60 BCE, “First, I have
what I think is good news [euangelia] . . .” (Letters to Atticus 2.3.1).
One might think, therefore, that Christian talk of to euangelion,
the good news, basically just recycled for Jesus a well- known cliché
that could evoke little more than a yawning response. That would
hardly convey the sort of grandly anti- imperial ambition which the
claim of a Christian euangelion is sometimes said to advance. To
be sure, resistance to the force of empire soon became at least a
sporadic occurrence—and sometimes part of the very essence of
what it meant to be a Christian, as stories about the trials of martyrs
repeatedly affirm. But despite sometimes heated scholarly debate, it
remains difficult to document in the New Testament any sense that
the use of the term “gospel” serves a clear anti- imperial function.
A related line of argument has sometimes taken such early
Christian terminology to imply the church’s origin not as a Palestinian
Jewish messianic movement but as a Hellenistic divinized hero cult,
drawing on culturally commonplace idioms and assumptions about
heroes or rulers.
But to acknowledge the existence of such potential Hellenistic
resonance is not yet to understand what a (or the) gospel conveys
in the early Christian texts. Even for Greek- speaking Jews and
Christians, gospel language must have carried a kind of dual
significance. On one hand, there will have been at least an awareness
of the secular use of “good news,” sometimes exploited in the
service of ideological ends and propaganda. Jewish writers in Greek
like Philo and Josephus repeatedly illustrate the currency of such a
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meaning of “good news.” Secular as well as religious overtones were
indeed in the air, even for Jews.
On the other hand, however, we must recognize that the Greek
terminology was also already part of a richly textured discourse of
prophetic and divine communication in older, pre- Christian Jewish
Greek Scriptures. In that respect the Greek words conveyed a
Jewish, Old Testament meaning—often associated with the second
part of the book of Isaiah, which announces the Servant of the
Lord’s return to redeem Jerusalem (52:7) and speaks of “good
news” to the afflicted and imprisoned (61:1, both times using the
verb euangelisasthai). While the Greek Old Testament does not
deploy the noun “gospel” in this fashion in either the singular or the
plural, the formative role of widely influential texts like these in the
early Christian understanding of the gospel of Jesus is clear. Other
Jewish texts in Greek like Psalms of Solomon 11:1 clearly highlight
such usage, and Paul quite confidently appropriates Isaiah 52:7 in
speaking of the activity of the apostles as proclaimers of a message
that is “the gospel” (see Rom. 10:15–16; cf. 1 Cor. 9:14; also Stanton
2013, 281–92 and passim and Horbury 2005, 2006).
Unlike the Greco- Roman use almost exclusively of the plural
euangelia, the early Christian writers deploy the singular “gospel”
(euangelion) consistently and uniquely in relation to the message
of or about Jesus. That said, even here there is some evidence
of semantic ambiguity from the start. As we saw earlier, Jesus’
message soon became the message about him (Mark 1:1; 14:9;
and 16:15; note esp. Matt. 26:13; 24:14, “this gospel,” i.e., not only
Jesus’ words and actions but evidently an account of that message
and ministry—such as Matthew himself provides; cf. Stanton 2013,
95–98). Already in the corpus of Pauline Letters the term came to
be used interchangeably for either the message or its content: the
apostle speaks of both “the gospel” and “my gospel” (cf. Phlm. 13
with 2 Tim. 2:8 and Rom. 16:25).
As already noted, Luke never uses the noun “gospel” in his
narrative of Jesus (but see Acts 15:7; 20:24), although he does
deploy the cognate verb twenty- five times in Luke and Acts. In
Acts 13:32–33 he places on Paul’s lips a definition of what it means
to preach the gospel: “we bring you the good news that what God
promised to our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by
raising Jesus.” The New Testament’s Johannine writings avoid the
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Greek euangel- word group altogether except at Revelation 10:7 as
well as at 14:6, where it denotes a message of judgment.
Matthew’s usage in particular evidently had a powerful
influence on subsequent understanding of what the gospel might
be. Very rapidly, its range of meaning expanded from Jesus’
kingdom message or (as in Paul, e.g., 1 Cor. 15) the message
about Jesus’ death and resurrection to include accounts of his life,
preaching, innocent death, and resurrection “for us.” As we saw
earlier, an early narrative form of this is implied in Peter’s account
in Acts 10:34–42, and in the writings of Ignatius (d. ca. 107) it is
already evident that “the gospel” designates for him the crucifixion-
resurrection message of Jesus (Smyrnaeans 7.2), quite possibly in
its Matthean form (cf. Smyrnaeans 1.1 with Matt. 3:15; similarly cf.
Didache 8.2 with Matt. 6:9–13; also 2 Clement 8.5, more loosely,
with Luke 16:10–11; see further Hill 2006; Foster 2005).
Significantly, not later than the middle of the second century
the notion of this gospel story “according to” one apostolic figure
or another had become attached to gospel books—for example, in
Justin, First Apology 66.3 (see Stanton 2013, 92–97). A little before
this, Marcion had already identified his edition of Luke as “the
gospel.” Similar examples can be found in other early documents:
the form of the Didache’s reference to its source suggests that “the
gospel” was already used to designate “a gospel writing, almost
certainly Matthew, some decades before Marcion” (thus Stanton
2013, 77; cf. Kelhoffer 2014, 72).
If this is correct it follows, importantly, that known portions of
one or more of the subsequently canonical gospels were known and
cited as “the gospel” before any of the extant noncanonical gospels
were composed. To some extent this is inevitably a judgment
about a serendipitous state of affairs at this present time, which
the discovery of new sources or compelling reassessments of
existing ones might require us to revise. And absence of evidence
is not evidence of absence. But in the meantime it matters for our
assessment of recent and current claims that while specific literary
identifications are sometimes difficult or textually ambiguous (e.g.,
Luke 16:10–11 in 2 Clement 8.5, cited above), no ancient author
refers to any identifiable version of a noncanonical text like Thomas
or Q as “the gospel.”
Further on this note, it has been repeatedly shown (e.g.,
Hengel 1984; Gathercole 2013) that while the titles of the existing
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New Testament gospels are clearly not from the pen of the
original authors, they and the associated authorial attributions are
nevertheless both stable and remarkably early, probably from the
first half of the second century. Although in theory compatible with
simplistic explanations in terms of wholesale deliberate “forgery,”
as Ehrman (2013) prefers, such a date makes it difficult to rule out
the possibility that these apostolic attributions are instead based in
some fashion, whether correctly or in error, on an existing chain of
collective or individual living memory.
Manuscript evidence suggests that the short forms “according to
Matthew” or “according to Luke” are secondary abbreviations from
an original longer form, “the gospel according to” Matthew or Luke;
see, for example, Gathercole 2013. (Gathercole 2012b illustrates
this same usage in the flyleaf of Matthew included with manuscript
∏
4
, dating from ca. 200. Thus Bovon’s assertion that “we have no
codices [with inscriptio and subscriptio] of these gospels predating
their canonization” [1988, 20–23] turns out to be an argument
from increasingly partial silence, which will require fuller facts and
rather more nuance. It is hardly the comprehensive refutation of
the “extravagant claims of Martin Hengel” that Ehrman [2013, 53
and 53n55] imagines).
Hengel additionally observes that while the title “gospel” is
routinely introduced in reference to other gospels like Thomas or
Nag Hammadi’s Gospel of the Egyptians, it is never lost from a text
that has once been so designated—even though gospel status itself
seems to fade from interest for later compositions at Nag Hammadi,
where “dialogues” and “revelations” predominate over narratives
of the earthly Jesus. Among other things, this suggests that the
relatively rapid successive publication of the Synoptic Gospels
between the 60s and the 90s, designated within a few decades as
“the gospel according to X,” may have established a compelling
precedent for the choice of titles in later accounts of the teachings of
Jesus. This precedent entailed both the term “gospel” and the name
of an apostolic guarantor, as evidenced not only in John but also in
several noncanonical gospels. (See Hengel 2008b, 110–11, 182–83.)
A related point concerns certain material aspects of conservation
and innovation in gospel writing. As we will see, there appears from
the start to be greater textual stability in the extant manuscripts of
subsequently canonical gospels than in those of Thomas, Peter, and
other apocryphal gospels. In relation to this it has been plausibly
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suggested that the more widespread copying, liturgical reading,
and memorization would have had a stabilizing effect on the textual
tradition, certainly allowing for the composition of new gospels (like
Matthew or Luke) but largely eliminating the scope for successive
textual recensions of the same text (Evans 2015, 36–37). While
Evans’s related inferences about the longevity of New Testament
autographs look a little problematic in their specificity, a manuscript
lifespan of a century and a half was indeed a reasonable expectation
(see, e.g., Houston 2014, 175, on Oxyrhynchus)—and might
reinforce this stability for texts that circulated widely.
Except for scribal identifications in titles or colophons (i.e.,
concluding scribal comments), the term “gospel” itself is remarkably
rare in the body of ancient gospel- like texts at Nag Hammadi or
elsewhere. Leaving aside late works like the Gospel of Nicodemus
(B 14.1) or the History of Joseph the Carpenter (1.2; 30.3), the small
handful of examples from antiquity includes the Gospel of Mary (9;
18) and the Gospel of Truth (17.1–4; 18.11; 34.34–35) for the saving
message about Jesus. Nag Hammadi’s Sophia of Jesus Christ, in a
question about why “in the gospel” (evidently a text!) Sophia’s Son
is called “human” and the “Son of Man” (104.1), also demonstrates
this meaning.
The Four Gospels—and the Others
Until the nineteenth century, Western biblical scholars tended to
take for granted that the emergence of the early church was based
on “one holy catholic and apostolic” faith and that the canon of
Scripture was essentially the result of a continuous and intention-
ally advancing original movement from which others deviated.
However challenged that movement may have been by detractors
without and heretics within, on this view it proceeded organically
from Christ to the apostles, to the fourfold apostolic gospel and the
New Testament read in light of the apostolic rule of faith (regula
fidei). This in turn became crystallized in agreed forms of worship
and confession in the Trinitarian creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon.
I am not myself averse to all aspects of this traditional picture.
No doubt it may be said to oversimplify or distort. But this very
excess also functions to some extent like a political cartoon, usefully
capturing salient features precisely by its clarifying selectivity and
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exaggeration of a few defining attributes out of the mass of conflict-
ing data.
At the same time, even mainstream accounts of Christian ori-
gins are today rightly more nuanced about the ecclesial diversity
of the first two centuries. And even among those who (like myself)
would wish to retain an account of creedal Christianity’s organic
connection to the faith of the apostles, most accept the eloquent
evidence for a rather more complex picture. In that sense the meta-
phor of the cartoon may usefully be balanced by that of a pointil-
list master painting, which is best appreciated from just the right
amount of sympathetic distance rather than by overinterpreting its
constituent points of detail.
Even a brief encounter with first- and second- century sources
shows that the reception and circulation of early Christian writ-
ings about Jesus remained remarkably fluid and elusive during that
period. This is true even for some of the canonical texts: it is, for
example, difficult to know quite how many second- or even third-
century Christians could have had regular access to written copies
of Paul’s Letters, Acts, or indeed the Gospel of Mark: only a few
small fragments survive from that period, all of them from Egypt
(for environmental reasons, as explained below p. 10; see Hurtado
2013 for statistics).
We do know that the second century was extraordinarily gen-
erative and fertile in religious and literary terms; one widely (if
perhaps somewhat credulously) cited calculation suggests that
our surviving sources from that period represent approximately
15 percent of the known Christian literary output (so, e.g., Mark-
schies 2002, 98; 2015, 21; he likes to refer to the second century
as Christianity’s “laboratory”: Markschies 2003, 120; 2012g, 34 and
elsewhere).
And yet it remains the case that by the mid- second century, gos-
pel accounts in the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were
increasingly emerging as the accepted fourfold narrative of the gos-
pel of Jesus Christ. Before the century was out, this had become
self- evident to someone like Irenaeus, closely familiar as he was
with the practice of the churches both of Asia Minor and of Rome:
in the face of multifarious sectarian alternatives, the catholic accep-
tance of the Four seemed to him as incontrovertible as the four
winds of nature (Against Heresies 3.11.8). Writing a few decades
later on the basis of both Alexandrian and Palestinian experience,
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Origen (ca. 185–254) famously quipped that “the Church has four
gospels; heretics have many” (Homilies on Luke 1.2).
To be sure, few congregations even in urban settings will have
owned copies of all four “canonical” gospels. And even in places that
affirmed these four as authoritative, they were now often encoun-
tered collectively rather than discretely. The extant manuscript tra-
dition and actual evidence of use suggest that Christians at this time
may often have physically experienced these texts not so much as
four complete individual books, but in more episodic fashion through
excerpts, informal or formal harmonies (most influentially Tatian’s
Diatessaron)—or indeed through one particular gospel (most often
Matthew or John) understood in light of such a harmony.
Who Read What in the Early Church?
Despite some early attempts to establish definitive lists of all New
Testament books, including the gospels, this “canonizing” effort
did not achieve an agreed final form until the later fourth century.
(Famously this is articulated in the Thirty- Ninth Festal Letter of
Athanasius in 367 CE: for the text, see Grosheide 1948; a partial
translation is offered in Metzger 1997, 312–13 [and discussion on
210–12]; cf. Brakke 2010b, with a new translation of the surviving
letter, 57–66.)
But does this mean, as some scholars continue to assert, that no
consensus about authoritative gospels existed until fourth- century
authoritarian decrees imposed their will upon the previously unlim-
ited flow of early Christian tradition and literature?
A recent inventory of pre- 300 Christian literary sources includes
a little over thirty gospel texts (Hurtado 2006, 209–21, updated
online as Hurtado 2013; cf. Lührmann and Schlarb 2000, 22). It
is in the nature of the evidence that statistical statements on this
subject are necessarily somewhat tenuous. The sample size is tiny,
and a small textual fragment in any case cannot prove the existence
of the entire text of which it is a part. With some notable exceptions
(mainly from Derveni, Dura Europos, Herculaneum, Nessana, and
Petra as well as Qumran: cf. Leach and Tait 2000, 239; Tov 2003,
100–103), papyrus evidence is largely restricted to Egypt, where
atmospheric conditions particularly favored its survival—and where
many of the known extracanonical texts originated and thrived. (The
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only surviving noncanonical gospel- like text from outside Egypt is
perhaps a Greek fragment of the Diatessaron from Dura Europos
on parchment, that is, processed animal skin rather than papyrus:
Yale P.Dura 10, formerly Dura Parchment 24; see below, p. 127.)
Except for the gospels of Thomas (P.Oxy. 1, 654, 655) and Mary
(P.Ryl. 463; P.Oxy. 3525), no noncanonical gospel before 300 CE is
extant in more than one copy. (P.Oxy. 2949 and 4009 are both some-
times assigned to the Gospel of Peter, but this seems unlikely in
one and possibly both cases, for reasons discussed below.) No other
gospel- like texts approach the manuscript dissemination of Mat-
thew or John, nor for that matter the persistent breadth of attesta-
tion in extant early Christian literature of any of the four gospels
that became canonical.
The statistics of extant manuscripts from the first three cen-
turies coincide with those from literary sources in documenting
Matthew and John as the most popular gospels by far, with Luke a
relatively distant third. Mark was almost never copied at all: out of
just over thirty known gospel papyri predating the year 300, at most
three contain Mark (∏
45
; P.Oxy. 5073; and possibly ∏
88
; see Hurtado
2013 [addenda], citing Barker 2009; also cf. Head 2012, 114–15,
who points out that ∏
45
appears to punctuate and mark up the text
of Mark, though not of the other gospels, for public reading).
While commentaries or scholia on Matthew, John, and Luke
emerge in the second century, the first commentary on Mark
appears only in the seventh, half a millennium later. (See, e.g.,
Wucherpfennig 2002 and Hill 2004 on John; Löhr 2003 on Luke;
Cahill 1998 on Mark; also Kok 2015 on second- century reception
of Mark.) In the preface to his commentary on Matthew, Jerome
(345–420) could already claim to have benefited from extensive
expositions by Theophilus of Antioch (late second century), Hip-
polytus (ca. 170–236), Origen (ca. 185–254), and numerous subse-
quent commentators in Greek and Latin (Jerome, Commentary on
Matthew, Preface 4; cf. Scheck 2008, 19–20).
If one stops to think about it, the position of Mark’s Gospel is
perhaps the most surprising. After two centuries of New Testament
scholarship’s preoccupation with the priority of Mark, this gospel’s
virtual absence from the earliest manuscript tradition rightly strikes
us as peculiar. What might explain this? At a time when manuscripts
were beyond the reach of most private citizens, and even most
churches could not afford the luxury of a complete four- gospel codex
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12
(for whose production expensive parchment rather than papyrus
turned out to be more viable), perhaps there was less need for Mark:
90 percent of it does appear in Matthew, who provides a more satisfy-
ing introduction and conclusion for a biographical narrative.
That said, the intensive use of Mark by Matthew and Luke is
itself eloquent tribute to this earlier gospel’s importance for the
Jesus tradition in the late first century. Moreover, several different
second- century endings of Mark imply that somebody was engag-
ing specifically with this gospel in the second century, and in the
light of other gospel narratives. Distinctively Markan features of
Tatian’s gospel harmony (the Diatessaron) are difficult to substanti-
ate with confidence and may not require that Tatian had at his dis-
posal a specifically Markan manuscript, although the evidence does
suggest knowledge of Mark 6:5; 10:18; and elements of the longer
ending, 16:9–20 (see, e.g., Head 1992b, 130, 137). Further discrete
second- century evidence for the use of Mark as one of the authori-
tative four is suggested by the mid- century Epistle of the Apostles
(see below, p. 220 and cf. Kelhoffer 2000, 155).
The use of Mark along with the other gospels is also implicit
in the emergence of four- gospel syntheses at this time: Theophi-
lus of Antioch (fl. ca. 169–183) is said to have compiled an early
example (Jerome, Epistle 121.6; De viris illustribus 25; cf. von
Campenhausen 1972, 174–75). He was followed some decades
later by the fourfold gospel synopsis that Ammonius of Alexandria
(ca. 175–242) constructed on the basis of Matthew—and which
Eusebius (ca. 260–340) refined in the system of gospel parallels
known as the Eusebian canons (see Eusebius’s Letter to Carpia-
nus, lines 4–5 to dia tessarōn . . . euangelion; on Ammonius’s syn-
opsis see further Crawford 2015b). In the fourth century Ambrose
of Milan knew (and heartily disapproved!) of a number of such
attempts at synthesis, as he did of apocryphal gospels in the names
of Basilides, Thomas, Matthias, or the Twelve (Commentary on
Luke 1.2; CSEL 32.11).
Justin Martyr (ca. 100–165) indicates that Christians read “the
memoirs of the apostles” at their weekly meetings (First Apol-
ogy 67). He remains notoriously inexact about quite what texts he
includes in this category, but it is clear that they are the writings of
“the apostles and their successors” (Dialogue 103.8)—that is, at least
two of each, and on one reading precisely four, which would coin-
cide nicely with the fact that Justin includes among them Matthew
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13
and (almost certainly) John as apostles, as well as Luke and Mark as
apostolic students (for documentation, see Hengel 2000, 19–20 and
nn.; more fully Hengel 2008b, 34–38; Stanton 2004; on Mark, see
also Bockmuehl 2010, 84–86).
Despite some strongly suggestive passages especially in the
First Apology, John’s Gospel admittedly appears less prominent in
Justin—possibly because it was at first less widely used in the West
(as forcefully argued by Watson [2013, 473–93], who however fails
to engage in appropriate detail with Hill 2004, 316–42, 191–204).
Justin is familiar with a few “extracanonical” but widely influen-
tial traditions like the birth of Jesus in a cave or the fire appearing
in the Jordan at his baptism (Dialogue 78, 88). Notably, however,
the only apostolic gospels Justin explicitly acknowledges are those
that appear in the New Testament—and no noncanonical gospel is
either cited or mentioned. Leaving aside Justin and his pupil Tatian,
other second- century writers of different stripes seem notably less
familiar with Mark and cite Luke infrequently while foreground-
ing Matthew and John. Although individual sayings (agrapha) are
indeed sometimes quoted as “gospel” or as words of the Lord (see
below, page 45), identified noncanonical gospels do not appear to
exercise a public liturgical role as analogous written sources along-
side Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This observation applies even
in Valentinian gnostic sources like Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora, as
Martin Hengel (2008b, 36–38) rightly notes, and is with very few
exceptions further confirmed in the manuscript tradition. Impor-
tant exceptions are the Infancy Gospel of James and the Epistle of
the Apostles, which in some settings did exercise a relatively wide-
spread liturgical role; but even these texts were not copied along-
side the four gospels in ancient codices.
While both the terms “canon” (a rule or norm) and “New Tes-
tament” are used in the second century, the combination of these
terms to designate a defined collection of writings appears only in
the fourth century (cf. Markschies 2012g, 13–14; Nicklas 2012b).
As we shall see, however, this does not mean that any of the
additional or alternative gospels ever achieved a comparable catho-
licity that might place them in competition with the four gospels,
whether individually or as a fourfold whole. Conversely, even
though Matthew and John were clearly more popular than Luke
and especially Mark, none of the Four was ever seriously ques-
tioned as authoritative for the church.
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Thus, the fourfold gospel status clearly emerged over the
course of the second century and gradually gained in definition and
exclusivity vis- à- vis some of the other permutations just described.
This reality stands in contrast to occasional assertions that the dis-
tinctive status of the canonical gospels derived from a wholly unan-
ticipated, “fictive” executive decision of fourth- century “theorizers”
engaged in “suppressing or manipulating” others (Watson 2013,
454 and passim; contrast Watson 2016, 16–20). To be sure, in the
late second century there is some limited evidence for the so- called
Alogi, an anti- Montanist splinter group around a Roman presbyter
who rejected the Gospel of John. But despite periodic assertions to
the contrary the evidence is marginal at best, and recent scholar-
ship has gone a long way toward demonstrating that there was no
sustained opposition to the Gospel of John in the early church (see,
e.g., Hill 2004 on Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.2.9, and Epiphanius,
Refutation of All Heresies 51.100).
Regional plurality and gradual convergence in the pattern of
Christian gospel usage in no way detracts from the surprisingly early
appearance of a widely acknowledged core of the fourfold gospel nar-
rative, in both the East and the West. And as Christoph Markschies
points out, signs of clear implicit reception and cross- referencing
already between the four gospels themselves points to a first- century
origin of this emerging core—even to the point that such material
began to be quoted as “Scripture” alongside the Old Testament
before the year 100 (Markschies 2012g, 26–27, 32–33, with reference
to Matt. 10:10//Luke 10:7 in 1 Tim. 5:18; cf. Didache 13.2).
The (Re)Discovery of Noncanonical Gospels
So far, so straightforward, one might think. Does this not offer us
a clear view of the canonical nest to which we may now contrast
the noncanonical cuckoo as the hostile newcomer (so Wright 2013,
358)? It might seem so. But that assumption would be a mistake.
Just when all seems order and clarity, the situation turns out to be
confusingly interesting!
The existence of gospels—indeed, numerous gospels—other
than the Four was well known in antiquity, although for long peri-
ods of church history our surviving mainstream Christian literature
considered them a fringe phenomenon (an impression that, by
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15
itself, could in theory reflect either de facto marginality or deliber-
ate marginalization).
But then in the first half of the last century the inherited view
of these texts was dramatically transformed by extensive manuscript
discoveries in a landfill site in Upper Egypt at the ruined ancient
city of Oxyrhynchus (“The Sharp- Nosed Fish”) beginning in 1896
and at Nag Hammadi (ancient Chenoboskion) in the late 1940s.
For our discussion in what follows, it will be worth noting that
these manuscripts are mostly written on either papyrus or parch-
ment. Manuscripts of both kinds could be part of codices (singular:
codex), books formed by folding larger sheets and binding them
together. Although not entirely unique to Christians, this medium
of the codex, rather than the book roll or scroll, is widely recognized
as the preferred Christian book technology for authoritative texts.
On a papyrus page the front is typically called the recto while the
back is called the verso. (See Leach and Tait 2000; Hurtado 2006,
84–86; and note the definitions of terms offered in the glossary of
technical terms below, page 239).
Oxyrhynchus
Unlike most other newly found written sources from antiquity, the
treasure trove of manuscripts that first came to light at Oxyrhyn-
chus in 1896 proved to be so vast that first editions of its contents
are still being published today. Bernard Grenfell (1869–1926) and
Arthur Hunt (1871–1934), two young archaeologists from Oxford,
joined work at an excavation that included the remains of an exten-
sive ancient landfill site on the outskirts of the Egyptian village of
Al- Bahnasa, 200 kilometers (about 125 miles) south of Cairo.
Before long this ancient rubbish deposit yielded tens of thou-
sands of documents, of which even now only a minority have been
published. At the time of writing, over eighty volumes of papyri
are in print (most recently Gonis et al. 2016), representing about 5
percent of the total—though a good deal of the remainder is in very
small fragments. Most of the texts are in Greek, although there is
some material in Coptic, Demotic Egyptian, Latin, and (for the lat-
est period) even Arabic. Among a wealth of classical literary as well
as scientific and documentary sources, there were large numbers
of biblical and other ancient Jewish and early Christian texts from
antiquity all the way to the seventh or early eighth centuries, with
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the bulk of material clustered between the first and third centuries.
(I will here for convenience designate all Oxyrhynchus fragments as
they were officially published, even though subsequent scholarship
has suggested not only that some extraneously acquired fragments
also originated from this site, but also that some early published
“Oxyrhynchus” finds may instead derive from the region of Fayûm,
about 100 km [62 mi.] closer to Cairo; see Blumell 2012, 89–162,
on the extensive epistolary networks and traffic patterns to and
from Oxyrhynchus.)
All in all, the literary material from Oxyrhynchus appears to
have comprised five major book collections, discarded at differ-
ent periods during the lifetime of the site (Houston 2014, 130–79).
Among the various Christian writings were about twenty examples
of what are often somewhat imprecisely called “apocrypha,” that
is, quasi- biblical texts with subjects related to the New Testament.
In addition to substantial parts of what we now know as the Gospel
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17
of Thomas, there were fragments of gospels in the names of Mary,
Peter, and James, along with three or four other previously unknown
gospel fragments. In the early decades of the twentieth century, this
gave rise to a lively discussion about the significance of this seem-
ing profusion of new and unknown gospels. Many other questions
remain unanswered—not the least of which is why so many biblical,
nonbiblical, and other manuscripts were consigned to an apparent
rubbish dump (provocatively explored by Luijendijk 2010; cf. more
recently Houston 2014, 130–79; and more generally Blumell and
Wayment 2015, on the Christian texts from this site).
Nag Hammadi
Continued study of the Oxyrhynchus discoveries has had far-
reaching consequences for our understanding of Greco- Roman
culture in late antiquity, and of Christianity’s place within it. But a
generation later came a further Egyptian discovery that was tiny by
comparison but at least initially seemed even more dramatic for an
understanding of early Christianity.
In December 1945, farmers near the village of Nag Hammadi,
several hours’ drive farther up the Nile (540 km [335 mi.] by road
from Cairo), discovered a collection of thirteen leather- bound
ancient codices in a pottery jar concealed at the foot of a cliff. Reli-
able accounts of their discovery are hard to come by, and successive
versions related by James M. Robinson and other editors seem to
have gained in the telling and become notably contradictory (see
Goodacre 2013). One of these volumes and part of a second one
were destroyed before they could be studied, but the rest turned
out to contain a wealth of mainly gnostic writings that were ini-
tially thought by some to have been part of the library of the nearby
monastery founded by St. Pachomius (ca. 290–346), and possibly to
have been discarded at a time of tightening canonical boundaries.
The improbabilities surrounding both this Pachomian theory and
the original discovery narratives have encouraged other, perhaps
more likely explanations. Among these is the idea that the manu-
scripts were an eclectic collection of privately commissioned cop-
ies, buried as part of their owners’ grave goods or Christian “books
of the dead” (thus Denzey Lewis and Ariel Blount 2014)—a point
rendered plausible by their discovery on the site of a large ancient
burial ground.
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The surviving fourth- century manuscripts are in Coptic transla-
tion rather than the original Greek, but they nonetheless represent
writings that in some cases were composed as early as the second
century. Several are presented as New Testament apocrypha. For
our purposes the most significant ones may be those with these titles:
The Gospel of Thomas
The Gospel of Philip
The Sophia of Jesus Christ
The Gospel of Truth
The Dialogue of the Savior
The Apocryphon of James
The Book of Thomas [the Contender]
The Gospel of the Egyptians
These Coptic documents are now all available in accessible edi-
tions and English translations (see below, p. 52).
“Gnosticism”?—A Definition
Because the controversial terms “Gnosticism” and “gnostic” are
frequently applied to texts like those found at Nag Hammadi, this
may be an appropriate point at which to offer a brief definition.
While the term itself derives from the Greek word for “knowl-
edge” (gnōsis), its significance here is in relation to a highly fluid
and diverse set of religious groups in the early Christian centuries.
“Knowledge” may function as a technical term as early as the later
writings of the New Testament (famously in 1 Tim. 6:20, where this
concept already appears related to a preoccupation with “myths”
and genealogies, 1:4). The noun’s complete avoidance in the Johan-
nine writings may also be significant.
Many key ideas about access to secret and otherworldly sal-
vific knowledge for the few were anticipated in popular Middle
Platonism and esoteric mysticism. In the most general sense they
have a wide and almost timeless currency across diverse religious,
philosophical, and even pseudoscientific manifestations, whether
ancient, medieval, or modern. Specifically Christian gnostics expe-
rienced their heyday in the second, third, and fourth centuries.
They developed sometimes elaborate mythologies influenced by
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19
Christian and Jewish scriptural texts (not least the opening chap-
ters of Genesis) as well as by Platonic philosophical ideas about
the origin and nature of humanity and the cosmos. Scholars often
distinguish Valentinians, on the one hand, from the more elabo-
rate mythologies of Sethians, “Barbelo gnostics,” and Ophites, on
the other (e.g., Rasimus 2009); but there is still no consensus on
these typologies. Certain gnostic ideas enjoyed a long and intrigu-
ing afterlife from late antiquity to the Middle Ages and beyond and
are sometimes thought to have influenced such groups as the Mani-
cheans and (much later) the Bogomils and Cathars.
As the name suggests, one of the key ideas uniting otherwise
diverse and differentiated groups was the belief that the adherents
were an elite gaining privileged access to knowledge of divinely
revealed insights. This secret knowledge was understood to carry a
saving significance in that it allowed the initiates to escape human-
ity’s fleshly condition, liberating their true divine spark from its
imprisonment in a corrupt materiality that is the evil design of an
inferior creator (the workman or demiurge).
In view of the complexity of the evidence, few generalizations
about gnostics or Gnosticism are likely to prove universally ser-
viceable. Indeed there has been a lively debate about whether the
“gnostic” terminology serves any useful purpose at all, with some
scholars casting doubt on whether these terms can ever be mean-
ingful (M. A. Williams 1996; cf. King 2003b; and more cautiously
Marjanen 2005). Certainly an important upshot of such debates is
the recognition that there was no single movement we could call
“Gnosticism.”
It is of course true that “gnostic” labels have often been deployed
indiscriminately or polemically. For our discussion it matters that
such terminology should not be invoked in order deliberately to
load the critical dice when discussing the apocryphal gospels. The
fact is that the terms “gnosis” and “gnostics” were indeed widely
used in antiquity for certain philosophical schools or haereses, by
Christian and non- Christian outsiders (e.g., Plotinus) as well as by
insiders. Even mainstream writers like Clement of Alexandria and
Origen implicitly acknowledged the validity of concerns for saving
knowledge in their rather different adoption of the language of gno-
sis in the service of catholic theological ends. So the active use of
the terminology is significant even if the term “gnostics” (gnōstikoi)
is relatively rare as a self- designation.
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“Gnosticism,” by contrast, is a potentially misleading modern
analytical construct (invented by the seventeenth- century com-
mentator Henry More), which for the sake of clarity we will avoid in
this book. (See further M. Edwards 1989; 1990; Layton 1995, 338;
Markschies 2003, 10–11; also McGuire 2010, 203–5 with nn5–7.)
On a related note, recent scholarship has also repeatedly called
into question whether several of the leading second- century found-
ers of such groups were themselves gnostic in any distinctive sense.
Martin Hengel, perhaps the late twentieth century’s leading New
Testament historian, acknowledged the profound influence such
prominent teachers clearly exercised on subsequent developments,
and he assigned the investigation of this problem to several of his
doctoral students and others. Their publications include Winrich
Löhr 1996 on Basilides (fl. 117–138), Christoph Markschies 1992
on Valentinus (d. ca. 165), Niclas Förster 1999 on Marcus (founder
of the Marcosians, mid- 2nd cent.), and Ansgar Wucherpfennig
2002 on the Valentinian commentator Heracleon. Similar work on
Ptolemy, the author of Letter to Flora explaining the Valentinian
approach to the Old Testament, remains desirable.
In a much- cited essay (2008a), Martin Hengel argues for the
development of these gnostic movements around the year 100 CE
out of Christian, Jewish apocalyptic, and Middle Platonic roots (cf.
further Lahe 2012; Drecoll 2013). In particular, Hengel suggests
that the attractiveness of gnostic ideas may have been in combining
a deep disillusionment about apocalyptic eschatology in the wake
of the catastrophic Jewish War with the educated Christian desire
for a viable philosophy of religion in Greco- Roman intellectual cul-
ture (560–63, 589–92). Such a cultural aspiration may also animate
Valentinian ethics: as an attempt to provide an intelligible Chris-
tian philosophical account of the good life, gnostic moral teaching
stresses ideas like the escape from materialism to a spiritual tran-
scendence, the control of emotions, and the rational elimination
of excess—from preoccupation with sex to the union of alienated
gender differences (see Dunderberg 2015; also Tite 2009).
This question of the origin and appeal of gnostic ideas is clearly
a large and complex topic to which we cannot do full justice here.
(For useful further reading, see Brakke 2010a; Logan 2006; Mar-
janen 2008; Markschies 2003; Pearson 2007; van den Broek 2013.
The most comprehensive overview of Valentinianism remains
Thomassen 2006.)
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Gospels of the Original Jesus, Suppressed
by an Authoritarian Church?
In Europe and North America, the third millennium of the Chris-
tian calendar began on a note of surprisingly widespread confusion
about Christianity’s origins, in the media and even in the churches.
That confusion was fueled in no small part by several cleverly mar-
keted new (or newly reinterpreted) discoveries of ancient artifacts,
including a supposed bone box (ossuary) of James the brother of
Jesus; a supposed family tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem, which some-
how came to be rebranded and republicized as such several decades
after its discovery; and a manuscript containing the so- called Gos-
pel of Judas, whose existence had been rumored ever since its
clandestine discovery in 1978, and which was published in 2006 to
much fanfare by none other than National Geographic magazine.
In 2012 Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School caused a consid-
erable stir when she announced (and later published, King 2014)
a papyrus fragment mentioning Mary Magdalene as the “wife” of
Jesus, although this was subsequently exposed as a modern fake
(see below, p. 187).
We will return to these texts. But even before these finds one
could not fail to notice the extraordinary media circus surrounding
The Da Vinci Code (D. Brown 2003), a blockbuster novel predi-
cated on wholly fanciful theories about the repercussions of Mary
Magdalene’s imagined marriage and children with Jesus. Swash-
buckling tales of conspiracy and deception at the heart of religion
or power retain a timeless potential to entertain the gullible while
generating impressive streams of revenue for their promoters (not
to mention for industries like Hollywood and tour guides from
Saint- Sulpice in Paris to Rosslyn Chapel outside Edinburgh). More
recently, comparable historical nonsense on stilts was in 2014 “dis-
covered” to fresh media fanfare in the supposed “decoding” of a
seventh- century manuscript paraphrasing Joseph and Asenath, an
early Jewish or Christian apocryphal narrative about the conversion
of Joseph’s pagan Egyptian wife. Contrary to appearances, this “lost
gospel” supposedly encodes the secret of Jesus’ marriage to Mary
Magdalene, who, like Asenath, gave birth to two sons (Jacobovici
and Wilson 2014; cf. Gen. 41:45, 50; 46:20). And so it goes on.
Given Christianity’s accelerating and partly self- inflicted decline in
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22
public influence and credibility throughout many Western societ-
ies, the loss of old certainties unsurprisingly yields the stage to more
fanciful counternarratives about Christian origins.
It is not sensationalist or misleading to point out that the
ancient church was indeed aware of the existence of a large number
of other gospels or gospel- like texts. The gradual acceptance of set-
tled canonical boundaries in turn entailed a more confident demar-
cation of documents that as a result had not become canonical.
(See Watson 2013; the more problematic notion of literature that
“became” apocryphal or canonical has been particularly stressed by
Lührmann 2004; Lührmann and Schlarb 2000; but see also the cri-
tique in Nicklas 2011.)
A pivotal twentieth- century contributor to this conversation was
Walter Bauer (1877–1960). Known to students of New Testament
Greek above all as the originator of a definitive lexicon (Danker,
Bauer, et al. 2000), he also became ideologically influential in the
1920s for his depiction of Jesus as a “syncretistically softened” anti-
Judean Jew who had grown up in a hellenized Gentile setting “in
considerable freedom from the Law,” disdainful of “levitical purity”
and of the Temple—as a place of conflict rather than of worship
(Bauer 1967, 102–3, 108). His sort of liberal Protestant Jesus was
hardly original, but seemed before long to lend grist to the mill of
“German Christian” New Testament scholars determined to dis-
cover a Jesus who was not Jewish at all (e.g., Grundmann 1940, esp.
175; cf. Ericksen 1985; Head 2004; Heschel 2008).
More significantly for our purposes, however, Bauer’s book
Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, first published in
1934 (English translation, Bauer 1971), became particularly forma-
tive in postwar scholarship through its idea that “heretical” beliefs
were not historically a deviation from singular Christian “ortho-
doxy,” but rather were the dominant expression of a fundamentally
diverse and plural faith from which “orthodoxy” emerged only at a
later stage. This view, seemingly boosted by fresh discoveries like
those at Oxyrhynchus and Nag Hammadi, commended itself to the
study of gospel literature among the students of Helmut Koester
and James M. Robinson, as well as among members of the late-
twentieth- century North American Jesus Seminar (see Koester
1990; Koester and Robinson 1971).
In more popularizing scholarship influenced by the Bauer and
Koester schools, conspiracy- minded interpretations have frequently
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23
asserted that these ancient texts were at first of the same status as,
and at least in some cases earlier than, the canonical gospels, supe-
rior witnesses to the real essence of the Jesus movement, and freely
proliferating in Christianity’s charismatic infancy until they came to
be brutally suppressed by authoritarian churchmen, perhaps at the
emperor Constantine’s beck and call.
Bauer’s scholarly reception by Koester, Robinson, and their stu-
dents encouraged the emergence of a view that the gnostic gospels
in particular offered access to the authentic original genius of the
Christian message—a view that has energized writers ranging from
scholars like Elaine Pagels (1979) to racy fiction writers like Dan
Brown (2003). Related to this are attempts to date the canonical
gospels exceptionally late while insisting that certain noncanonical
sources, including the Gospel of Thomas, grant exceptionally early
access to the teaching of Jesus. That is the approach of a writer like
John Dominic Crossan (1991, 427–30), who asserts no fewer than
fifteen sources of “independent attestation” predating the Gospel
of Mark, or of the optimistically titled volume The Complete Gos-
pels, which conveniently presents “for the first time anywhere all
twenty of the known gospels from the early Christian era,” all of
which are said to be “witnesses to early Jesus traditions” (Robert
Miller 1994, cover, 3).
Certain observations are, however, important to bear in mind if
we are to keep the second- century profusion and variety of Christian
literature in perspective. One pertinent insight to be elaborated in
the course of our discussion is this: while scholars from time to time
postulate the existence of primitive texts like Q or early sources of
Thomas, no extant alternative gospel forms or attestations predate
the New Testament Four. Even a large and diverse collection of
early Christian literature like that at Oxyrhynchus turns out to cor-
roborate the popularity of the two mainstream apostolic Gospels of
John and Matthew. These were evidently—there as elsewhere—
the most widely read and copied.
As for the apocryphal gospels, at one level the overwhelm-
ingly Egyptian evidence is what we would expect, given the extent
to which the climate favored the survival of papyri. But there, to
some extent, lies the rub for a good deal of the evidence on which
Bauer’s hypothesis draws: can the discoveries at Oxyrhynchus or
indeed those at Nag Hammadi (which followed the publication of
his book) really grant us representative insights into the nature of
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early Christianity more generally, or are they perhaps eloquent first
and foremost about themselves and their own context—namely, at
the core of the singular Nag Hammadi collection and nearer the
periphery of the vast Oxyrhynchus finds? These discoveries do illus-
trate the rich diversity of theological approaches in early Christian
circles of Upper Egypt—but they cannot straightforwardly establish
the priority and predominance of heterodoxy in quite the way that
Walter Bauer assumed. (Blumell [2012, 318–25] offers a valuable
if incomplete inventory of Christian evidence from Oxyrhynchus
published up to 2010, which implies a proportion of canonical to
noncanonical gospel fragments in purely numerical terms at around
2.5 to 1, depending on which centuries are included. More signifi-
cantly, only the dominant Gospels of Matthew [15x] and John [13x]
seem to be attested consistently in every century up to the time of
canonization, and they appear respectively five times and four times
as often as the three confirmed fragments of Thomas, their nearest
noncanonical rival; there are two fragments for Mary and arguably
just single attestations for the nine other noncanonical gospel- like
texts. Canonical and noncanonical gospels are not found together
within the same manuscripts.)
In other words, even for Egypt the manuscript finds may help
underscore the serendipitous and marginal or subsidiary character of
what was discovered. Some readers at Oxyrhynchus were evidently
interested in apocryphal gospel literature—but as we just saw, never
to the extent that any of these texts competed with the preferred
Gospels of Matthew or John, even if Luke and Mark are admittedly
rarer. Nag Hammadi offers fewer statistical clues, but we have here a
dozen books about whose status and representative currency we can
have no assurance on the basis of this single find. This point becomes
more significant if one considers how very few of these texts gener-
ated multiple copies or translations, let alone commentaries.
All in all, these observations certainly do not invalidate Bauer’s
thesis, but they do urge considerable caution. The appeal of author-
itarian suppression theories casts a long shadow—not least for a
Protestant romanticism that loves to lionize an imagined primitive
charismatic anarchy being crushed by authoritarian institutions and
orthodoxies. In such scenarios Hegel’s philosophy of history, Adolf
von Harnack’s nineteenth- century rediscovery of Marcion, and a
popular heroic mythology of Luther’s battle against the pope are
never far from the surface.
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Ancient Christian Gospels
25
We must certainly take on board the important questions about
early Christian diversity that were raised by the Bauer thesis and
the Egyptian discoveries of the twentieth century. But this can-
not make the evidence from the sands of Egypt yield answers as
straightforward as either traditionalist or skeptical accounts would
have us believe.
The idea of a fourfold apostolic gospel of Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John emerged during the first half of the second century
and continued to gain in strength until it formally prevailed in the
fourth. But other gospels and gospel traditions richly proliferated
in the later second and third centuries, many of them informed—
either directly or more often indirectly—by the narrative outline of
the Four. Far from these documents being eliminated as “heretical”
departures from a clear, uninterrupted orthodox line from the start,
many appear to have coexisted happily with the protocanonical tra-
dition and even taken it for granted.
Mainstream church leaders did indeed voice opposition to
such alternative accounts in either written or oral form, whether
or not they knew them at first hand. Such conflict began not in the
fourth century but in the second, if not earlier. Several New Tes-
tament documents already explicitly discount false or inaccurate
renderings of the ministry or teaching of Jesus (see, e.g., Matt.
5:17, 19; Luke 1:3–4; John 1:8; 6:66; 21:23–24; also 1 John 4:2–3;
1 Cor. 15:14–18).
But the idea that the noncanonical gospels disappeared from
view simply or primarily because they were formally silenced by
church authorities founders on several contrary facts.
First, the supposedly suppressed documents were evidently
known and read by some, but—judging from the manuscript evi-
dence—appear never to have gained widespread popularity, circu-
lation, or acceptance. The following table illustrates this well.
Precise dates and therefore absolute manuscript statistics
are admittedly always debatable; but it is now factually incorrect
to claim that there are no pre- 300 manuscripts of Mark (so, e.g.,
Watson 2016, 3–4; but note ∏
45
, P.Oxy. 5073, and perhaps ∏
88
), let
alone that “papyri dating from 100 to 300 CE are equally balanced
between canonical and non- canonical gospels” (Burke 2013a, 29,
citing only Koester 1980, who was, among other things, unaware of
at least eight as yet unpublished papyri on John [∏
90
, ∏
95
, ∏
106
, ∏
107
,
∏
108
, ∏
109
, ∏
119
, ∏
121
], five on Matthew [∏
101
, ∏
102
, ∏
103
, ∏
104
, ∏
110
],
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ANCIENT APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS
26
one on Luke [∏
111
], and one or possibly two on Mark [P.Oxy. 5073;
∏
88
?], all predating the year 300).
Those gospels that went on to become canonical in the fourth
century are also the ones that were most frequently read and cop-
ied before 300, as well as most frequently cited and commented
upon—Mark being a partial exception on both counts. It is a par-
ticularly telling additional observation that the early- third- century
manuscript ∏
45
, possibly our earliest unambiguous multiple- gospel
codex, includes parts of four and only four gospels: Matthew, John,
Luke, and Mark—in that order, plus Acts. (Skeat [1997] suspected
an even earlier example in a compilation of ∏
4
+ ∏
64
+ ∏
67
; this has
not been widely accepted, but Gathercole [2012b, 218, 235] does
suggest “the possibility (but no more)” that ∏
4
formed part of a
codex containing both Matthew and Luke.)
Even if one counts all extant manuscripts prior to the invention
of the printing press, the copies of gospels composed before 300
remain in single- digit numbers except in the case of the four New
Testament gospels—and the Infancy Gospel of James (along with
later translations of public texts like the Diatessaron).
Significantly, too, there are no extant manuscripts from antiq-
uity (whether before or after canonization) that combine canoni-
cal with apocryphal gospels. The manuscript record does suggest
that some or many early Christians knew both sorts of texts, and
in some places like Rhossus or Oxyrhynchus some of them clearly
read both sorts (see Hurtado 2015). But their manuscripts evidently
Table 1. Gospel Manuscripts prior to the Year 300
Matthew 13x
Mark 2–3x
Luke 7x
John 18x
Diatessaron?
1x
Thomas
3x
Protevangelium of James
1x
Gospel of Mary
2x
Gospel of Judas
1x
Various “Unknown” Gospels 5x
This table is adapted from Hurtado 2013, a fuller inventory than the list of papyri in the
appendix to Nestle- Aland
28
(Nestle et al. 2012, 792–99).
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Ancient Christian Gospels
27
distinguished between them. And Christians did not copy or read
them as equivalents side by side, contrary to a twentieth- century
scholarly prejudice in the wake of Walter Bauer that continues to
be popularized to this day (nicely illustrated by collections like Rob-
ert Miller 1994 or for that matter Taussig 2013).
All this says a great deal about a process of dissemination and
acceptance of popular authoritative texts that, especially in the
early centuries, was far too diverse and widespread to be explicable
in terms of structures of authoritarian imposition or censorship.
Official suppression is of course one possible explanation for
this disparity of attestation—and for particular cases this possibility
cannot be categorically excluded. But occasional efforts to blacklist
various documents (for example, by Irenaeus of Lyons and Sera-
pion of Antioch in the second century or by the Gelasian Decree
in the late fifth or early sixth) appear for the most part to have had
little effect. The effective replacement of the Diatessaron with the
fourfold gospel in Syrian churches of the fifth and sixth centuries
demonstrates that some “opposed” texts did disappear; but others,
like the Infancy Gospel of James and various Pilate cycles, contin-
ued to go from strength to strength.
Until the sixth century—and perhaps until considerably later—
the church simply did not have the power to make such texts go
away. Of course it could merrily anathematize and in certain places
sporadically take or threaten action; but it could not, it seems, suc-
cessfully enforce. With the notable exception of para- canonical texts
like the Diatessaron and the Infancy Gospel of James, the absence
of noncanonical gospel literature from the Eastern and West-
ern churches’ public liturgical reading may be simply that—the
Table 2. Extant Manuscripts of Some Ancient Noncanonical
Gospels
Gospel of Thomas
4x
Gospel of Philip
1x
Gospel of Mary
3x
Gospel of Judas
1x
Sophia of Jesus Christ (Wisdom of Jesus Christ)
1x
Gospel of Peter
1x
Infancy Gospel of James (Greek manuscripts only;
numerous translations and derivatives exist)
Over 150x
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ANCIENT APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS
28
nonappearance of texts that failed to attract a sufficient communal
readership to establish themselves as universal Christian “classics,”
that is, popularly received Christian texts that could garner consen-
sus and stand the test of time and faith. As has been the case for
popular religious literature and music through the ages, eventual
success or failure was above all a function of their power to engage
their subject matter credibly and authentically in the service of
the faithful—and, at least partly as a result, their ability to weather
occasional periods of local, popular, or official opprobrium.
An interesting early medieval confirmation of this view is pro-
vided by the discoveries in the genizah (storeroom for disused man-
uscripts) of the Old (Ben Ezra) Synagogue in Fustat near Cairo.
These have long been noted to include palimpsests (scraped and
recycled manuscripts) of the New Testament texts of Matthew,
John, Acts, and 1 Peter. In addition to Greek Old Testament transla-
tions of Aquila and of Origen’s Hexapla, the genizah also contained
translations of New Testament texts and lectionaries into languages
including Arabic, Judeo- Arabic, and Syriac (on which, see Niessen
2009; some may have been used in part for liturgical purposes). But
aside from the well- known medieval Toledot Yeshu fragments (on
which see below, p. 129), not a single apocryphal gospel has turned
up among the Christian texts and palimpsests of the Cairo Genizah.
(On a more speculative note, Piovanelli (2011, 92–96) neverthe-
less suggests close links between the Toledot Yeshu and the Gos-
pel according to the Hebrews as well as the Gospel of Judas.) This
absence of Christian apocrypha seems particularly notable since
the Cairo Genizah’s somewhat catholic selection of texts included
a number of Jewish noncanonical or “apocryphal” writings like
Hebrew Sirach, Aramaic Levi (a source for the Testament of Levi),
and the Damascus Document—whether these attest a surviving
ancient manuscript tradition or were later rediscovered, like the
cache of Hebrew manuscripts found near Jericho at the end of the
eighth century (mentioned in a famous letter by Patriarch Timothy I
[780–823]; for text and translation, see Reeves 1999, 174–77).
The Design and Approach of This Book
As a deliberately brief and accessible guide to this complex and
newly reinvigorated field of study, this book does not intend to
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Ancient Christian Gospels
29
break new ground or push the envelope on basic historical- critical
questions of the authorship, date, and setting of the noncanonical
gospels. The aim is to develop the argument in the context of a
fairly middle- of- the- road approach to most critical debates, rather
than to advance the field in this respect.
Five main emphases constitute the basic argument of this book.
1. First, the aim is to provide an introduction that is both acces-
sible and nonsensationalist while offering a sympathetic account of
these writings in relation to what became the New Testament. This
involves taking the texts seriously on their own terms and in relation
to a centrist range of assessments within mainstream critical scholar-
ship. It will also relate them to their place within the reception history
and formation of what was to become the canonical fourfold gospel.
2. This approach also favors the conviction that it is legitimate
and instructive to read these texts alongside the New Testament gos-
pels. In doing so we will find that their status can be usefully under-
stood as epiphenomenal and supplementary to that gospel tradition.
In relation to its narrative structure as well as its status as public and
“apostolic,” all noncanonical gospels presume that New Testament
tradition’s existence; many of them presuppose its substance or even
its wording. In some sense, therefore, the apocryphal gospels occupy
what at least in retrospect can be described as a “para- canonical”
perspective—whether their intent is to supplement and reaffirm, to
replace, or to subvert the four gospels that became canonical.
As I will suggest, this is routinely the narrative perspective they
adopt, and sometimes their explicit self- understanding, whether or
not they identify themselves (like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gos-
pel of Judas, the Apocryphon of John, and others) as “apocryphal”
or “secret”—and therefore whether or not they intend any bid for
public ecclesial status at all. This para- canonical identity pertains
even for texts that are formally or chronologically nearer the New
Testament canon than others. (On this point it is helpful to consult
the articulation by Luke Timothy Johnson [2008] of the respective
“canonical” settings of John and Thomas, in contrast to the alter-
native account of that relationship offered by writers like Elaine
Pagels [2003]. See also below, p. 42, for an attempt to define the
slippery term “apocryphal.”)
3. We will repeatedly find our attention drawn to one simple
and obvious but easily overlooked feature of our source material,
which in turn encourages this para- canonical way of looking at the
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ANCIENT APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS
30
texts. Of the dozens of noncanonical gospel- like documents from
antiquity, whether familiar from ancient citations or only through
manuscript discoveries, not a single surviving text offers an alterna-
tive narrative account of the kind provided in the four New Testa-
ment gospels. That is to say, none of them trace what Jesus did and
said and suffered from his baptism through his public ministry to
his crucifixion and resurrection. Apparent exceptions to this rule
are either closely dependent on the text of the four gospels, like
the second- century synthesis known as the Diatessaron, or else
belong in this form to a much later period, like the Jewish antigos-
pel Toledot Yeshu or the Muslim Gospel of Barnabas.
It is true that quite a number of fragmentary texts might in
theory have provided such an alternative narrative—including, for
example, the Gospel of Peter or Papyrus Egerton 2. But none is
extant—or even attested in the ancient literature. Nor did any alter-
native gospel- style narrative accounts of Jesus’ mission and ministry
from birth or baptism to death or resurrection experience signifi-
cant attestation or circulation in antiquity. The canonical Four are
thus notably distinctive in this regard; indeed their Markan outline
appears in one way or another to have been the narrative reference
grid for at least the large majority of noncanonical gospels.
4. Quite how that relationship between noncanonical and
canonical gospels works intertextually will be a matter for repeated
reflection in the following chapters. Most typically, we will encoun-
ter gospel- like texts showing a marked editorial distance from the
New Testament gospels, while nevertheless revealing their own
(and their readers’) presupposed consciousness of the narrative
framework and even the wording of those protocanonical gospels
to a greater or lesser extent.
We will thus see that traditional scholarly notions of literary
dependence, when narrowly understood in terms of scribes work-
ing with written texts, are rarely serviceable for this relationship
between the fourfold gospel and the others. In trying to describe
this clearly epiphenomenal but often somewhat loosely or indirectly
articulated connection, it seems in many cases preferable to think
in terms of antecedence and influence rather than a relationship of
direct dependence on a written text. This accounts for the frequent
presence of shared themes or phrases while also explaining the
considerable literary freedom and independence which some of the
noncanonical texts manifest at the same time. (Others, like Foster
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Ancient Christian Gospels
31
[2010a, 116–17], prefer to maintain, e.g., for the Gospel of Peter,
a somewhat extended notion of “literary dependence” that might
include “drawing upon a literary work from memory.” This is a con-
ceptually helpful clarification, but it still presupposes the mediated
antecedent to be a distinct written text rather than, say, an informal
harmony or conflation.)
5. Finally, another occasionally useful frame of reference can
be the concept of “social memory,” which considers the social, cul-
tural, ritual, and religious dimensions of how communities remem-
ber their past and understand their identity (see Dignas, Smith,
and Price 2012; Fentress and Wickham 1992; the relevance for the
gospel tradition is explored by Dunn 2007; Kelber 2002; Kirk and
Thatcher 2005; Le Donne 2009). In a surprising number of cases
the protocanonical pattern of attributing gospels to key apostles or
their immediate disciples also characterizes the noncanonical gos-
pels; and at least until the second century it remains in theory pos-
sible that such associations are informed in part by appeal to the
often contested living memory of these apostolic figures or their
students, as they were for Ignatius, Justin, and Irenaeus (see Bock-
muehl 2010 and 2012b on Simon Peter).
How Many Apocryphal Gospels?
There is always something unquestionably exciting and intriguing
about public announcements that an ancient text about Jesus has
come to light—or perhaps even just a papyrus fragment of such a
document. What if it contains genuine sayings or stories previously
unknown about him? What if it reveals mysterious or secret truths
about Jesus of Nazareth or his followers, authentic insights into the
earliest Jesus movement?
But it is in the nature of this material that much of what we
are dealing with is either highly fragmentary, lost, or perhaps even
entirely hypothetical. This fragmentary nature of our texts is self-
evident for papyri like those found at Oxyrhynchus and elsewhere,
but it is also clear from a number of apparently well- known docu-
ments that are repeatedly mentioned in early Christian writings,
but whose actual text is only ever cited in passing or quoted in occa-
sional short snippets in the church fathers. So how do we study this
confusing wealth of disparate material outside what is presented
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ANCIENT APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS
32
to us so tidily in the four complete narrative gospels of the New
Testament?
To arrive at a proper reading we must first find a serviceable
way to describe what we are dealing with. How many texts are
there? One reason the noncanonical gospels often seem particu-
larly formidable and bewildering to the nonexpert is the sheer
difficulty of even establishing how many sources we are talking
about. It is one thing to discover that in antiquity more than the
four biblical gospels were known, or perhaps that one of them
was a text known as the Gospel of Thomas and another called the
Gospel of Judas. What can be more confusing is to open one of
several excellent recent volumes of translations to discover quite
how many of these “gospel” documents there are, surviving either
in their entirety or more often as fragments. One ballpark fig-
ure often cited is that there were approximately forty “other gos-
pels” (e.g., Tuckett 2005; cf. Ehrman and Pleše 2011, viii); but the
1,500- page German work of Markschies and Schröter 2012 con-
tains around twice that number (depending, inevitably, on how
one counts). Ancient sources certainly cite or report dozens of
other noncanonical gospels or gospel- related texts. For some of
these we have fleeting descriptions or quotes, but no trace sur-
vives of many others.
It is easy to feel dismay or paralysis at the complicated mass of
this material, much of which is either lost or fragmentary, and about
whose original size and shape we can only speculate. The following
two lists will help to illustrate the broad scope of the material, and
the problems of taxonomy, by means of one ancient and one mod-
ern inventory of “apocryphal” gospels.
An Ancient Inventory of Noncanonical Gospels
Below is a list of prohibited texts in the so- called Gelasian Decree
(Decretum Gelasianum), a Latin document of uncertain provenance
and authority transmitted under the names of popes including Dam-
asus I (366–384) and Gelasius I (492–496) but thought to have been
compiled more unofficially in the sixth century. The list below (culled
from Klauck 2003, 3–5) includes only the gospel- related texts, in the
order in which they appear. The text of the decree explicitly identi-
fies each item as “apocryphal” (and therefore rejected).
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Ancient Christian Gospels
33
The Gospel under the name of Matthias
The Gospel under the name of Barnabas
The Gospel under the name of James the younger
The Gospel under the name of Thomas, which the Manicheans
use
Gospels under the name of Bartholomew
Gospels under the name of Andrew
The Gospels that Lucian has forged
The Gospels that Hesychius has forged
The Book about the childhood of the Savior
The Book about the birth of the Savior and about Mary or the
Midwife
The Cento about Christ, compiled in Virgilian verses [probably
the Cento Vergilianus de Laudibus Christi by Faltonia Beti-
tia Proba (ca. 315–ca. 366), which covers biblical history up
to the ascension]
The Book which is called The Passage of Holy Mary (Transitus
Mariae)
The Epistle of Jesus to Abgar
The Epistle of Abgar to Jesus
All amulets composed in the name not of angels (as those peo-
ple pretend), but rather of demons
The inclusion of one or two of these items is admittedly doubt-
ful and reflects the extent to which the term “apocryphal” was
applied fairly liberally to suspect documents. Faltonia Betitia Pro-
ba’s Cento, for example, however disagreeable to the author of the
decree, is certainly not apocryphal in any sense either of secrecy
or of supplementation or competition with the canonical gospels.
In fact, it is a poetic composition that seeks to recapitulate them
through the educated and aesthetically refined medium of Virgilian
verse, which in turn facilitated a wealth of fresh allegorical associa-
tions (see Sandnes 2011, 141–80).
A Note on Amulets
While the final category, amulets, perhaps was included in this
catalog somewhat whimsically (but in keeping with general early
Christian opposition to magic), it does hint at a relevant point for
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ANCIENT APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS
34
our purposes. Recent text- critical research has drawn attention
to the neglected category of noncontinuous biblical texts. Among
these are amulets containing or echoing biblical quotations, includ-
ing, for example, P.Oxy. 5073, which is now by at least a century
the earliest attestation of the text of Mark 1:1–2 (Head 2013, 439–
43). As a number of these noncontinuous texts appear to redeploy
gospel quotations in amulets or other unofficial formularies, they
clearly constitute an interesting interstitial category between the
customary ecclesial forms of biblical manuscripts and lectionaries,
on the one hand, and popular praxis and belief, on the other. It
is significant for our purposes that virtually all known examples of
such talismanic gospel texts consist of authoritative canonical rather
than apocryphal gospel excerpts—usually incipits (opening lines of
works or passages) or the Lord’s Prayer. (The main exception is the
story of Jesus and Abgar, on which see below, p. 121; de Bruyn
2015, 156–60, 173–74.) Greek examples are conveniently cataloged
in de Bruyn and Dijkstra 2011, nos. 4, 8, 19, 21, 22, 26, 36, 38, 44,
45, 50, 59, 70, 77, 84, 95, 105, 117, 122, 134, 146, 148, 156, 157,
182; there are many others in Coptic. See further de Bruyn 2010;
Sanzo 2014; also Kraus 2004; 2007 on problems of classification and
definition.
A Modern Inventory of Noncanonical Gospels
This section is adapted from the large collection edited by Mark-
schies and Schröter (2012). For ease of reference it follows their
sequencing of the material (see, e.g., pp. ix–xii), lightly adapting the
structure for easier representation.
Jesus Traditions
Words of Jesus (incl. Nag Hammadi, Arabic literature)
Non- Christian Traditions about Jesus
Traditions about Jesus’ Ministry and Passion
The Legend of Jesus and Abgar
The Gospel of Nicodemus
The Acts of Pilate
Christ’s Descent to Hell
Other Literature Associated with Pilate
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Ancient Christian Gospels
35
Traditions about the Relatives of Jesus
The Dormition and Assumption of Mary
The History of Joseph the Carpenter
Gospels
Papyrus Fragments of Unknown Gospels
P.Oxy. 840
P.Egerton 2 + P.Köln 255
P.Berlin 11710
P.Oxy. 1224
P.Cair. 10735
The Fayûm Gospel (P.Vindob. G. 2325)
The Rylands Gospel (P.Ryl. 464)
PSI XI 1200bis
The Strasbourg Coptic Papyrus (P.Argent.
Copt. 5–7)
P.Merton 51
P.Oxy. 210
The Secret Gospel of Mark
Other Minor Gospel Fragments
The Gospel of Eve
Questions of Mary
The Birth of Mary
The Gospel (or: Traditions) of Matthias
Secondary Reports about Extracanonical Gospels
The Gospel of the Four Zones of the World
The Gospel of Perfection
The Gospel of the Twelve
The Quqite Twelve Gospels/Gospel of the Twelve
The Manichean Gospel of the Twelve
The Gospel of the Twelve Apostles
The Gospel of the Seventy
The Memoir of the Apostles
The Gospel of Cerinthus
The Gospel of Basilides
The Gospel of Marcion
The Gospel of Apelles
The Gospel of Bardaisan
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ANCIENT APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS
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Sayings Gospels
The Gospel of Thomas:
Nag Hammadi Codex II,2
P.Oxy. 654
P.Oxy. 655
The Gospel of Philip
Narrative Gospels
Fragments of Jewish Christian Gospels
Fragments of the Gospel of the Hebrews
Fragments of the Gospel of the Ebionites
Fragments of the Gospel of the Nazoreans
Textual Variants of the “Jewish Gospel”
The Gospel of the Egyptians
The Gospel of Peter
The Gospel of Bartholomew
Questions of Bartholomew
The Coptic “Book of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
Our Lord”
Infancy Gospels:
The Protevangelium of James
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas
The Narrative of Justin (in Hippolytus)
The Arabic Infancy Gospel
The Gospel of Pseudo- Matthew
The Gospel of the Arundel Manuscript
(British Library MS Arundel 404)
An Extract from the Life of John the Baptist
The Gospel of Mani
Dialogue Gospels
The Freer Logion
The Epistle of the Apostles
The [Letter or] Apocryphon of James (NHC I,2)
The Book of Thomas the Contender (NHC II,7)
The Sophia/Wisdom of Jesus Christ (NHC III,4/BG 3)
The Dialogue of the Savior (NHC III,5)
The First Apocalypse of James (NHC V,3/CT 2)
The Second Apocalypse of James (NHC V,4)
The Letter of Peter to Philip (NHC VIII,2/CT 1)
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Ancient Christian Gospels
37
The Gospel of Mary (BG 1/P.Oxy. 3525/P.Ryl. 463)
Fragments of a Conversation between John and Jesus
The Gospel of Judas (CT 3)
The Book of Allogenes (CT 4)
“Gospel Meditations”
The Gospel of Truth (NHC I,3)
The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit (NHC
III,3/IV,2; sometimes erroneously identified as
“Gospel of the Egyptians”)
Unknown Berlin Gospel/Gospel of the Savior
Pistis Sophia
The Books of Jeû (CB 1/CB 2)
The Gospel of Gamaliel:
Coptic Fragments of the Gospel of Gamaliel
Arabic Version of the Gospel of Gamaliel
Ethiopic Version of the Gospel of Gamaliel
The Anonymous Apocryphal Gospel
It is not hard to find oneself multiply confused or overwhelmed
by conflicting catalogs like these! For one thing, they suggest that
the question of an overall document count may be the least of
our problems. Much of what is known from ancient sources is not
extant, while a good deal of what is extant is “unknown”—that is to
say, we have no way of linking it either with other surviving texts
or fragments or with sources mentioned in antiquity. There are of
course occasional exceptions to this state of affairs. Once in a while
a lost ancient text may indeed come to light (e.g., the Gospel of
Judas); careful scholarly study may suddenly stumble upon a dem-
onstration that one previously unconnected fragment of papyrus
belongs with another, well- known text (e.g., P.Köln 255 with P.Eger.
2). But these are happy exceptions in what in many other respects
remains a frequently perplexing state of affairs.
Then again, one cannot leaf through more than a few of the
documents in the major collections without stopping to ask oneself
in what sense some of these items can really be said to represent
gospels, even on a broad nontechnical definition of that term. The
Oxford English Dictionary, for example, characterizes apocryphal
gospels as “certain ancient lives of Christ of a legendary character.”
Should we really count ancient texts that show no interest in the
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life of Christ, whether legendary or otherwise? If not, our inven-
tory immediately becomes very much shorter. What is more, no two
scholars’ lists or taxonomies seem to agree: it is remarkably difficult
even to describe, let alone to categorize, what we are dealing with.
It will help to begin our task by asking what defines an “apoc-
ryphal” gospel and questioning a few conventions that are likely to
obscure rather than to clarify.
What Makes a Gospel “Apocryphal”?
The designation of texts as “apocryphal” often carries the negative
connotation of an implied value judgment between apparently nor-
mative texts and others that are deemed extraneous and quite pos-
sibly suspect. The ancient church’s usage of the term in relation
to Jewish or Christian writings was overwhelmingly pejorative (for
the Western church, see the documentation in Gallagher 2014).
For this reason some interpreters prefer to speak only of “early
Christian” texts without singling out some as canonical and others
as inferior: the very notion that some gospels are canonical is on
that view a late and somewhat arbitrary fourth- century imposition
upon texts which until that point had happily coexisted and cross-
fertilized each other (thus Watson 2013).
Yet one of the more intriguing aspects of the texts we are study-
ing is precisely the question of their historic place, and sometimes
even their literary presentation, as in some sense “hidden,” apokry-
pha. This notion has had a variety of meanings in different contexts.
The Old Testament already implies the possibility of hidden
secret knowledge that can be revealed only by God rather than by
human inquiry: the God of Israel alone is the author and dispenser
of wisdom (Prov. 1:7; 2:6; 20:27; cf. Job 12:22; Amos 3:7). A classi-
cally influential text in this respect was Deuteronomy 29:28 (29:29
in the Vulgate and most English translations), famously supplied in
Masoretic manuscripts (and still in the standard modern critical edi-
tion, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) with ten scribal dots marked
across particular words to warn against dangerous speculation: “The
secret things belong to the L
ord our God, but the revealed things
belong to us and to our children forever, to observe all the words
of this law.” The “secrets” in this case may well denote the future,
as the preceding context implies (so Fishbane 1985, 540), but for
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Wisdom literature like Sirach 3:22 (cf. 20:30) or Tobit 12:7 there
are other secrets of wisdom that should be kept concealed from the
uninitiated. (See further Bockmuehl 1990, 66–68.)
Matters are once again different for the Christian texts related
to the gospels, with which we are here concerned. Certainly it is
true that anathemas or assertions of their “apocryphal” status (e.g.,
in documents like the Gelasian Decree, cf. above, p. 32) are deni-
als of legitimacy or authority. This derogatory usage seems at least
implicitly to be found as early as Hegesippus in the second cen-
tury (cited in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.22.8: apocrypha
composed by heretics) and Origen in the third (e.g., Commentary
on John 2.31.188; Commentary on Matthew 10.18; Epistle to Afri-
canus [Migne 1857–86, 11:65, 80]).
That said, some of the noncanonical gospels do indeed make
explicit claims to contain material that is hidden, secret, or indeed—
in that specific sense—apocryphal. Most obvious among these
is the Gospel of Thomas, which famously begins with the words,
“These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which
Didymus Judas Thomas wrote” (incipit). A similar claim opens the
Gospel of Judas, which claims to present “the secret discourse of
revelation that Jesus spoke with Judas Iscariot” (Codex Tchacos
33). By implication the Lord’s instruction to Mary Magdalene in the
Gospel of Mary is similarly identified as secret by Peter within that
text (Gospel of Mary 17; see Tuckett 2007, 127, 188). The gnostic
library of Nag Hammadi contains several other examples.
So it is interesting that the term “apocryphal” crops up as a delib-
erate self- designation in the opening statement or framing narrative
of (frequently gnostic) texts that propose their material by means of
the literary fiction of an alternative, “hidden” tradition about Jesus.
Such hiddenness may be intended to emphasize that this Jesus is
not part of the mainstream gospel tradition on which the subsequent
text draws and which it seeks to interpret, supplement, or occasion-
ally to subvert. It is thus hidden in the sense of being unfamiliar
or unknown to the mainstream public gospel tradition, but also—
indeed already in the Gospel of Thomas—in the sense of conveying
something deliberately concealed because it is intrinsically difficult
to understand and requires insider knowledge for its explanation.
Compare Thomas 1: “And he [Jesus? Thomas?] said: the one who
finds the interpretation of these words will not taste death.” In
texts like Thomas that manifest gnosticizing sympathies, then, the
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terminology of apokryphos may thus be deliberately adopted and
endorsed to convey difficult saving knowledge for the spiritual elite,
while attaching to this a claim (implicit or indeed explicit) of antiq-
uity and authority. Both Hippolytus and especially Irenaeus take it
for granted that what sets Valentinians and other gnostic “heretics”
apart from catholic Christianity is that they emphasize the secrecy
of their writings and their meetings (e.g., Hippolytus, Refutation of
All Heresies 1, preface; 6.1, 4, 36, 37; 9.10; 10.8; Irenaeus, Against
Heresies 1, preface; 3.2–4 and passim).
Jesus’ private teaching of his disciples is as such, of course, a
theme already familiar from the Gospel of Mark (most famously in
4:12); but the difference here is that the secret is evidently some-
thing to be publicly disclosed after the resurrection and publicly
intended for all who respond in faith (contrast Mark 9:9; 14:9; cf.
16:15; Matt. 10:27).
In this sense, it turns out that the contrast between “apocryphal”
gospels and mainstream sacred Scripture is at one level quite in
keeping with the self- definition of such texts. Writings like Thomas
that stake an explicit claim to secrecy appear deliberately to posi-
tion themselves in competition with liturgically public, nonapoc-
ryphal Jesus tradition. Indeed their claimed superiority actually
presupposes the prior givenness of nonsecret, accessible writings
that already carry some sort of public authoritative character. And
leaving aside the contested question of whether isolated sayings in
(say) Thomas might indeed convey earlier strands of Jesus tradition,
overall this self- identification acknowledges its own distance from
the antecedent gospel literature.
In this sense, as H. Förster (2013, 144–45) also points out,
while the New Testament gospels were indeed authoritative texts
that in time “became canonical,” it is rather more problematic to
assume that other gospel- like texts, after originally occupying the
same ground as the Four, had then necessarily “become” apocry-
phal only by an act of formal exclusion. This is sometimes claimed
(e.g., by Lührmann and Schlarb 2000; cf. also the general argument
of Watson 2013, e.g., 606). While such a scenario is of course con-
ceivable and worth considering for any given case, in most of the
more prominent instances (including Thomas, Mary, and Judas)
a more accurate description would envisage texts that remained
apocryphal, in their quite self- conscious and deliberate competi-
tion with those that became canonical.
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It is perhaps also important that many other extracanonical
texts do not claim to be in any sense hidden or secret rivals to the
protocanonical gospels. Certainly this is true of second- century
writings counted among the Apostolic Fathers or the Apologists,
but it also pertains to certain infancy gospels, Jewish Christian gos-
pels, and the gospel harmony known as the Diatessaron.
It is an interesting, if slippery, corroboration of this point that
none of the New Testament writings one might deem pseudony-
mous makes any analogous claim to preserve a secret, alternative
connection to Jesus or to the church’s apostolic origins. All these
texts claim on the contrary to stand within the same public, “catho-
lic and apostolic” tradition.
Importantly, moreover, there are no known gospel texts, either
extant or otherwise attested, that became apocryphal after having
once been widely normative or authoritative—let alone canonical.
The Synoptic Sayings Source Q, if it existed, could potentially be
an exception; but quite apart from any intrinsic questions about
Q it matters that no assertion of normativity for this hypothetical
document can be found in antiquity (see further discussion on p. 89
below). Another exception to prove the rule is the widely popular
Diatessaron, a harmony of the protocanonical gospels that eventu-
ally gave way to the discrete canonical Four. But no known indi-
vidual gospel, inside or outside the canon, began in a normative
ecclesial mainstream and then became unequivocally apocryphal.
This observation tends to lend further credence to the impres-
sion that the apocryphal gospels are instead—often indirectly and in
part—epiphenomenal on the gospel tradition that became canoni-
cal. In other words, contrary to the impression frequently conveyed
in some popular media (and occasionally reinforced by scholarly
constructs), the fourfold gospel is not the endpoint of centuries of
complete uncertainty about which of many gospels might be norma-
tive. Even while debate continued about certain minor epistles and
Revelation, no such sustained doubt ever affected Matthew, Mark,
Luke, or John either in the early manuscript tradition or in preserved
second- century discussions like those of Serapion, Irenaeus, Justin,
and Papias. We have previously cited in this connection Theophilus
of Antioch, the Epistle of the Apostles, and other second- century
sources. But it is worth adding here the much- debated but prob-
ably late- second- century list of authoritative writings known as the
Muratorian Canon, which survives only in a fragmentary translation
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into a barbaric pidgin Latin. This puzzling document, too, never-
theless references precisely four gospels: the text begins in midsen-
tence with a conclusion on Mark before introducing Luke as the
third gospel and John as the fourth. (Its certainty about the four
gospels seems particularly telling in view of the omission of New
Testament documents like Hebrews, 1–2 Peter, and James along
with the apparent inclusion of the Book of Wisdom, the Apocalypse
of Peter, and possibly the Shepherd of Hermas.)
Should We Use the Term “Apocryphal”?
On the subject of terminology, common usage does not necessarily
distinguish between “noncanonical” and “apocryphal” gospels. The
second of these terms is more widely known and often preferred,
and is therefore retained in the title of this book for pragmatic rea-
sons; its continuation has similarly been advocated by Ehrman and
Pleše (2011, vii) and Markschies (1998; 2012g, 18–21).
That said, there are reasons to be cautious and circumspect
about this terminology and to note the advantages of the more
neutral term “noncanonical.” First, while “apocryphal” in its Greek
etymology derives from the word apokryphon, meaning sim-
ply “hidden,” in time it acquired a more ambivalent significance.
“Apocryphal” writings might then be hidden either in the sense of
communicating a knowledge reserved only for the few, or else per-
haps as concealing secretive or conspiratorial knowledge as opposed
to (and perhaps subversive of) the received public teaching of the
church and its Scriptures.
Both of these meanings might function either as a posi-
tive claim on the part of a book’s advocates or as a negative value
judgment about a text whose opponents deem it to be damaging,
defamatory, and perhaps wholly fictitious. Neither of these over-
tones seems appropriate to the noncanonical gospels. Many are
not obviously “hidden” at all, whether in an elitist or a subversive
sense. Conversely, as we saw earlier, a handful of these texts actually
claim hiddenness or secrecy for themselves as a positive quality—
beginning arguably with the incipit of the Gospel of Thomas. So the
term “apocryphal” might seem to skew the discussion, one way or
another, from the start.
As applied to books often called “apocryphal” by Protestants
and “deuterocanonical” by Roman Catholics in relation to the Old
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43
Testament, the significance of the terminology is rather different,
and indeed almost equivalent to “noncanonical.” In the narrowest
sense, the “apocryphal” label is here a Protestant designation imply-
ing that books contained in the Greek (Septuagint) or Latin (Vulgate)
but not in the Hebrew Old Testament carry no canonical authority.
In this case, their “apocryphal” status pertains not to any secrecy
but to a perceived lack of authority—though the deuterocanonical
books are in fact liturgically used in Roman Catholic and (with slight
variations) Orthodox Churches, as well as by some Anglicans.
By contrast, none of the so- called apocryphal gospels appear in
the canon of any major Christian tradition (though see below on the
Epistle of the Apostles, p. 215).
“The” Apocryphal Gospels?
Given the lack of any agreed- upon inventory, even the frequently
encountered definite article “The Apocryphal Gospels” turns out
to be misleading. It seems to imply the existence of an identifiable
set of texts. But in reality it may be impossible to create a definitive
list. Not only are we confronted with numerous fragments that may
or may not be part of larger documents, but the textual traditions
themselves often appear to be highly unstable and volatile com-
pounds of which each new manuscript, and each new translation,
may in fact be the creation of a new or secondary apocryphon. The
so- called infancy gospels are a particularly accessible case in point
(see Voicu 2011, 408–11), but various “gnostic” and “Jewish Chris-
tian” traditions present comparable challenges.
This point about the volatility of our texts becomes even more
problematic if we recognize that comparable documents continued to
be produced throughout antiquity into the Middle Ages and beyond.
Does any and every literary retelling of the life of Jesus qualify, even
once the New Testament’s canonical boundaries are firmly drawn?
For this reason, too, neither forty nor some other figure can offer
a definitive or exhaustive total count of “the” apocryphal gospels.
“Fragmentary” Gospels?
Another problem of taxonomy in inventories like the above is that
so much of what we have is either highly fragmentary or indeed
known to us only from brief citations or allusions in other ancient
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texts. In many cases at Oxyrhynchus, in patristic citations, or else-
where, the surviving fragments do not amount to enough material
to give us confidence about the shape of the original document. For
any given text, are we dealing perhaps simply with a single narra-
tive episode or set of sayings, or even with a longer but still strictly
limited set of passion or resurrection material? Or must we think of
it as either a part or the whole of an integral composition, whether a
continuous narrative account of the ministry of Jesus or a complete
collection of sayings? What if the fragments we have are in fact all
there ever was? Since in many instances the extant fragment may
be the only one of its kind, these supposedly “fragmentary” gospels
often leave us with more questions than answers.
Among the relevant examples are several Jewish Christian gos-
pels, which are mentioned numerous times in antiquity but are
known only from brief snippets of text. Some of these papyri and
patristic citations are de facto fragmentary in their extant state. But
in many cases it is impossible to be certain about the overall nature
and shape of the document concerned—for example, whether it
was only a sayings collection or also a narrative, and whether that
narrative covered the entire ministry of Jesus or only one aspect of
it. Were some of them perhaps only ever intended to supplement
the retelling of an existing (canonical or harmonized) gospel out-
line rather than to constitute part of an entire alternative account?
As we will see, there are reasons to think this may have been the
case for the so- called Jewish Christian gospels. Perhaps the best-
known example of such an “intruded” episode is the story of the
adulterous woman that eventually attached itself to the end of John
7 (7:53–8:11) in the third century, perhaps to answer the Pharisees’
challenge of 7:15 (but in some manuscripts it follows 7:36; 7:44; or
Luke 21:38; see further Keith 2009). That said, the actual number
of such “intrusions” in the textual tradition of the gospels remains
remarkably small.
Or there are the discourse collections—including short frag-
ments, more extensive texts like the gospels of Thomas or Philip,
and, for that matter, the sayings source Q, if it ever existed. And
there are episodic narrative texts, including somewhat more exten-
sive ones like the infancy gospels of James and Thomas and passion
accounts like the gospels of Peter and (much later) Nicodemus.
But it concentrates the mind to consider that we do not have
a single surviving alternative ancient narrative account of Jesus’
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ministry ranging from the baptism of Jesus to his death and resur-
rection. Is it possible that this narrative structure, which is held in
common by the four canonical gospels, was by the noncanonical
writers either ignored or else (and more typically) used as a rough-
and- ready scaffold in which to insert supplementary or substituted
episodes of “rewritten gospel” (somewhat in analogy to the “rewrit-
ten Bible” or “rewritten Scripture” technique attested in the Dead
Sea Scrolls and other ancient Jewish and Christian texts)? We will
need to revisit these questions (see, e.g., p. 87).
Agrapha
A related question concerns the so- called agrapha or “unwritten”
sayings of Jesus, which surface in a wide range of early Christian
writings, in certain variant New Testament manuscripts (e.g., Codex
Bezae, or D in the standard text- critical designation), and even in
the mainstream text of the New Testament itself (esp. at Acts 20:35,
where Luke has Paul quote a saying of Jesus that appears nowhere
in his gospel).
The problematic nature of agrapha as originally conceived has
become increasingly clear in a number of respects. Most obvious
is the paradox that this material survives by definition in literary
sources and is therefore not unwritten in any meaningful sense.
Further, the distinction between agrapha and fragmentary gospels
is sometimes a matter of degree rather than of kind: some isolated
sayings might in theory be excerpted from larger sayings collections
(like the Gospel of Thomas) while, conversely, some of the collec-
tions may be anthologies of such individual sayings. There is also
the less compelling objection to any definition of agrapha based on
a distinction between canonical and noncanonical sayings, which
Ehrman and Pleše (2011, 351) in a somewhat curious dichotomy
deem “a decision that involves theological rather than historical
judgments.”
Relevant inventories therefore vary considerably, but involve
at a minimum a number of New Testament sayings not recorded
in the gospels (e.g., Acts 20:35, “It is more blessed to give than to
receive”) and undesignated variants in the textual tradition (e.g.,
in Codex D: Mark 9:49, “Every sacrifice will be salted with salt,”
and Luke 6:4, where Jesus says to a man working on the Sabbath,
“Man, if you know what you are doing, you are blessed; but if you
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do not know, you are cursed and a transgressor of the law”). Among
the many other sayings, the most notable include several in 2 Clem-
ent, such as a brief dialogue with Peter in which Jesus encourages
the disciples to be as sheep even in the midst of ravenous wolves
(5.2–4; cf. P.Oxy. 4009 below, p. 148) as well as an enigmatic state-
ment that the kingdom will come “when the two will be one and
the outside like the inside, and the male with the female will be
neither male nor female” (12.2–6, also echoed in Gospel of Thomas
22; also 2 Clem. 4.5).
Clement of Alexandria also cites a number of logia (“sayings”;
singular: logion) like “Ask for the big things, and the small things
will be given to you as well” (Stromateis 1.24.158) and “My mystery
is for me and the children of my house” (5.10.63, also in Pseudo-
Clementine Homilies 19.19–20, and several other writers); Origen
quotes “Be clever bankers” (Commentary on John, 19.7.2).
Some of these isolated sayings could in theory feature among
the oldest parts of the Jesus tradition. But the majority seem more
clearly the derivative product of reported speech, paraphrase,
expansion, or quotation from memory. They are sometimes placed
on the lips of Jesus in edifying or homiletical settings or indeed
as devotionally experienced, rather than necessarily intended as
recording authentic pre- Easter sayings.
Illustrations of this point abound from the earliest to the latest
examples in Christian antiquity. The memory of what “he said to
me” in prayer is already part of the apostle Paul’s spirituality: 2 Cor-
inthians 12:8–9. In the fifth or sixth century, the recently published
P.Monts.Roca IV 59 (inv. no. 996), in an apparently homiletical or
meditative context, includes a saying of the Lord that might be ren-
dered as “it has been kept to pronounce sweet words” (see Torallas
Tovar and Worp 2014, 164–67).
It is significant that, as Jens Schröter has demonstrated, the
gospel tradition’s “recollection” of Jesus is from the start articulated
within an integrated complex of sayings and narrative. Individual
agrapha and short dialogue units are in that connection much
more likely to “emerge secondarily to the already existing gospels”
(Schröter 2013b, 130–32, 262). This is an important corrective
to formerly widespread views that imagined the gospels growing
instead “from bare sayings” to full narrative lives (so again recently
Hägg 2012, 148–86 and blurb).
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Recent scholarship has tended to restrict the number of texts
being considered under this heading—in particular by omitting
clearly derivative or misattributed material, sayings of the pre- or
post- incarnate Jesus, and non- Christian sources.
The most recent German edition (Markschies and Schröter
2012) for the first time considers these sayings under the three cat-
egories of (1) noncanonical sayings of the (earthly) Jesus (Hofius
2012; on this somewhat minimalist reading just seven early sayings
are not derivative); (2) Jesus logia from Nag Hammadi texts other
than apocryphal gospels (Plisch 2012b: five units from Testimony of
Truth [NHC IX,3] and Interpretation of Knowledge [NHC XI,1]);
and (3) sayings of Jesus in Arabic and Islamic literature (Eissler
2012: ten logia from the Qur’an and thirty- one traditions from post-
Qur’anic sources of the seventh and later centuries).
While Otfried Hofius (2012; following his teacher Jeremias
[1964]; cf. Hofius 1991) focuses on potentially “authentic” sayings of
the “historical Jesus,” recent scholarship has been more open to the
development of such material from the perspective of the reception
history of both canonical and noncanonical gospel traditions. As
Elliott (1993, 26) rightly notes in critique of Hofius’s minimalism,
notions of “authenticity” and “originality” are not normally thought
pertinent to the selection of apocryphal gospels. That said, Elliott
himself opts for a relatively sparse account (26–30), while Ehrman
and Pleše (2011, 351–67) argue for an economical but more “repre-
sentative” identification of agrapha as “sayings allegedly spoken by
the historical Jesus that are recorded in documents other than the
surviving gospels (canonical or non- canonical).” (Contrast further
the more expansive collections of Morrice 1997 and Stroker 1989.)
“Lost” Gospels?
Another category problem is presented by documents whose exis-
tence is asserted by either ancient or modern authors, but which
may be either fictive or hypothetical. Most famous among the latter
is the so- called Q source of sayings material shared by Matthew and
Luke, which is still widely affirmed in Synoptic Gospel scholarship.
We will return to this in a separate section (p. 89).
Several other hypothetical “lost” gospels have been postulated
from time to time. Among these are first editions of the existing
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canonical gospels (Proto- Mark, Proto- Luke, etc.), as well as miscel-
laneous other narrative or sayings sources adduced to explain certain
parts of the gospel tradition. John Dominic Crossan, for example,
proposes a text called the “Cross Gospel” that he believes to underlie
the canonical passion narratives as well as the noncanonical Gospel
of Peter (Crossan 1988, 1991, 2007; cf. p. 137 below), while Francis
Watson (2013) more recently has substituted a source he calls SC
(Sayings Collection), which in his view predates the canonical gos-
pels and is most conservatively preserved in the Gospel of Thomas.
None of these other hypothetical sources have been found
compelling by a significant number of scholars, and not one is a
document whose real existence, let alone whose ancient identity as
a gospel, has been demonstrated.
Even so, this is not to deny that some gospels were indeed lost
in antiquity: the list above from the Gelasian Decree contains a
number of plausible examples, and Markschies (2012c) discusses
others (cf. above, table 2, p. 27), several of which our discussion
references in passing. All in all, however, we have no reason to think
that lost gospels constitute a literary category in their own right.
Rather than being unique, such texts are far more likely to belong
to one or another familiar genre. Even many of the apocryphal gos-
pels we will discuss survive only in a single copy and were “lost”
until they were rediscovered.
How to Organize the Texts: A Taxonomy
How then should we structure the available evidence, using what
we know to be an inevitably partial inventory of (so- called or self-
styled) gospels, along with numerous other ancient texts and frag-
ments that present gospel- like narrative or teaching about Jesus of
Nazareth?
A quick comparison of the tables of contents in recent edi-
tions and textbooks illustrates the reality of the problem by show-
ing a variety of often incompatible organizing principles. Some, like
Christopher Tuckett, Hans- Josef Klauck, Paul Foster, and Chris-
toph Markschies, recognize the difficulty of consistent classifica-
tion and try to address it by variously mixing historical, literary, and
linguistic categories with narrative or even geographic ones (e.g.,
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for Nag Hammadi). This unfortunately leaves us with an unwieldy
hybrid. Markschies and Schröter (2012) have compiled the most
comprehensive collection but are left with an even more impene-
trable taxonomy, the rationale for which is inadequately elaborated
in an otherwise magisterial and wide- ranging introduction.
A number of serviceable schemes exist, including some that
sort the texts by theological orientation and others by literary or
geographic criteria. In the end, a degree of eclecticism is probably
inevitable in choosing which particular documents to focus on. Here
I will adopt a fourfold taxonomy patterned loosely on elements of
the New Testament gospels’ narrative typology, developing insights
drawn from Christopher Tuckett and Paul Foster. Tuckett (2005,
243–48) suggests four categories:
• Narrative gospels
• Sayings gospels
• Birth and infancy gospels
• Resurrection discourses
As Tuckett points out, the fragmentary nature of much of our
material inevitably leaves our judgments about these categories
provisional, and certain texts arguably belong to more than one cat-
egory. But perhaps this is not the best we can do. There is a certain
awkwardness in juxtaposing essentially literary categories of nar-
rative and sayings genres with essentially narrative ones relating
to the infancy and resurrection of Jesus. In terms of literary genre,
Tuckett’s third category could arguably fold into the first, and the
fourth into the second. Some editors in fact simply distinguish two
headings, sayings and narratives (e.g., Cameron 1982, 7).
Paul Foster (2009) produces similar categories but introduces
an additional twist:
• “Gospels” from Nag Hammadi
• Infancy gospels
• Gospels during the earthly life of Jesus
• Secret revelations and dialogue gospels
Once again there is a certain clash of literary and biographi-
cal categories. Clustering the Nag Hammadi texts together under
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a separate heading of their own (an archaeological or perhaps geo-
graphical one) has a certain neatness about it, and at least in this
case contextualizes like with like. And yet, as Foster acknowledges,
these texts are vastly different from one another in form and sub-
stance, so it seems better not to prejudge the question of whether
in origin, intent, or function they belong together. In any case the
remainder of Foster’s outline seems tethered to a biographical
sequence, especially when one realizes that the last genre is almost
exclusively cast in a post-resurrection setting.
Genre distinctions are quite often somewhat crude and arbi-
trary. On the other hand, the attempt to offer finer distinctions very
quickly turns unwieldy. Compare, for example, Hans- Josef Klauck’s
taxonomy of no fewer than twelve categories, deployed in his intro-
duction to the apocryphal gospels (2003):
• Agrapha (unwritten, “scattered” words of Jesus)
• Fragments
• Jewish Christian gospels
• Two gospels of the Egyptians
• Infancy gospels
• Gospels about Jesus’ death and resurrection
• Gospels from Nag Hammadi
• Dialogues with the risen Jesus
• Nonlocalized dialogues with Jesus
• Legends about Mary’s death
• Lost gospels
• An antigospel
Large collections like that of Markschies and Schröter (2012)
resort to even more complicated and cumbersome lists (above,
table 2, p. 27; cf. previously Schneemelcher 1991–92, vol. 1). Com-
plex mixtures of literary and biographical categories are deployed
by Elliott (1993) and Robert Miller (1994), while Ehrman’s 2003
book gives no account of order or taxonomy at all (though he rem-
edies this in Ehrman and Pleše 2011; 2014).
We clearly need to start somewhere. Tuckett’s attractive break-
down of narrative, sayings, infancy, and resurrection quite rea-
sonably points in a direction that is largely guided by the explicit
content and setting of these documents themselves, without unduly
prejudging questions of context, literary criticism, or interpretation.
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Further along this line, I suggest, the most promising and least
prejudicial taxonomy of these documents is therefore quite reason-
ably narratival rather than literary- analytical. In other words, it
seems advisable to map the extracanonical sources onto the basic
structure of the New Testament’s narrative gospels, in relation to
which they most often position themselves. Among recent writers
this decision is, for example, similarly adopted with minor varia-
tions by Ehrman and Pleše (2011), who follow the threefold divi-
sion of (1) infancy gospels, (2) ministry gospels, and (3) passion,
resurrection, and post-resurrection gospels.
This is also the approach we will take in the present volume.
It seems best to structure the documents under four broadly bio-
graphical headings:
• Infancy
• Ministry
• Passion
• Resurrection
Similar or related finds from an important geographic location
(e.g., Nag Hammadi) will also fit this scheme without undue diffi-
culty—sometimes because interest in one or another of these head-
ings predominates. Fragmentary gospels on papyrus, too, tend to
be identifiable along these lines. The scheme arguably remains ser-
viceable even where the writers apparently do not know, or do not
accept, a biographical account of Jesus’ life: the focus in such cases
is often on one aspect of the Jesus tradition that implicitly functions
in a way that in other sources forms part of a narrative whole—be
it the instruction of the risen Jesus or the parable- like sayings of his
earthly teaching.
Where to Read the Noncanonical Gospels Today
Given the lively interest and controversy the noncanonical gospels
have generated since at least the nineteenth century, it is puz-
zling that for quite a long time these texts nevertheless remained
relatively difficult for the general public to access. Until the late
twentieth century, English translations were often partial, expen-
sive, and not always up to date (e.g., James 1924; the two editions
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ANCIENT APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS
52
of Hennecke, Schneemelcher, and Wilson 1963; Schneemelcher
1991–92). The mid- 1990s produced a couple of more serviceable
but still partial translations, Elliott 1993 as well as Robert Miller
1994. Elliott 2006 additionally contained a useful “synopsis” spe-
cifically of the infancy gospels. At the time of writing the most
accessible and reasonably priced collection and translation of non-
canonical gospels, in both paper and e- book versions, is Ehrman
and Pleše 2014. (This is also available in a useful four- language
edition with facing pages in Greek, Latin, or Coptic [Ehrman and
Pleše 2011]. The 2014 edition updates their translation of the Gos-
pel of Judas and additionally includes the Unknown Berlin Gospel
[Gospel of the Savior] and the Discourse on the Cross [the Stauros
Text from Qasr El- Wizz].)
For the gospel- like texts from Nag Hammadi, several editions
still advise readers to consult the exhaustive but expensive and
unwieldy five- volume Coptic Gnostic Library (Robinson 2000). A
more recent and handier, if still costly, bilingual Coptic- German
edition is Nagel 2014, which contains specifically gospels and
Acts material from Nag Hammadi. The most accessible English
translation is that of Meyer 2007.
The most complete translation, with an outstanding monograph-
length critical overview by Christoph Markschies as well as indi-
vidual introductions to the texts, is at present available in German
only (Markschies and Schröter 2012). Its translation into English
seems highly desirable but also liable to prove a complex undertak-
ing in view not only of the volume of material but also of the often
contested and rapidly shifting lines of scholarly debate.
In what follows I will take as my base texts Ehrman and Pleše
2011/2014 wherever possible, as theirs is a widely available set
of translations. Students of the original languages are strongly
encouraged to consult the 2011 multilingual volume. Since the
available space does not permit us to do full justice to all thirty-
seven of this edition’s “gospels,” we will foreground the most
important and supplement this with brief treatments of texts not
included by Ehrman and Pleše, particularly a number of dialogue
gospels from Nag Hammadi (drawing on the translation of Meyer
2007). For each document, I offer a brief historical introduction
and survey of the content, concluding with an analysis in relation
to some or all of the five interpretive emphases outlined above
(see pp. 28–31).
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Ancient Christian Gospels
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Suggested Further Reading
Texts
Ehrman, Bart D., and Zlatko Pleše, eds. 2011. The Apocryphal
Gospels: Texts and Translations. New York: Oxford University
Press.
———, eds. 2014. The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Out-
side the New Testament. New York: Oxford University Press.
Meyer, Marvin W., ed. 2007. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The
International Edition. New York: HarperOne.
General
Foster, Paul. 2009. The Apocryphal Gospels: A Very Short Intro-
duction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hengel, Martin. 2000. The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of
Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Collection and Origin of
the Canonical Gospels. Trans. J. Bowden. London: SCM Press.
Hurtado, Larry W. 2006. The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manu-
scripts and Christian Origins. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
———. 2013. “Christian Literary Texts in Manuscripts of Sec-
ond & Third Centuries.” http://larryhurtado.files.wordpress
.com/2010/07/second- third- century- christian- texts1.pdf.
Markschies, Christoph. 2015. Christian Theology and Its Institu-
tions in the Early Roman Empire: Prolegomena to a History of
Early Christian Theology. Translated by W. Coppins. Baylor-
Mohr Siebeck Studies in Early Christianity. Waco, TX: Baylor
University Press.
Nicklas, Tobias. 2011. “ ‘Apokryph Gewordene Schriften’? Gedan-
ken zum Apokryphenbegriff bei Grosskirchlichen Autoren
und in einigen ‘Gnostischen’ Texten.” In “In Search of Truth”:
Augustine, Manichaeism and Other Gnosticism; Studies for
Johannes van Oort at Sixty, edited by J. A. van der Berg et al.,
547–65. Leiden: Brill.
Tuckett, Christopher. 2005. “Forty Other Gospels.” In The Written
Gospel, edited by M. Bockmuehl and D. A. Hagner, 238–53.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Watson, Francis. 2016. The Fourfold Gospel: A Theological Read-
ing of the New Testament Portraits of Jesus. Grand Rapids:
Baker Academic.
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