Wesley Huff explains why the early church rejected the so-called “lost gospels.”

Transcript

Tim: I’m thinking of books like the Gospel of Thomas. I’m thinking of Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Peter. It seems like around Easter time, there’s some book that we’ve known about for some time, but National Geographic or BBC or somebody does a documentary, and it’s like, here is something you Christians didn’t know. Here’s this lost or secret gospel that’s going to change everything. So, that normally comes out around Easter time, and they sell a lot of magazines.

Wes: Conveniently.

Tim: So, tell us about these books. Maybe we’ll start this way. What was the criteria for, say, a gospel or a New Testament document? Why were these ones included? And that may help us to distinguish as we go with some of these other works.

Wes: That’s a very interesting question and a little bit of a complicated one because, in one way, if you were to go back in time—if you were to hop in your time machine and go back to the second century—and talk to that second-century Christian and say, “Hey, why did you choose Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?” They would look at you, Tim, and they’d say, “What—what are you talking about?”

First of all, literally, what are you talking about? You’re not speaking Greek or Aramaic. But secondly, what do you mean “choose”? I think they would actually look at you and say, “These are the books that were handed down to us from the apostles. These are the books that hold that level of authority.”

So, in one way, there are no criteria. But, in a completely different way, there’s actually a very stringent criteria. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, I mean that, in this period of time, you have a number of books that are floating around Christian communities, and then some other communities that want to associate themselves with Jesus—groups like the Ebionites, or the Gnostics, or the Docetics, or the Nestorians. There are other groups that say, hey, we like this Jesus guy. We want him on our team, too. And they have some of these other books. So, the early church is saying, “Okay, we need to figure out what is inspired by God.” In one way, they are recognizing books right from the beginning. They’re seeing these books that were handed down to them by the apostles. And, in another way, they’re saying, “Okay, we also have to figure out and make sure that these are the books that the apostles gave.”

So, if we’re going to talk about any criteria, we’re going to talk about apostolicity. And what that word means is, can we connect it to an apostle or someone who knew an apostle? And that was a big one. There were actually some books that we have now in our New Testaments that wrestled a little bit to get their way into the Canon because of that—and maybe not for the reasons you think.

Some of these other apocryphal books, they started to attach names to them, which is why you get the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas. But let’s be honest. No one’s going to read the Gospel of Tim. Sorry. So, if you write a gospel, Tim, you’re not going to put your name on it.

Tim: Of course not.

Wes: You’re going to put someone who is important. You’re going to put Peter’s name on it, or you’re going to put Thomas’s name. You’re going to put Phillip’s name on it. Better yet, you’re going to put Mary Magdalene’s name on it because that’s going to cause a stir. Nowadays, plagiarism is me taking your stuff and putting my name on it. But what we’re talking about here is these groups taking their stuff and putting someone else’s name on it.

So, you had a lot of books floating around with names like Peter and John being associated with them. We have books like that in our New Testament canon, like 2 John and 3 John or 2 Peter. The church said, “Hey, we need to slow down and make sure we’re sure about these because there are a few too many of these books with these names on them.” So, that’s why some of those books took a little bit longer for the dust to settle on them.

Now, the trump card in all this conversation is that when we start to look at when these books outside the New Testament pop up, when we can date them to, they’re far too late. They’re second century and later. And that’s the kicker. As much as the New York Times or the Discovery Channel want to label these things “lost,” we can look at some of the early church writers, and they knew about them. In fact, every time they do talk about them, they condemn them. They’re not hidden in any way. Every time you hear the Gospel of Thomas mentioned by the early church, they’re like, “That thing ain’t Scripture.”

So, the date of them is second century and later, which means that all the names that are associated with them—those people have been long dead. Thomas, Peter, Phillip, Judas, Mary—they’re long dead. They didn’t write any of this stuff.

When you hear this accusation—when you hear people say, “Well, what about the Gospel of Thomas? What about the Gospel of Peter?” I think, really, without getting into the weeds, all you really need to say is, well, I want to know about Jesus. If I want to know about Jesus, I’m going to go to the earliest stuff that tells me about Jesus. And what is that? Unanimously, it’s Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and, I would contend, all the rest of the books of the New Testament—those 27 books. There really is no debate about that in academia.