“Think Different – Accept Uncertainty”

Question:

I want to know about the other gospels - the ones that did not make it into the official canon of Holy Scripture.  When were they written?  Can we get any insight into Jesus from them?

Answer:

Dear Barb,

The “non-canonical gospels,” to which you are referring, are quite numerous and are all generally second and third century creations.  We know about the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of James, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of the Hebrews among others.  In most cases we originally learned of the existence of these gospels because they were quoted in other ancient sources.  We do not have full manuscripts of most of them even today.  Recall that books had to be copied by hand to be preserved and that process was very expensive.  Only those books that were deemed to be particularly important were copied.  The discovery at Nag Hammadi in the first half of the 20^th century of an almost complete manuscript of the Gospel of Thomas was greeted with great enthusiasm.  The Jesus Seminar included this Gospel of Thomas in the canon in its signature work entitled The Five Gospels (Ed. by Robert Funk and Roy Hoover).  In that volume they sought to identify the level of authenticity in each of the words attributed to Jesus in each of the texts.  Later, Elaine Pagels, the brilliant Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the author of the best-selling and highly acclaimed book entitledThe Gnostic Gospels, also did a masterful study of the relationship of the Gospel of Thomas to the canonical Gospel of John in a book entitled Beyond Belief.  Both of her books are classics in this field and I commend them to you.

The later the gospel, the more the miraculous is heightened, the more the stories are exaggerated.  They tended to be the products of a community of Christians who wrote their gospels in order to claim the authority of Jesus for their point of view.

Do we learn much about Jesus from them? I would say we learn some things, but not much about Jesus.  We learn more about how Jesus was used to interpret the experiences of second and third century followers.

~John Shelby Spong