The Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Mary. The Gospel of Peter. The Gospel of Judas. The Jewish-Christian gospels of the Hebrews, the Nazarenes, and the Ebionites. Each was the holy book of a real Christian community. None of them are in the Bible most people read. The reasons are not all the same.
Season 2 · Episode 21
The second of two episodes on the Christian canon question. This one walks the books that did not make it: Thomas, Mary, Peter, Judas, the Jewish-Christian gospels of the Hebrews, the Nazarenes, and the Ebionites. Each was used by a real community somewhere in the second or third century. The episode also names the five filters that did the rejecting, and shows that in 313 CE regional Christianity still had seven or eight different Bibles in active use.
The Gospel of Thomas was recovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, sealed in a jar in the late fourth century by a Coptic monk. It is not a narrative. It is 114 sayings of Jesus, presented one after another with little framing. There is no birth, no Passion, no resurrection. The opening promises that whoever finds the meaning of the words will not taste death. Salvation is self-knowledge: the kingdom of God is inside you and outside you. There is no atoning sacrifice, no apocalyptic kingdom from outside, no church, no bishop, no Eucharist, no cross. Composed in Syria or Egypt around 120 to 150 CE.
The Gospel of Mary survives only in fragments. Composed in Egypt around 120 to 180 CE. The Mary is Magdalene. After Jesus has left, the disciples are afraid. Mary stands up, comforts them, and recounts a vision Jesus gave her privately: the soul's journey past cosmic powers after death. Andrew objects that the teaching is too strange. Peter objects more sharply: "Did he really speak to a woman without our knowledge?" Levi rebukes Peter: if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you to reject her? The fragment is short and the argument is sharp. It captures a fight over whether a woman could carry authoritative teaching, in a movement that was actively narrowing the role of women.
The Gospel of Peter, from around 150 to 180 CE in Syria, was used in worship until Bishop Serapion of Antioch read it more carefully in 199 CE and identified its docetic Christology. Jesus is silent on the cross, as if he feels no pain. At the moment of death he cries, "My power, my power, why have you forsaken me?" The resurrection scene is the only one in early Christian literature to actually describe Jesus emerging from the tomb: a giant cross walks out on its own, and a voice from heaven asks the cross whether it has preached to those who sleep, and the cross answers yes.
The Gospel of Judas, lost for fifteen hundred years and recovered in 2006, is theological inversion. Judas is not the villain. He is the only disciple who understands. Jesus tells him privately that the creator god of the Hebrew Bible is not the true God, that the world is a prison, and that by handing Jesus over Judas frees Jesus' spirit from the flesh. The betrayal is the act of liberation. Composed by Sethian Gnostics in Egypt around 140 to 180 CE. Irenaeus mentions it by name in his Against Heresies around 180.
The Jewish-Christian gospels are known only through quotations. The Gospel of the Hebrews has Jesus refer to the Holy Spirit as his mother. The Gospel of the Nazarenes is a version of Matthew used by a Jewish-Christian community in Syria. The Gospel of the Ebionites was used by a sect that rejected the virgin birth, rejected Paul as a false apostle, and taught that Jesus was adopted as God's son at baptism. These books did not lose because they were inauthentic. They lost because the historical wing of the movement they represented (the heirs of the Jerusalem church under James) had been displaced by the gentile-friendly version Paul had pushed for.
Five filters explain the rejections. Late composition: most apocryphal gospels were written fifty to a hundred years after Jesus and could not credibly claim apostolic authorship. Theological deviation: Gnostic dualism, denial of bodily resurrection, secret knowledge, anti-creation cosmology. Pseudonymity to figures the bishops would not accept: Mary Magdalene, Thomas, Philip, Judas. Local rather than catholic use. Active suppression: manuscripts destroyed, possession dangerous, most of what was suppressed simply lost. The Nag Hammadi library survived only because someone hid it in a jar.
By 313 CE the canon was almost but not quite settled. The Latin West was close to the standard but contested Hebrews and James. The Byzantine East accepted Hebrews but doubted Revelation. The Syriac Church still read the Diatessaron and excluded 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude. Egypt's Coptic Church accepted books the Latins rejected. Ethiopia would settle on a canon that includes 1 Enoch and Jubilees to this day. Armenia excluded Revelation until the twelfth century and includes 3 Corinthians. Constantine, looking across his empire, did not see one Bible. He saw seven or eight, with the proto-orthodox filter having done most of its work, but the empire mostly ratifying what the network had already chosen.
Key themesThomas and the sayings engine, the Gospel of Mary and Peter against Magdalene, the Gospel of Peter and Serapion's reversal, docetism and the walking cross, the Gospel of Judas as inversion, Sethian Gnosticism, the Jewish-Christian gospels of the Hebrews, the Nazarenes, the Ebionites, the displaced Jerusalem stream, five filters (late composition, theological deviation, wrong apostolic name, local use, active suppression), Nag Hammadi as the part that survived, the regional canons of 313 CE, Diatessaron Syria, the Ethiopian and Armenian outliers.