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

Lost Scriptures:

Books That Did Not

Make it into the New

Testament

Bart D. Ehrman

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

General
Introduction

1

NON-CANONICAL
GOSPELS

7

The Gospel of the Nazareans 9

The Gospel of the Ebionites 12

The Gospel According to the Hebrews 15

The Gospel According to the Egyptians 17

The Coptic Gospel of Thomas 19

Papyrus Egerton 2: The Unknown Gospel 29

The Gospel of Peter 31

The Gospel of Mary 35

The Gospel of Philip 38

The Gospel of Truth 45

The Gospel of the Savior 52

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas 57

The Proto-Gospel of James 63

The Epistle of the Apostles 73

The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter 78

The Second Treatise of the Great Seth 82

The Secret Gospel of Mark 87

NON-CANONICAL
ACTS
OF
THE
APOSTLES

91

The Acts of John 93

The Acts of Paul 109

The Acts of Thecla 113

The Acts of Thomas 122

The Acts of Peter 135

NON-CANONICAL
EPISTLES
AND
RELATED
WRITINGS

155

The Third Letter to the Corinthians 157

Correspondence of Paul and Seneca 160

v

vi

CONTENTS

Paul’s Letter to the Laodiceans 165

The Letter of 1 Clement 167

The Letter of 2 Clement 185

The “Letter of Peter to James” and its “Reception” 191

The Homilies of Clement 195

Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora 201

The Treatise on the Resurrection 207

The Didache 211

The Letter of Barnabas 219

The Preaching of Peter 236

Pseudo-Titus 239

NON-CANONICAL
APOCALYPSES
AND
REVELATORY

TREATISES

249

The
Shepherd
of Hermas 251

The Apocalypse of Peter 280

The Apocalypse of Paul 288

The Secret Book of John 297

On the Origin of the World 307

The First Thought in Three Forms 316

The Hymn of the Pearl 324

CANONICAL
LISTS

329

The Muratorian Canon 331

The Canon of Origen of Alexandria 334

The Canon of Eusebius 337

The Canon of Athanasius of Alexandria 339

The Canon of the Third Synod of Carthage 341

General Introduction

Even though millions of people world-wide read the New Testament—whether from curiosity or religious devotion—very few ask what this collection of books actually is or where it came from, how it came into existence, who decided which books to include, on what grounds, and when.

The New Testament did not emerge as an established and complete set of books immediately after the death of Jesus. Many years passed before Christians agreed concerning which books should comprise their sacred scriptures, with debates over the contour of the “canon” (i.e., the collection of sacred texts) that were long, hard, and sometimes harsh. In part this was because other books were available, also written by Christians, many of their authors claiming to be the original apostles of Jesus, yet advocating points of view quite different from those later embodied in the canon. These differences were not simply over such comparatively minor issues as whether a person should be baptized as an infant or an adult, or whether churches were to be run by a group of lay elders or by ordained priests, bishops, and pope. To be sure, such issues, still controversial among Christian churches today, were at stake then as well. But the alternative forms of Christianity in the early centuries of the church wrestled over much larger doctrinal questions, many of them unthinkable in most modern Christian churches, such as how many gods there are (one? two? twelve? thirty?); whether the true God created the world or whether, instead, it was created by a lower, inferior deity; whether Jesus was divine, or human, or somehow both; whether Jesus’ death brought salvation, or was irrelevant for salvation, or whether he ever even died. Christians also debated the relationship of their new faith to the religion from which it came, Judaism. Should Christians continue to be Jews? Or if not already Jews, should they convert to Judaism? What about the Jewish Scriptures? Are they to be part of the Christian Bible, as the “Old Testament”? Or are they the Scriptures of a different religion, inspired perhaps by a different God?

Such fundamental issues are for the most part unproblematic to Christians today, and their solutions, as a result, appear obvious: There is only one God; he created the world; Jesus his Son is both human and divine; his death brought salvation to the world, in fulfillment of the promises made in the Old Testament, which was also inspired by the one true God.

One of the reasons these views now seem obvious, however, is that only one set of early Christian beliefs emerged as victorious in the heated
1

2

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

disputes over what to believe and how to live that were raging in the early centuries of the Christian movement. These beliefs, and the group who promoted them, came to be thought of as “orthodox” (literally meaning,

“the right belief ”), and alternative views—such as the view that there are two gods, or that the true God did not create the world, or that Jesus was not actually human or not actually divine, etc.—came to be labeled “heresy”

(� false belief) and were then ruled out of court. Moreover, the victors in the struggles to establish Christian orthodoxy not only won their theological battles, they also rewrote the history of the conflict; later readers, then, naturally assumed that the victorious views had been embraced by the vast majority of Christians from the very beginning, all the way back to Jesus and his closest followers, the apostles.

What then of the other books that claimed to be written by these apostles, the ones that did not come to form part of the New Testament? For the most part they were suppressed, forgotten, or destroyed—in one way or another lost, except insofar as they were mentioned by those who opposed them, who quoted them precisely in order to show how wrong they were. But we should not overlook the circumstance that in some times and places these

“other” writings were in fact sacred books, read and revered by devout people who understood themselves to be Christian. Such people believed that they were following the real teachings of Jesus, as found in the authoritative texts that they maintained were written by Jesus’ own apostles.

Historians today realize that it is over-simplified to say that these alternative theologies are aberrations because they are not represented in the New Testament. For the New Testament itself is the collection of books that
emerged
from the conflict, the group of books advocated by the side of the disputes that eventually established itself as dominant and handed the books down to posterity as “the” Christian Scriptures.

This triumph did not happen immediately after Jesus’ death. Jesus is usually thought to have died around 30 ce.1 Christians probably began to produce writings shortly afterwards, although our earliest surviving writings, the letters of Paul, were not made for another twenty years or so (around 50–60 ce). Soon the floodgates opened, however, and Christians of varying theological and ecclesiastical persuasion wrote all kinds of books: Gospels recording the words, deeds, and activities of Jesus; accounts of the miraculous lives and teachings of early Christian leaders (“acts of the apostles”), personal letters (“epistles”) to and from Christian leaders and communities; prophetic revelations from God concerning how the world came to be or how it was going to end (“revelations” or “apocalypses”), and so on. Some of these writings may well have been produced by the original apostles of Jesus. But already within thirty or forty years books began to appear that
claimed
to be written by apostles, which in fact were forgeries in their names (see, e.g., 2 Thess. 2:2).

1I.e., 30 of the “Common Era,” which is the same as the older designation, AD 30.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

3

The practice of Christian forgery has a long and distinguished history.

We know of Gospels and other sacred books forged in the names of the apostles down into the Middle Ages—and on, in fact, to the present day.

Some of the more ancient ones have been discovered only in recent times by trained archaeologists or rummaging bedouin, including Gospels allegedly written by Jesus’ close disciple Peter, his female companion Mary Magdalene, and his twin brother Didymus Judas Thomas.

The debates over which texts actually were apostolic, and therefore authoritative, lasted many years, decades, even centuries. Eventually—by about the end of the third Christian century—the views of one group emerged as victorious. This group was itself internally diverse, but it agreed on major issues of the faith, including the existence of one God, the creator of all, who was the Father of Jesus Christ, who was both divine and human, who along with the Father and the Holy Spirit together made up the divine godhead. This group promoted its own collection of books as the only true and authentic ones, and urged that some of these books were sacred authorities, the “New” Testament that was to be read alongside of and that was at least as authoritative as the “Old” Testament taken over from the Jews.

When was this New Testament finally collected and authorized? The first instance we have of any Christian author urging that our current twenty-seven books, and only these twenty-seven, should be accepted as Scripture occurred in the year 367 ce, in a letter written by the powerful bishop of Alexandria (Egypt), Athanasius. Even then the matter was not finally resolved, however, as different churches, even within the orthodox form of Christianity, had different ideas—for example, about whether the Apocalypse of John could be accepted as Scripture (it finally was, of course), or whether the Apocalypse of Peter should be (it was not); whether the epistle of Hebrews should be included (it was) or the epistle of Barnabas (it was not); and so on. In other words, the debates lasted over three hundred years.