“Lost Gospels” and Other Christian Apocrypha: New Discoveries and New Perspectives
On Wednesday, October 7 I delivered a virtual lecture for BASONOVA (Biblical Archaeology Society of Northern Virginia). They have granted me permission to share the text of that lecture (with some minor changes) on Apocryphicity.
Discussions of the origin and transmission of apocryphal literature in popular media, and some scholarship, typically look something like this:
Christian apocrypha are texts about Jesus and his family, followers and friends that are not found in the New Testament. They were written in the first three centuries, some perhaps as early as the late first century. They contain heretical ideas and were systematically destroyed once the church of Rome solidified its power over other forms of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries; these repressive efforts culminated in the formation of the canon of the New Testament, established at the latest by the time of Athanasius of Alexandria. The scriptures were clearly established as the 27 books of the New Testament; nothing more should be written, copied, or read thereafter. Some apocryphal traditions survived, however, but heavily sanitized of heretical ideas and collected as writings of the saints—so-called hagiographical literature. Otherwise, Christian apocrypha were lost to history until scholars of the Renaissance found copies in Eastern monasteries and brought them home to the West to be published, and more recently from archaeologists and Bedouins who found texts in caves and ancient garbage dumps. Despite all of the efforts of the church to censure these texts, many of them are now available for everyone to …