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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > June 2002

The 34 Gospels

Diversity and division among the earliest Christians

By Charles W. Hedrick

In 1995, I discovered a lost gospel.

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Footnotes

1.

See Eta Linnemann, “Is There a Gospel of Q?” BR 11:04; and Stephen J. Patterson, “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Q,” BR 11:05.

2.

See Helmut Koester and Stephen J. Patterson, “The Gospel of Thomas—Does It Contain Authentic Sayings of Jesus?” BR 06:02; and Patterson, “Now Playing: The Gospel of Thomas,” BR 16:06.

3.

See Leonard Greenspoon, “Major Septuagint Manuscripts—Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus,” sidebar to “Mission to Alexandria,” BR 05:04.

4.

See Roy W. Hoover, “How the Books of the New Testament Were Chosen,” BR 09:02; and George Howard, “Canon: Choosing the Books of the New Testament,” BR 05:05.

5.

See Robert J. Miller, “The Gospels that Didn’t Make the Cut,” BR 09:04.

6.

See Ronald Hock, “The Favored One: How Mary Became the Mother of God,” BR 17:03.

7.

In truth, we do not know exactly how the canon was determined. It seems to have been the result of a gradual grassroots process that evolved at different rates in various parts of the Roman Empire. There is no evidence of a single council of the church making the decision at a single moment in time. The earliest reflections (early fourth century) on the process can be found in Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History 3.25; 6.14.1–2, 6.25.3–14.

8.

But see David Cartlidge, “The Christian Apocrypha: Preserved in Art,” BR 13:03.

Endnotes

1.

See Charles Harold Dodd, “A New Gospel,” in Dodd, New Testament Studies (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 12–52. The paper originally appeared in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library in 1936. A year earlier, in 1935, the editor of P52 dated it to the first half of the second century. See C.H. Roberts, An Unpublished Fragment of the Fourth Gospel in the John Rylands Library (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1935).

2.

Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, LOGIA IESOU: Sayings of Our Lord from an Early Greek Papyrus (London: Egyptian Exploration Society, 1897).

3.

H. Idris Bell and T.C. Skeat, Fragments of an Unknown Gospel and Other Early Christian Papyri (London: British Museum, 1935).

4.

See Charles W. Hedrick, “Secret Mark,” The Fourth R 13:5 (2000), pp. 3–10.

5.

Wilhelm Schneemelcher and Robert McLachlan Wilson, New Testament Apocrypha: Gospels and Related Writings, rev. ed. (Louisville/Cambridge: Westminster John Knox/James Clarke, 1991).

6.

Except for the Gospel of the Savior, quotations from the noncanonical gospels are from Robert J. Miller, The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version, Revised and Expanded (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1994).

7.

Origen, Contra Celsum 6.16.

8.

It’s impossible to know whether the last word originally read “life” or “kingdom.” In truth, it could have been either, for the terms are used interchangeably in the Gospel of Mark to describe eternal life and the kingdom of God (Mark 9:43, 45 vs. 9:47; 10:17 vs. 10:23–24).