The 34 Gospels

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In 1995, I discovered a lost gospel.

Well, stumbled over it might be a more accurate description. I was working in the Berlin Egyptian Museum, reconstructing an ancient papyrus codex. In the museum’s storage area I chanced upon a few fragments of a manuscript written in Coptic, the ancient Egyptian language (second to seventh century A.D.) written in Greek letters. I was struck by a beautiful sheet of parchment (animal skin prepared for writing) and the scribe’s elegant uncial handwriting (not cursive, but separate, carefully executed capital letters). This was clearly no love letter or bill of lading; it was a professionally prepared document intended for public reading.

When I asked the museum curator if anyone was working on the text, I was surprised to hear him say, 022“No one.” The fragments had been lying unconserved in the museum’s storage rooms ever since they had been acquired from a Dutch antiquities dealer in 1967 for a measly 300 Deutsche Marks—about $140 today.

I began coming to the museum early each morning to work on the fragments and photograph them. Some months later, back in the States, I discovered that Paul Mirecki from the University of Kansas was also working on the fragments. He too had stumbled upon them while working in the museum in 1991, and had made photocopies of the fragments. From these, he produced a rough copy of the very Coptic fragment that had caught my eye—but he set the project aside for future analysis.

Before learning of his interest, I transcribed the texts (dividing the unseparated Coptic letters into discrete Coptic words) and prepared a provisional translation. When we later learned of each other’s interest, we decided that a collaborative project would see the text into print sooner than our competitive efforts.

The text was clearly Christian (see the sidebar to this article). It mentions several of Jesus’ disciples, including Andrew, John and Jude (or Judas). I did not find the name “Jesus,” but the title “savior” was prominent throughout the fragments. The text contains dialogues between the savior and the apostles, and brief speeches by the savior. Many of the savior’s sayings are similar to statements in the New Testament, but others are completely new. One fragment contains a courageous statement from the savior to the cross: “You were eager for me, O Cross; I also will be eager for you”—a remarkable contrast to Mark’s reluctant Jesus, who cries out in Gethsemane: “Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me” (Mark 14:36).

Frankly, neither Mirecki nor I realized what we had. I simply enjoy reading unpublished ancient texts whether they are fragmentary or not. Mirecki had concluded that the fragments were part of a Coptic sermon with excerpts from the gospels and set them aside. But when I presented a brief description of the fragments at a conference in 1996, Hans-Martin Schenke, retired professor of New Testament studies at Humbolt University in Berlin, said: “It sounds like a gospel.” It turned out he was right. We called it the Gospel of the Savior.

Mirecki and I are not the first scholars to find a new ancient gospel. In fact scholars now have copies of 19 gospels (either complete, in fragments or in quotations), written in the first and second centuries A.D.—nine of which were discovered in the 20th century. Two more are preserved, in part, in other ancient writings, and we know the names of several others, but do not have copies of them. Clearly, Luke was not exaggerating when he wrote in his opening verse: “Many undertook to compile narratives [about Jesus]” (Luke 1:1).

Every one of these gospels was deemed true and sacred by at least some early Christians. But do they have any value today? Can they tell us anything new about the historical Jesus? Does the sheer abundance of gospels shed light on the activities of the earliest church?

Before we can answer these questions, we must first consider what makes a gospel a gospel. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all called “gospels” even though their structural forms and stories differ considerably. The name, from the Greek euangelion, simply means “good news.” A precise definition of gospel on which all scholars would agree eludes us, but as Mr. Justice Stewart famously said about a very different 023genre: “I know it when I see it.” In the broadest sense, a gospel reports the sayings and deeds of Jesus, and stories about him. Gospels—whether canonical or not—are collections of anecdotes from Jesus’ public career. The Gospel of the Savior, too, fits this description.

Contrary to popular opinion, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not included in the canon simply because they were the earliest gospels or because they were eyewitness accounts. Some noncanonical gospels are dated roughly to the same period, and the canonical gospels and other early Christian accounts appear to rely on earlier reports, and thus are not independent eyewitness accounts.

Mark, generally recognized as the earliest of the canonical gospels, is dated based on its allusion to the Roman destruction of the city of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple (Mark 13:1–2, 14:58, 15:29), an event that occurred in 70 A.D. Scholars assume that the city and Temple had already fallen by the time the gospel was written, or that its fall was imminent and considered inevitable by the author of the gospel. Thus Mark is usually dated around 70 A.D. or shortly thereafter, but the precise date of composition of all early gospels—canonical and noncanonical—is unknown.

Mark does not specify any sources used in writing the gospel. But, according to the fourth-century church historian Eusebius (who credits the early-second-century writer Papias for this information), Mark acquired material from the apostle Peter. Peter did not recount the sayings and deeds of Jesus in an orderly fashion, however, and he interpreted the material to meet the needs of the church in Mark’s own later day. Hence, according to Eusebius (and Papias), Mark is already a retelling of an earlier gospel tradition, a conclusion also reached by modern scholars on other grounds.

Luke, on the other hand, is part of a third generation of storytellers. Luke writes that the gospel story was passed on to him “by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses” (Luke 1:2), and he mentions “many” other accounts of Jesus’ career (Luke 1:1). Most 024scholars today date Luke to around 80 A.D. and accept that Luke actually drew material from two earlier gospels: Mark and Q, a collection of Jesus’ sayings that scholars hypothesize existed because both Luke and Matthew seem to draw from the same now-lost common source (other than Mark).^a

John (generally dated no earlier than 90 A.D. and no later than 140 A.D.) actually mentions an eyewitness who is someone other than the narrator of the story. Thus, the narrator or author, John, simply records what he was told (John 19:35, 21:24).

This leaves only Matthew. If the generally accepted theory about gospel origins is correct, canonical Matthew, like Luke, was written around 80 A.D. and is an expansion, and interpretation, of the gospels of Mark and Q.

None of the canonical gospels claims to be an eyewitness. Thus, the information found in the canonical gospels did not pass straight from Jesus’ mouth to the evangelists’ ears.

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Although the canonical gospels are believed to have been written in the first century A.D., virtually all the extant manuscripts date from the third century and later. We have no Christian artifacts or manuscripts from the first century and only two small fragments of John from the second century A.D. (see photo of fragment from Gospel of John). The earliest of these was originally known as John Rylands Papyrus 457 (because it was housed in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England). Today it is commonly referred to as P52. This 2.5- by 3.4-inch fragment includes John 18:31–33, 37–38, and dates “not later than A.D. 140,” in the words of the eminent New Testament scholar C.H. Dodd.¹

The same is true of the noncanonical gospels: We have no manuscripts from the first century and only a few fragments from the second. These include three Greek fragments of the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas, which were originally dated “no later than A.D. 140,”² and five fragments that make up Papyrus Egerton 2 (named for the collection providing the funds to purchase most of them). The Egerton Gospel (see photo of fragment from the noncanonical Egerton Gospel), which describes Jesus healing a leper and debating opponents, has been dated to the mid-second century—a conservative date, according to the editors, who believe it may be even earlier.³

Thus, as far as the physical evidence is concerned, the canonical gospels do not take precedence over the noncanonical gospels. The fragments of John, Thomas and the Egerton Gospel share the distinction of being the earliest extant pieces of Christian writing known. And although the existing manuscript evidence for Thomas dates to the mid-second century, the scholars who first published the Greek fragments held open the possibility that it was actually composed in the first century, which would put it around the time John was composed.^b

The earliest complete New Testament, which incidentally includes the earliest complete manuscripts of any New Testament book, is the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, found by the 19th-century German explorer Constantin von Tischendorf in St. Catherine’s Monastery, at the foot of Mt. Sinai, and now housed in the British Museum.^c

Of the extant noncanonical gospels from the first and second centuries, only four survive in complete manuscripts. The others exist only in fragments. They are listed in full in the sidebar to this article.

To this list of 11 extant noncanonical gospel manuscripts, we can add four lost gospels known only from brief quotations in the writings of early church leaders: They are the Secret Gospel of Mark (the date and originality of which is much debated),⁴ and the gospels of the Hebrews, Ebionites and Nazoreans.

Most scholars would add to this list the hypothetical Sayings Gospel Q (from the German Quelle, meaning “source”) and the Johannine Signs Gospel. Like Q, the Signs Gospel is a hypothetical gospel that scholars infer John used as a source but has since been lost.

Finally, there are other gospels of which little more than their name is known: The Gospels of the Four Heavenly Regions, Perfection, Eve, the Twelve, Matthias, Judas, Bartholomew, Cerinthus, Basilides, Marcion, Apelles, Bardesanes, and Matthew’s logia collection.⁵

In sum, in addition to the four canonical gospels, we have four complete noncanonicals, seven fragmentary, four known from quotations and two hypothetically 026recovered for a total of 21 gospels from the first two centuries, and we know that others existed in the early period. I am confident more of them will be found. For example, I have seen photos of several pages from a Coptic text entitled “The Gospel of Judas” that recently surfaced on the antiquities market.

The sheer number of early Christian gospels dated to the first and second centuries is evidence that early Christianity was not monolithic. Orthodoxy competed with many other variations of Christianity in this early period. Each group claimed an authoritative gospel tradition and excluded the others as heretical. The distinction was not based on history, but theology.^d Thus, we cannot assume that a gospel excluded from the New Testament is historically less reliable than one in the canon. Any of these gospels has the potential to preserve at least some reliable historical memory about Jesus of Nazareth and the earliest stages of the Christian movement.^e

The variety of texts can certainly provide an indication of issues that divided the earliest Christians. One very practical question that the Christian communities had to face after the death of Jesus was, Who is in charge?

The New Testament gives the strong impression that Paul and Peter were widely accepted as Jesus’ successors. Thirteen of the 27 New Testament books claim Pauline authorship, and another (Acts) has Paul as its central character. Two letters in the New Testament are attributed to Peter, and, by the second century, Peter, as we have seen, was identified as the source for the information in Mark’s gospel. More importantly, in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells Peter, “You are Peter, and on this rock (petros) I will build my church…I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:18–19). Similarly in the Gospel of John, Jesus singles out Peter and commands him, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15–17).

The New Testament provides only hints of the tension that existed among early Christians over who should lead the church. For example, Paul criticizes members of the Corinthian church for showing allegiance to different authority figures (1 Corinthians 1:10–16) and describes a rather sharp difference of opinion on the nature of the gospel message—between himself, on the one hand, and Peter and James, on the other (Galatians 2:1–14). A casual reader might 029easily miss these scattered references, however, and assume that Peter and Paul were the only apostles from whom a unified, compatible, authoritative tradition was derived.

Only when we turn to the noncanonical gospels do we find that Paul and Peter had considerable competition in the first and second centuries. The Gospel of Thomas cites the apostle Thomas (a minor figure in Matthew, Mark and Luke, but more prominent in John) as the authoritative source for its rather different sort of collection of Jesus’ sayings. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas also traces to Thomas its numerous accounts of the exploits of Jesus from five to twelve years of age. In the Gospel of Mary, Mary (apparently Mary Magdalene) is the authoritative apostle “whom the Lord loved more than any other woman” (Mary 6:1).⁶ She teaches the male disciples what she alone learned from the Lord, but she is challenged by Andrew and Peter. The Gospel of Mary restores the lost thread of the influential role of women in the fabric of the early Christian movement (also noted in Romans 16:1–15).

The Gospel of Peter traces to Peter a description of the actual moment when Jesus comes out of the tomb—a description lacking in the canonical gospels. The Secret Book of James features James of Jerusalem (likely the Lord’s brother) as the authoritative apostle.

All this is lost in the canonical New Testament. When the followers of Paul and Peter compiled the New Testament canon, they simply deemed heretical those texts that questioned Paul and Peter’s authority, and overcame the dispute between them by canonizing both.

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Another issue early Christians struggled with was how Jesus came to be divine. Although this question is addressed in Matthew, Luke and John, the broad range of early Christian understanding can only be fully appreciated by reading all the early Christian gospel texts.

Matthew (1:18–23) and Luke (1:26–35) trace Jesus’ divine sonship to the moment of his birth from the Virgin Mary. The Infancy Gospel of James goes to great lengths to prove Mary’s suitability as the mother of God’s son.^f The Gospel of the Hebrews goes even further, describing Mary as a divine “power that came down into the world” (fragment 1).

The gospels of Mark, John and Thomas, on the other hand, are able to describe Jesus’ significance for Christian faith without recourse to a virgin birth story. John describes Jesus as the preexistent Son of God—there never was a time when Jesus was not (John 1:1–3). Thus, John has a slightly different problem. He needs to describe how this eternal divine figure came to be human, and does so ever so briefly: “The word became flesh,” writes John (1:14), without indicating exactly how it happened.

Mark doesn’t provide a birth narrative but has a heavenly voice say to Jesus at the moment of his baptism, “You are my beloved son; I am well pleased with you” (Mark 1:11), almost as if Jesus became divine at that very moment. What is hinted at in Mark is fully 031spelled out in the Gospel of the Ebionites: “And there was a voice from the sky that said, ‘You are my favored son—I fully approve of you. Today I have become your father’” (fragment 4).

Thus, long before the council of Nicea met in 325 to address how the church should account for the nature of Jesus (divine? human? or what?), the Christian gospels reveal a fundamental division among early Christians. They variously trace Jesus’ divinity moving backwards from his resurrection (Romans 1:3–4), to his baptism, to his birth, and to his eternal preexistence.

Other details of Jesus’ life vary from gospel to gospel. In fact, there is no one uniform portrait of Jesus among all these early Christian narratives. This should not be surprising. As Bible scholars have long recognized, even the canonical gospels offer four startlingly different portraits of Jesus. In each gospel, Jesus acts and reacts differently, and says different things, even when the gospels appear to be reporting the same incident.

Many of the noncanonical gospels (especially the Gospel of the Savior and the Gospel of Thomas) are awash in new sayings of Jesus. Whether these new sayings were spoken by Jesus the historical man or not must be evaluated using historical criteria—just as sayings attributed to Jesus in the canonical gospels must be evaluated for what may, with a higher degree of historical probability, be traced to Jesus the historical man.

As early as the second century, both the reliability of the canonical gospels and their portrayals of Jesus were under fire. For example, the philosopher Celsus argued that a saying of Jesus quoted in Mark was actually purloined from Plato’s Laws (743A): “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25).⁷ Today, a group of scholars known as the Jesus Seminar has attempted (in the face of great criticism by many scholars and clerics) to determine the relative historical reliability of all early Christian traditions about Jesus, both canonical and noncanonical.

One passage that came under scrutiny and failed their historical criteria, for example, is Luke 4:23, which attributes a traditional Hellenistic proverb to Jesus. This saying, “Physician, heal yourself,” was known before the time of Jesus. It was not originally a “Christian” saying. Jesus may have repeated it, but he did not coin it—that is, the saying did not originate in the mind of Jesus, the historical man. Luke calls the saying a parable (parabole), but modern scholars 046and translators, ignoring Luke’s misidentification and recognizing it for what it is, translate Luke’s “parable” as “proverb.”

The canonical gospels not only misattribute sayings to Jesus, they also freely modify sayings attributed to Jesus. For example, Mark presents Jesus refusing to give a sign to authenticate his career: “Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation” (Mark 8:12). Matthew and Luke, however, change Mark’s “no sign” to “the sign of Jonah,” so that the statement reads: “Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation—except the sign of Jonah” (Matthew 12:38–39, 16:1–4; Luke 11:29). Clearly, we should not always regard the canonical gospels as historically correct simply because they are in the canon.

In like manner, the noncanonical gospels also change sayings of Jesus to fit their own views—but they are not always incorrect. Sometimes they are more historically reliable in the sayings they preserve. For 047example, the Gospel of the Savior reports what may be a new saying of Jesus, not preserved in the canonical gospels: “You are the salt of the earth; you are the lamp that illuminates the world” (Savior 97:19–22). This is a single saying of two parallel lines (called “stiches”), the second of which repeats the thought of the first in different words. There is a parallel to this saying tucked inside Matthew 5:13–16:

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot.

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

Reading Matthew in the light of the Gospel of the Savior suggests that Matthew likely split up the traditional saying and followed each stich with clarifying commentary. Of course, it is always possible that the author of the Gospel of the Savior has simply created a two-stich aphorism of Jesus by abbreviating Matthew’s gospel. But it seems more plausible that the shorter aphorism in the Gospel of the Savior is the original saying of Jesus, which Matthew has expanded.

Another saying of Jesus that is absent from the New Testament but appears in the Gospel of the Savior is “Who is near to me is near to the fire; who is far from me is far from life” (Savior 107:43–48). This, too, is most likely an original saying of Jesus. First, this form of antithetical parallelism—pairing those who are near with those who are far—is characteristic of Hebrew poetry and of Jesus’ discourse (compare, for example, Luke 8:16–18, 9:58; Mark 2:27, 4:25). Second, we have four independent witnesses to the saying: It appears first in the Gospel of Thomas (late first-early second century), where it ends with the word “kingdom,” rather than “life” (“Who is near to me is near to the fire; who is far from me is far from the kingdom” [Thomas saying 82]). The early church writer Origen (third century) attributed the saying (with the “kingdom” ending), with some reservations, to Jesus. Elsewhere, Origen rejected the Gospel of Thomas as “heretical” so he apparently knew the saying from a different source, one that he respected. The saying also appears in a fourth-century Armenian text (Exposition of the Gospel), which ends with the word “life.”⁸

This saying, which probably originated with Jesus, was almost lost to history when the definitive list of the 27 New Testament books was compiled. The earliest extant affirmation of the list was by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria in 367.^g But already by the end of the second century, four gospels were clearly preferred over all others. Exclusion from the list of books, which Athanasius described as the only sources of the teaching of true religion, eventually doomed all the other gospels to virtual oblivion.^h

The rediscovery of the historical value of the noncanonical gospels—and the discovery of new gospels—offers unparalleled opportunities for critiquing traditional views of Jesus and developing a much more comprehensive picture of Christian origins.

In 1995, I discovered a lost gospel.