The Apocryphal Gospels: A Very Short Introduction
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MODERN JAPAN Christopher Goto-Jones
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THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS
A Very Short Introduction
Paul Foster
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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First published 2009
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Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain by Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport, Hampshire
ISBN 978-0-19-923694-7
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
List of illustrations
1 The apocryphal gospels – what’s in a name?
2 The ‘gospels’ from Nag Hammadi
3 The infancy gospels
4 Gospels set during the earthly life of Jesus
5 Secret revelations and dialogue gospels
6 Insights from the non-canonical gospels
Further reading
References
Index
List of illustrations
1 Map showing the location of manuscript discoveries in Egypt: Akhmîm, Nag Hammadi, and Oxyrhynchus
2 Oxyrhynchus Courtesy of the Egyptian Exploration Society
3 Diggers unearthing scraps of papyrus at Oxyrhynchus Courtesy of the Egyptian Exploration Society
4 Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt Courtesy of the Egyptian Exploration Society
5 Nag Hammadi Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California
6 Nag Hammadi codicies Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California
7 The Gospel of Thomas Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California
8 Ceiling panel, ‘Jesus vivifies clay birds’, c.1150, Church of St Martin, Zillis, Switzerland
© The Art Achive/Glanni Dagli Orti
9 Albrecht Dürer, Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, 1502–3
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich
10 Gospel of Peter manuscript International Photographic Archive of Papyri, Cairo
11 The opening two pages of the text of the Gospel of Peter International Photographic Archive of Papyri, Cairo
12 The final page of the manuscript of the Gospel of Peter International Photographic Archive of Papyri, Cairo
Chapter 1
The apocryphal gospels – what’s in a name?
There are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
(John 21.25)
So ends the Gospel of John, with an acknowledgement that it contained only a limited number of the traditions about Jesus. But is this statement mere authorial hyperbole, or does it reflect a reality that in the gospel writer’s day there was a vast number of stories and sayings attributed to Jesus in circulation? If, even to a limited extent, the author of the fourth gospel portrays the prevailing circumstances of his own day, it becomes fascinating to ask what happened to all these extra traditions concerning Jesus. In all likelihood the vagaries of ancient history would mean the vast majority were lost in the mists of time. Romantic notions of such material surviving through long chains of oral tradition reaching down two millennia are simply fanciful. For such additional traditions to survive, the only plausible mechanism would be through the medium of written texts: either copied and transmitted by scribes down through the centuries, or through the chance preservation of ancient manuscripts.
Up until about the 1870s, only the first of these two alternatives was known to have led to the preservation of extra-biblical traditions concerning Jesus. Manuscripts recounting stories purporting to be events in the life of Jesus before his public ministry, or further post-crucifixion narratives, were generally the types of documents that had survived through scribal copying. Hence the written sources tended to be medieval or early-modern copies, many centuries removed from the date of composition of these extra-biblical stories. In many ways these represented a ‘gap-filling’ exercise, by providing details of the so-called ‘hidden years’ of Jesus’ life.