The Gospels that Didn’t Make the Cut

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A few years ago, I was part of a team of scholars who set out to produce a new translation of the gospels. We were all teachers frustrated with the various New Testament translations in our college and seminary courses. While most of the major translations are quite good, they are designed primarily for use in worship and Bible study, not for the college classroom. The Greek of the New Testament was the Greek of the marketplace. Translations designed for use in worship tend to elevate the tone and style of the language. Also, because almost all New Testament translations are intended for use in explicitly Christian contexts, they reflect Christian theology and the interests of different churches.

The purpose of our new translation, The Complete Gospels, Annotated Scholars Version (Polebridge Press, 1992), is educational: Our goal was to put the gospels into the English actually spoken in America, whether or not 015it would sound good in church or would reinforce Christian beliefs. We wanted our students to be able to hear the gospels as they might have sounded to first-century audiences, before the terms and concepts of the gospels were overlaid with the interpretations of Christian orthodoxy.

We realized that our pedagogical purpose could best be served by doing our work without regard for theologies that emerged after the New Testament period. Unlike other major English translations, the Scholars Version is not answerable to any church. Our stance is not one of hostility toward the churches or toward Christian theology. Our purpose is simply to let the gospels speak, as much as possible, on their own terms and in their own historical and religious contexts. What the gospels said in their own contexts is not always what the later Church took them to mean.

The same philosophy that underlay our translation led us to question the canon itself. We had decided to do our translation work outside the context of a later Christian orthodoxy. However, it occurred to us that we were still beholden to this later context if we limited our attention to the New Testament gospels. If we were not letting our translation be governed by a later orthodoxy, why should we let our selection of texts be governed by the New Testament canon, which was determined long after the gospels were written?

Most of us were already using various noncanonical gospels in our courses. Few of these texts were published in formats accessible to our students. Since our goal was to produce a book suitable for the classroom, we decided to gather all the relevant gospels into one volume. The result is a collection of 17 freshly translated gospels.

Here I want to discuss the value of the gospels outside the New Testament. Why should we study them and what can they teach us? To start, let us consider why we study the four canonical gospels. One reason is to learn what early Christians believed about Jesus. A single gospel gives only one perspective on the meaning of the deeds and words of Jesus. It’s easy to see that we cannot make general statements about Jesus or early Christianity on the basis of one gospel alone. To use a simple example: If the only gospel we knew were John, we would not know that Jesus was remembered as an exorcist because he does not cast out demons in John’s Gospel. If our goal is to attain an adequate understanding of early Christianity, common sense requires that we attend to all four gospels. By a simple extension of this same logic, we also need to take into account other gospels, for they too represent forms of early Christianity. That later centuries judged these gospels to be incompatible with official church doctrine does not alter the fact that, in the contexts of their own times, these gospels expressed the religious convictions of sincere Christians. If there is one thing that the past century of biblical scholarship has taught us it is that early Christianity was diverse. Some of this diversity is evident within the New Testament itself. If we study texts outside the New Testament as well, we can learn about early Christianity in all of its remarkable variety.

The New Testament canon is a product of the Church’s attempt to define its identity in terms of doctrinal conformity. The result was a sharp boundary between insiders and outsiders, between the “orthodox” and the “heretics.” The canon is one marker of this boundary. In its final version, the canon included the four gospels, Acts, 13 Pauline letters, 8 general letters (Hebrews, James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John and Jude) and Revelation.^a

Eusebius, a fourth-century historian, catalogued many different Christian writings at a time when the contours of the New Testament canon were still a matter of debate. He discusses three categories of writings: acknowledged, disputed and rejected. The rejected works are ones that “the heretics put forward in the name of the apostles,” such as the gospels of Peter, Thomas and Mattheus (not to be confused with the Gospel of Matthew). Eusebius characterized the rejected writings as “absolutely out of harmony with true orthodoxy” and as “altogether monstrous and impious.” Such language is rooted in a mentality that perceives theological diversity as a threat to the fabric of Christianity. But what about those Christians on the other side of the boundary drawn by the self-proclaimed orthodox? The communities that produced and preserved works such as the gospels of Peter and Thomas obviously did not think they were monstrous or unholy. Such texts nourished the faith of generations of Christians who sincerely believed them to carry the revealed truth about the identity, significance and teaching of Jesus. The “other” gospels open a window for us to another side of early Christianity.

One question that naturally arises is whether the noncanonical gospels contain information about the historical Jesus. The answer is an emphatic very little. From 1985 to 1991 the Jesus Seminar^b carried out the first comprehensive survey of all the sayings attributed to Jesus in all texts 016through the fifth century. The seminar’s object was to assess the historicity of all Jesus’ sayings, whether found in canonical or noncanonical sources. Using historical-critical methods, the seminar found virtually nothing outside the canonical tradition that could be traced back to Jesus, except in the Gospel of Thomas, a surprisingly rich source of historical Jesus material.^c

However, both the noncanonical and the canonical gospels are valuable witnesses to the religious beliefs, practices and imaginations of the communities that treasured these texts. Any objective and comprehensive historical understanding of early Christianity must grapple with it in all its manifestations, and must not exclude aspects of it that lost the battle for orthodoxy. Those who study the noncanonical gospels will almost certainly discover much that strikes them as wrongheaded or even bizarre. By striving to understand what the authors and audience of these gospels believed and why they believed it, we can learn much about the dynamism of a religion that generated so much diversity. Insights gleaned from such effort are useful in our own age because contemporary Christianity is even more diverse than it was in its formative years, despite centuries of effort (and even violent attempts) to homogenize it.

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Pre-Canonical Gospels

Generally speaking, the four canonical gospels are earlier works than the gospels outside the canon. However, a few extracanonical gospels were written before the canonical ones and were used as sources for them. To distinguish these earliest gospels from the rest, we can call them “precanonical.” While we cannot be sure how many precanonical gospels existed, two that we do know about are the Signs Gospel and the Sayings Gospel.

The Signs Gospel. The Signs Gospel is a hypothetical precanonical text that survives embedded in the Gospel of John. It is an account of the deeds of Jesus, nearly all of them miracles. It contains very few of Jesus’ teachings and none of the speeches characteristic of the rest of John’s Gospel.

Scholars have long suspected, because of the presence of so many rough spots in John, that much of John’s narrative is based on an earlier document, for which we have no manuscript copy. These rough spots, or literary seams, are places in the narrative that are marked by inconsistencies and contradictions, or places where different, even competing, interpretations are being given to the same story.

For example, in John 4:46–54, when an official pleads with Jesus to heal his son, Jesus derides those who do not believe unless they see miracles. Despite this, however, Jesus grants the request. The man believes Jesus’ word, goes home, confirms the miracle and believes (again). That the official believes both before and after the miracle gives conflicting messages about the relationship of miracles and belief. Jesus’ pejorative remark about those whose belief depends on miracles is doubly strange, since the Gospel of John declares that it recounts Jesus’ miracles precisely so that the reader will believe in him (John 20:30–31). By paying careful attention to the numerous literary seams in this gospel, scholars can separate out the pre-Johannine material. In this way the Signs Gospel can be reconstructed by working backwards from John. While we cannot be certain about the exact contents or wording of the Signs Gospel, we do know enough to recognize it as a distinct gospel with a distinct message. Its fundamental message is that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and that he proved it by working a series of messianic miracles that the gospel calls “signs,” such as changing water into wine at Cana (John: 2:1–11) and healing the official’s son (John 4:46–54).

The Signs Gospel can deepen our understanding of earliest Christianity in two ways:

1. It can bring John’s Gospel into clearer focus. By knowing the Signs Gospel we can sharpen our understanding of John by studying how John builds on and modifies his source.

2. By learning how the Signs Gospel “grew into” the Gospel of John, we can track the religious developments within the Johannine community. This provides us with another case study of early Christianity’s development in response to both external pressures and internal influences.

Two kinds of developments are especially clear in contrasting the Signs Gospel and the Gospel of John. The first is a development from the Signs Gospel’s relatively uncomplicated belief that Jesus is the Messiah to John’s high Christology of Jesus as the divine Son of God. The second development has to do with the notion of Christian belief. The Signs Gospel seems optimistic that simply recounting Jesus’ miracles and showing how he fulfilled prophecy would persuade Jews to accept Jesus as 018the Messiah. However the Signs Gospel seems to have failed badly as a proselytizing document, because John makes it clear that a faith based on a belief in Jesus as a miracle worker is insufficient. For John, “believing in Jesus” is more complex and demands a deeper personal commitment than the simple willingness to believe in miracle stories. Knowing the Signs Gospel helps us to see that this lesson was probably a painful one for John’s people, learned from the hard experience of having their message rejected by fellow Jews. We can surmise just how bitter this experience was from the acrimonious tone of many of Jesus’ arguments with “the Jews” in John.

Although the Signs Gospel adds significantly to our understanding of Johannine Christianity, it was not written to be a source for some later gospel. It was meant to be its own proclamation of the good news about Jesus. Behind it we can glimpse a very early community of Jewish followers of Jesus in the full flush of enthusiasm about their recently departed Messiah, never imagining that they would ever be anything other than Jews.

The Sayings Gospel. The other major precanonical gospel is Sayings Gospel Q, or simply Q (from the German Quelle, meaning “source”). Like the Signs Gospel, Q is a hypothetical text. Scholars “discovered” it by comparing the material Matthew and Luke have in common but did not derive from Mark. Because so much of this common material agrees word for word, it is assumed that Matthew and Luke must have copied it from another document. Such extensive verbatim agreement would be all but impossible if Matthew and Luke were independently drawing on an oral tradition. Meticulous comparison of the Matthean and Lucan passages by numerous scholars has given us a high degree of certainty about the contents of Q.

The most striking feature of Q is that it is composed almost entirely of sayings of Jesus. The only two narrative passages it contains—the stories of Jesus’ temptation by Satan in the wilderness (Luke 4:1–13 and Matthew 4:1–11) and his healing of the centurion’s slave (Luke 7:1–10 and Matthew 8:5–13)—actually reinforce Q’s emphasis on Jesus’ teaching, for they dramatize the power of his words.

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It is worth noting what Q does not have: stories or even sayings dealing with Jesus’ death and resurrection, the title “Messiah,” disciples with names, stories about Jesus’ birth and many miracle stories found in other gospels. Compared with other gospels, Q seems theologically underdeveloped, one indication that it must be a very early document.

The fact that Q lacks so much of what we expect in a gospel makes it important for our understanding of early Christianity. We expect gospels to have narratives (and other features) because our assumptions about what a gospel should be are derived from the four canonical gospels. Q helps us correct our “canonical bias” by introducing us to a very early community quite unlike what we might expect Christians to have been.

Behind Q are followers of Jesus who passed on his teachings, preached in Jewish towns and believed that they were continuing the work of the Hebrew prophets. Judging from the contents of Q, these followers sustained their commitment to Jesus without referring to him as the Messiah, without mentioning his resurrection and without attributing any salvific significance to his death.

If our notion of the core of the early Christian message is that Jesus is the Messiah who died to save others and rose from the dead (an impression, by the way, for which Paul is responsible), then we may well be inclined to call Q a “pre-Christian” gospel. Q seems to be a kind of missing link between the Jewish world of Jesus and the early Christian movement.

If we allow that Q is as much a gospel as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—the four that were later declared canonical—we can better appreciate the pluralism of early Christianity. This appreciation can sharpen our awareness of the significant differences among the canonical gospels themselves. When we add to the mix the letters of Paul (and the ones written in his name by his disciples: Ephesians, Colossians and the Pastoral Epistles), the motley collection of other letters in the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, as well as the considerable corpus of noncanonical Christian literature, it becomes very difficult to identify any “mainstream” at all in Christianity until well into the second century. Even then there were so many exceptions to this mainstream that any historically responsible study of early Christianity needs to take into account the pluralism represented in the noncanonical works as well. The mainstream stands out only in hindsight, from the perspective of later centuries. If we strive to understand early Christianity from the perspective of its own time, the very notion of a mainstream may be more misleading than it’s worth.

These hypothetical earliest gospels—Signs and Q—do not refer at all to Jesus’ birth and childhood. Even Mark, the earliest New Testament gospel, dated to about 70 A.D., betrays no knowledge of the circumstances of Jesus’ early life. It was not until Matthew and Luke, probably in the 80s, that an infancy narrative was introduced into Jesus’ story. Even after this, John’s Gospel, dated to the late first or early second century, shows that Jesus’ birth is not a necessary element in narrative gospels, for it has none.

Infancy Gospels

Interest in Jesus’ early life grew greatly over the next few centuries. Various popular traditions embellished and supplemented the stories in Matthew 1–2 and Luke 1–2 and filled in the gaps in Jesus’ early life and family history. A new kind of gospel emerged in the second century—the infancy gospels—dealing exclusively with events prior to Jesus’ 020adult career. The best examples are the Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas.

The Infancy Gospel of James. Just who wrote the Infancy Gospel of James can no longer be determined, but it was written after Matthew and Luke, probably around the middle of the second century, when evidence of this document begins to show up in other Christian writings.

The Infancy Gospel of James is more interested in Jesus’ mother than in Jesus. The gospel opens with the story of Joachim and Anna, a righteous but childless couple whom God favors by sending a child, Mary. It tells of Mary’s unusual childhood—most of it spent at the Temple in Jerusalem, of how she came to live with Joseph, of her miraculous pregnancy and the scandal it created and how it was resolved. James then goes on to narrate the birth of Jesus and its uniquely miraculous outcome: Mary remains a virgin even after giving birth, a wonder verified by a midwife who physically examines her. The gospel tells of the astrologers and of how both Jesus and the infant John (later the Baptist) escape being murdered by Herod. The fundamental question guiding the narrative of the Infancy Gospel of James is why Mary, of all the virgins in Israel, was chosen to be the mother of the Son of God. Mary’s purity becomes the theme of the gospel.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The canonical gospels provide no information about Jesus between his presentation in the Temple as an infant (Luke 2:22–39) and his visit to Jerusalem at age 12 (Luke 2:41–49).

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas fills this biographical gap with episodes about Jesus at ages five, six and eight, ending with its own version of the 12-year-old’s discussion with the elders in the Temple. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas describes Jesus as a boy with miraculous powers, which he sometimes uses in destructive ways, such as killing two of his playmates by cursing them in outbursts of anger. Jesus is a prodigy at school, impatient with his merely human teachers. As he grows older, he learns to control his temper and begins to help and heal those in need.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas was originally written in Greek sometime in the second century. It survives in various forms in numerous manuscripts and was translated into several languages. The earliest extant copy is a sixth-century Syriac manuscript. In its longest form, this gospel is about half the length of the Infancy Gospel of James. We know nothing about its author or the place or circumstances of its composition.

Three insights into early Christianity emerge from the infancy gospels:

1. The Infancy Gospel of James is evidence that the New Testament gospels were being read “against” one another. Gaps, inconsistencies and theological problems were noticed. For example, if John the Baptist was born six months before Jesus (a detail only in Luke), how did he escape being killed by Herod’s soldiers (an incident only in Matthew)? The question only arises when both gospels are read together. The Infancy Gospel of James solves the problem by having John’s mother hide him in the hills. Another problem was how to explain Jesus’ brothers. The natural assumption that they were later children of Mary and Joseph is religiously unacceptable to the author of the Infancy Gospel of James, which maintains that Mary was a lifelong virgin. So in this gospel Joseph is a widower and Jesus’ brothers are Joseph’s sons from his first marriage.

2. The infancy gospels reflect “popular” Christianity. These gospels are not concerned with fine points of Christology, but rather with personal details of Jesus’ family life, especially those involving miracles. What we see here are the interests of unsophisticated Christians, not the concerns of the Christian theological elite. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas gives us a Jesus who is supernatural, to be sure, but also unmistakably human—someone to revere but also to be charmed by, a precocious divine brat growing into his godliness.

3. Finally, the Infancy Gospel of James is a blunt reminder of how different from us early Christians really were. The gospel’s elaborate emphasis on Mary’s physical virginity finds little resonance 021among Christians today. Our culture does not revere permanent virginity (especially not for married people), and modern readers no doubt find the gynecological details in the story rather odd, if not offensive. (It’s hard to imagine Mary’s postpartum examination being incorporated into a Christmas pageant.) This gospel confronts us with just how differently religious values were configured in the ancient world, even among Christians.

Sayings Gospels

A major category of noncanonical writings is the Sayings Gospels, texts that focus predominantly on Jesus’ teachings. In addition to the earlier Q, four Sayings Gospels were composed in the first and second centuries, long before the canon was fixed: the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Book, or Apocryphon, of James, the Dialogue of the Savior and the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene). A distinctive feature of these gospels is that they are witnesses to the blending of Christianity and Gnosticism.

Gnosticism was a diversified and vigorous movement in the early centuries of Christianity. Orthodox theologians attacked it energetically, attributing all manner of bad faith and moral depravity to its adherents. They refuted, ridiculed and slandered Gnostic teachings and teachers, both regarded as threats to the theological and social control of the burgeoning Catholic Church. In short, Gnosticism was a heresy. Of course history is written by the victors, in this case by the orthodox authors known as fathers of the church. From an objective historical perspective, however, “heresy” is a label for the rival religious currents that lost; that is, they eventually ceased to be politically, socially or intellectually sustainable alternatives to mainstream Christianity.

The fundamental obstacle to a proper historical understanding of Gnosticism used to be the lack of primary sources. Almost all of what was known about Gnosticism had to be pieced together from the testimony of hostile witnesses—the anti-Gnostic writers. Using Polemical materials to reconstruct what is being attacked is obviously problematic; polemical authors are not noted for their objectivity. Sifting out the inevitable distortions was difficult when so little of what Gnostics themselves wrote was available.

However, this changed in 1945 when two Egyptian peasants found buried treasure at a place called Nag Hammadi,^d a treasure more precious 022than gold: ancient manuscripts of 52 texts from a Gnostic community. Known as the Nag Hammadi codices, these texts are the single most important source for understanding Gnosticism. Heresy hunters in the early Church destroyed whatever Gnostic documents they could find. Texts that escaped destruction languished uncopied when Gnostic communities faded away. The Nag Hammadi documents were probably buried to keep them from being destroyed. Thanks to the bone-dry Egyptian climate and the good luck of two farmers who were digging for natural fertilizer, we now can learn about Gnosticism from Gnostics.

Three Nag Hammadi Texts. The Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Book of James and the Dialogue of the Savior are especially important in advancing knowledge of the gospel tradition. Although the Gospel of Thomas was known to have existed, there was no copy of it, and hence little knowledge of its contents, until it turned up at Nag Hammadi. The other two gospels were completely unknown until their discovery at Nag Hammadi.

The manuscripts of these three gospels are not ideal sources for two reasons. First, they are not in their original language, Greek. Rather, they are translations into Coptic, the form of the Egyptian language in use in the first century, when Christianity arrived in Egypt. (For some idea of the problems this creates, imagine that the works of Ernest Hemingway were preserved only in Russian translations.) Second, our only copies of these gospels are in poor condition, with numerous gaps, called “lacunae,” in the manuscripts. While this presents moderate problems in the Gospel of Thomas and the Secret Book of James, the Dialogue of the Savior has so many gaps that several of its sayings are unintelligible. A few missing letters can usually be filled in by Coptic scholars, but when whole words or phrases are missing, even the best scholars can only guess at what the original text said, and usually they do not even try.

The Gospel of Mary. In addition to these three Sayings Gospels, a fourth deserves attention: the Gospel of Mary. Though not discovered in the sands of Nag Hammadi, it is clearly rooted in the same Gnostic Christian soil as its partners. It is 023preserved in two fragmentary Greek manuscripts (published in 1938 and 1983) and in a Coptic translation (published in 1955). These manuscripts have textual problems of their own. The first is that we have only part of this gospel. Judging from the gaps in the page numbers on the longest manuscript, probably half of the total text is missing. The second problem is that the Coptic and Greek versions differ in important ways. There is nothing we can do about the first problem beyond hoping that more copies will turn up with the missing pages. As for the second problem, when the versions differ it makes sense to prefer the Greek readings, since these manuscripts are earlier and Greek is the original language of the text.

Despite the textual difficulties that come with these four Sayings Gospels, they can still make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the gospel tradition. The very fact that Christians wrote and used Sayings Gospels tells us that they had a distinct notion of what it meant to be a Christian. Of course, the New Testament gospels include a lot of Jesus’ teachings, and two, Matthew and John, give special prominence to them. Matthew portrays Jesus as a second Moses bringing a “new law” with his teaching. John attributes long speeches and dialogues to Jesus and opens his gospel by referring to Jesus as the “Word.” In the canonical gospels, however, the Jesus who teaches also works miracles, dies and rises from the dead.

When the Christians behind the canonical gospels thought about how Jesus brought salvation, they focused on what Jesus had done, not on what he had said. Jesus saved by his death and resurrection. The great doctrinal controversies of the early Church, especially those resolved in the ecumenical councils, were almost all about who Jesus really was and about how he effected salvation, not about the significance of his teachings. This emphasis has stamped Christianity forever. Even though Christians were expected to learn and follow Jesus’ teachings, the saving significance of his death and resurrection formed the core of Christian belief. This remains true today. Those who strive to follow Jesus’ teachings but who do not believe that he is the Son of God who died for our sins and rose from the dead are usually considered to be marginal Christians at best. In many churches such people are not regarded as Christians at all.

So it is interesting indeed that the faith of some early Christians was formed by and reflected in the noncanonical Sayings Gospels. The Jesus of these gospels is the revealer who brings salvation by his teaching, not by his death or resurrection. Perhaps the clearest expression of this is found in the very first Saying of the Gospel of Thomas, “Jesus said, ‘Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.’ ” These gospels do not deny that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead. They just seem to consider it 024unimportant theologically, for they either do not mention Jesus’ death and resurrection or mention it only in passing. The challenge and duty of the Christians represented by these gospels was to seek to understand Jesus’ words and live according to them. As the first saying in Thomas implies, understanding Jesus’ words does not come easy. Many of these teachings are quite obscure, at least to us. Perhaps the Christians who used these gospels easily understood these teachings, but it may well be that even they found some of them puzzling. Outsiders would certainly have been confused.

This obscurity may have been intentional, a way of hiding certain teachings from those who did not belong to these communities. An undercurrent of secrecy runs through these texts. The prologue to the Gospel of Thomas describes it as “the secret sayings” of Jesus revealed to Thomas. The Secret Book of James, as the name implies, is the record of a private revelation Jesus gave to James and Peter. The Gospel of Mary contains teachings that Mary Magdalene received from Jesus in a vision.

Understanding the meaning of Jesus’ teaching is a process that saying 1 of Thomas envisions as a quest. The interpretation of Jesus’ sayings is something to be won after a struggle. The New Testament also maintains that discipleship is a struggle. Three well-known examples can illustrate: 1. The Gospel of Mark challenges the reader to join the struggle of following Jesus on the way to his death. To be a disciple means to pick up one’s cross and follow Jesus (Mark 8:34). 2. The Epistle to the Hebrews emphasizes the struggle to remain loyal to Jesus despite persecution. To be a true disciple is to persevere under the stress of persecution, a theme highlighted in other New Testament books. 3. Second Timothy portrays Paul near the end of his life, looking back at his career. Paul sums up his achievements by using images of struggle: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7).

The Gospel of Thomas and other Sayings Gospels understand the Christian struggle to have a significant intellectual dimension: The true Christian labors to understand the truth Jesus revealed. Here we find an intellectual, even philosophical, approach to religion uncharacteristic of the New Testament. Very little of Jesus’ teaching in the canonical gospels is hard for his hearers to understand. Mark does portray the parables as baffling the people, but Jesus always explains them afterwards to his disciples (Mark 4:33–34). In John, when Jesus teaches about the need to eat his flesh and drink his blood, his disciples complain that it is a “hard saying” (John 6:60). They do not mean that it is difficult to grasp but that it is difficult to accept. The New Testament gospels describe a Jesus whom one must struggle to follow, but who is easy to understand.

Another way in which the noncanonical gospels enrich our understanding of early Christianity is by showing how some early believers were creatively accommodating Christianity and Gnosticism. Although not all the post-canonical sayings gospels were produced by Gnostics, it is in this genre more than any other that we see the blending of Christian and Gnostic belief. One especially clear example of this blending is the characterization of the kingdom of God as a reality found within the soul. The canonical gospels depict the kingdom as a future reality established by divinely willed apocalyptic events. Less often, they portray the kingdom as in some sense already present, as an idealized social reality (“the kingdom of God is among you,” Luke 17:21). By contrast, the Gnostic influence in the Sayings Gospels makes for an understanding of the kingdom as an interior, spiritual reality. Consider three sayings that echo Luke 17:21 but give it a distinctively Gnostic spin.

“If your leaders say to you, ‘Look the [Father’s] imperial rule is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the 025sea,’ then the fish will precede on you. Rather, the [Father’s] imperial rule is within you and outside you” (Gospel of Thomas Saying 3:1–3).

“Be on your guard so that no one deceives you by saying, ‘Look over here!’ or ‘Look over there!’ For the seed of true humanity exists within you. Follow it. Those who search for it, they will find it” (Mary 4:3–7).

“What you seek and search for, behold, [it is] within you” (Dialogue of the Savior 16:2).

Sayings Gospels differ significantly among themselves on the degree and manner in which they are influenced by Gnosticism. For example, in the Gospel of Thomas, Gnostic themes are found next to themes with no trace of Gnostic influence. Many of the sayings and parables in Thomas have close parallels in the canonical gospels. To take just two examples from Thomas:

“Come to me, for my yoke is easy and my lordship is gentle, and you will find rest for yourselves” (Saying 90; compare with Matthew 11:28–30).

“[Blessed are] Congratulations to the poor, for to you belongs the Heaven’s imperial rule [Kingdom of heaven]” (Saying 54; compare with Luke 6:20, Matthew 5:3).

Other sayings in Thomas have no such parallels, but are the kind of things Jesus says in the canonical Gospels:

“[Woe to] Damn the Pharisees, for they are like a dog sleeping in the cattle manger, for it neither eats nor [lets] the cattle eat” (Saying 102).

“[Blessed are] Congratulations to those who know where the rebels are going to attack. [They] can get going, collect their imperial resources, and be prepared before the rebels arrive” (Saying 103).

These sound at home on the lips of the New Testament Jesus. There is nothing Gnostic about them. On the other hand, many sayings reflect a decidedly Gnostic perspective:

“If they say to you, ‘Where have you come from?’ say to them, ‘We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image’ ” (Saying 50:1).

“[Woe to] Damn the flesh that depends on the soul. [Woe to] Damn the soul that depends on the flesh” (112).

Finally, there are some sayings that sound a Gnostic overtone on traditional themes:

“[Blessed are] Congratulations to those who have been persecuted in their hearts: they are the ones who have truly come to know the Father” (Saying 69:1; compare with Luke 6:22–23).

“I am the light that is over all things [compare with John 8:12]. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there” (Saying 77).

Scholars differ over the extent to which Thomas was in fact Gnostic. Many sayings can legitimately be read either way. Thomas opens a window for us into a community of Christians at an interesting time in their religious development, for it allows us to see an early Christian community taking its first steps in the direction of Gnosticism.

The Secret Book of James. Similarly, in the Secret Book of James, Gnostic elements blend with expressly Christian concepts. For example, on the one hand the kingdom of God is attained through knowledge (“Unless you receive [the kingdom] through knowledge, you will not be able to discover it,” [Secret James 6:18]) and through being “full,” a term associated in Gnosticism with knowledge and salvation: “Truly, I say to you, no one ever will heaven’s domain if I bid him, but rather because you yourselves are full” (Secret James 2:6). On the other hand, there is the utterly non-Gnostic teaching of the salvific value of the crucifixion. Secret James presents us less with a synthesis of Gnostic and Christian beliefs than with a juxtaposition of the two. Consider Secret James 9:4, which sounds like some sort of compromise formula worked out by a committee of Gnostic and Pauline Christians: “But you, through faith [and] knowledge have received life.”

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In contrast to the Secret Book of James and the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary is a thoroughly Gnostic text. It presupposes some fundamental Gnostic beliefs: The human soul preexisted the body in an exalted spiritual realm. Through some disaster the soul has been entrapped in the body and has forgotten its origins. The “Powers” of this world hold the soul in bondage but can be overcome by one who possesses the true knowledge, brought by the Revealer: the knowledge of the soul’s spiritual nature and thus its inherent superiority over the material world. Once the soul overcomes its own ignorance, it can thereby also overcome the Powers, whose domination of souls is enabled by the souls’ ignorance of their true origin and destiny.

The Gospel of Mary is unique among the gospels in being named after a woman. Mary Magdalene has the central role after Jesus departs from the disciples. They are upset at his absence and worried that they might also be killed. It is Mary who comforts and encourages them. Peter asks her, “Tell us the words of the Savior that you know, but which we haven’t heard” (Mary 6:2). This request reflects the Gnostic belief that Jesus revealed certain things secretly to select disciples. But in singling out Mary as the recipient of this special teaching, the Gospel of Mary seems also to be building on a tradition known to the Gospel of John, that Mary was the first disciple to see the risen Jesus and that she went on to report his words to the others (John 20:1–18). The Gospel of Mary depicts her teaching Peter and the others, demonstrating her role as a Christian leader. At the end of the story, however, Peter rejects her teaching because she is a woman. “[Peter said], ‘Has the Savior spoken secretly to a woman and not openly so that [we] would all hear? [Surely] he did [not wish to indicate] that [she] is more worthy than we are?’ ” (Mary 10:3–4).

The Gospel of Mary upholds Mary’s role as a leader among the apostles, making it clear that her leadership is based on her superior understanding of Jesus’ teaching. Peter and some of the other disciples, however, cannot see past the superficial sexual differentiation of the flesh to Mary’s spiritual authority. Their pride prevents them from grasping the truth of her teaching. The controversy is far from resolved at the end of the gospel. Peter and the others have not understood the Savior’s teaching. The reader can only wonder what kind of good news such proud and ignorant men will announce.

The Gospel of Mary lets us in on a heated debate in early Christianity over the role of women in the Church. While Jesus was remarkably open to women, and while Paul affirmed that sexual difference was spiritually irrelevant (Galatians 3:28), mainstream Christianity moved decisively toward accommodating the values of the society around it by insisting on the subordination of women and their exclusion from official leadership. The Gospel of Mary unreservedly supports the leadership of spiritually advanced women. Though this understanding was pushed to the margins of orthodox Christianity and virtually extinguished in the later Church, the Gospel of Mary shows us a Christian community more faithful to the attitudes of Jesus and Paul than to mainstream Christianity.

One way to look at the extracanonical gospels is that they are “losers”; they lost out when the more powerful circles in Christianity successfully imposed their own limits of doctrinal acceptability. In short, these gospels didn’t make the final cut.

These gospels are also “losers” in the sense that most of them were physically lost. Some were destroyed by orthodox Christians. Most died out because they were not recopied. These lost gospels come to us today like notes in bottles, discovered more or less by accident. Several gospels are still lost. For some of them, all we have is a brief passage or two copied by another Christian author into his own work. We know some other gospels existed because ancient writers mention them, but not a single word from these gospels is extant except their titles. How many gospels have disappeared without a trace we cannot know.

Several gospels survive in mere fragments, stray scraps of papyrus torn from gospels even whose names are lost. Obviously there was much more to these fragmentary gospels; what we see are but the tips of icebergs. Perhaps these fragments aptly symbolize our knowledge of the whole gospel tradition: What we know might well be but a fraction of what there was. What we do have, however, can teach us much. With the noncanonical gospels we can recover at least part of the “other side” of early Christianity.

All selections, except the Lord’s Prayer, from The Complete Gospels, ed. Robert J. Miller (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1992).

A few years ago, I was part of a team of scholars who set out to produce a new translation of the gospels. We were all teachers frustrated with the various New Testament translations in our college and seminary courses. While most of the major translations are quite good, they are designed primarily for use in worship and Bible study, not for the college classroom. The Greek of the New Testament was the Greek of the marketplace. Translations designed for use in worship tend to elevate the tone and style of the language. Also, because almost all New Testament […]