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  The Apocryphal Gospels: A Very Short Introduction

  VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in more than 25 languages worldwide.

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  THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS

  A Very Short Introduction

  Paul Foster

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in

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  Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

  © Paul Foster 2009

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

  First published 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

  You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Data available

  Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain by Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport, Hampshire

  ISBN 978-0-19-923694-7

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Contents

  List of illustrations

  1 The apocryphal gospels – what’s in a name?

  2 The ‘gospels’ from Nag Hammadi

  3 The infancy gospels

  4 Gospels set during the earthly life of Jesus

  5 Secret revelations and dialogue gospels

  6 Insights from the non-canonical gospels

  Further reading

  References

  Index

  List of illustrations

  1 Map showing the location of manuscript discoveries in Egypt: Akhmîm, Nag Hammadi, and Oxyrhynchus

  2 Oxyrhynchus Courtesy of the Egyptian Exploration Society

  3 Diggers unearthing scraps of papyrus at Oxyrhynchus Courtesy of the Egyptian Exploration Society

  4 Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt Courtesy of the Egyptian Exploration Society

  5 Nag Hammadi Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California

  6 Nag Hammadi codicies Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California

  7 The Gospel of Thomas Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California

  8 Ceiling panel, ‘Jesus vivifies clay birds’, c.1150, Church of St Martin, Zillis, Switzerland

  © The Art Achive/Glanni Dagli Orti

  9 Albrecht Dürer, Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, 1502–3

  Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich

  10 Gospel of Peter manuscript International Photographic Archive of Papyri, Cairo

  11 The opening two pages of the text of the Gospel of Peter International Photographic Archive of Papyri, Cairo

  12 The final page of the manuscript of the Gospel of Peter International Photographic Archive of Papyri, Cairo

  Chapter 1

  The apocryphal gospels – what’s in a name?

  There are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

  (John 21.25)

  So ends the Gospel of John, with an acknowledgement that it contained only a limited number of the traditions about Jesus. But is this statement mere authorial hyperbole, or does it reflect a reality that in the gospel writer’s day there was a vast number of stories and sayings attributed to Jesus in circulation? If, even to a limited extent, the author of the fourth gospel portrays the prevailing circumstances of his own day, it becomes fascinating to ask what happened to all these extra traditions concerning Jesus. In all likelihood the vagaries of ancient history would mean the vast majority were lost in the mists of time. Romantic notions of such material surviving through long chains of oral tradition reaching down two millennia are simply fanciful. For such additional traditions to survive, the only plausible mechanism would be through the medium of written texts: either copied and transmitted by scribes down through the centuries, or through the chance preservation of ancient manuscripts.

  Up until about the 1870s, only the first of these two alternatives was known to have led to the preservation of extra-biblical traditions concerning Jesus. Manuscripts recounting stories purporting to be events in the life of Jesus before his public ministry, or further post-crucifixion narratives, were generally the types of documents that had survived through scribal copying. Hence the written sources tended to be medieval or early-modern copies, many centuries removed from the date of composition of these extra-biblical stories. In many ways these represented a ‘gap-filling’ exercise, by providing details of the so-called ‘hidden years’ of Jesus’ life.