The Forgotten Gospels is an attractive little book: gold-blocked front cover with an image of Jesus, and with chapter headings, dropped caps and page numbers in dark red throughout. And for anyone who doesn’t have any of the non-canonical gospels, it contains the full text of the Gospel of Thomas. Can you detect the whiff of faint praise?
In his introduction, editor Tim Newton says: “There are many interesting texts from the beginning of Christianity not easily accessible to the lay reader… And nowhere are they to be found all in one place.” Nowhere except Willis Barnstone’s 742-page The Other Bible, Marvin Meyer’s 338-page The Secret Gospels of Jesus and several other readily available works, all of which are considerably more comprehensive than Newton’s slim volume.
He doesn’t include the Gospels of Mary or Philip, the Gospel of Truth by Valentinus or one of the earliest Christian writings, the Didache. He doesn’t include any of the various pseudepigraphical Acts of John, Paul, Thecla, Thomas or Peter, or any of the several apocalypses. More seriously, as he is seeking to describe the other material in circulation at the time the New Testament canon was compiled, he doesn’t include several works frequently included in early versions of the canon, which could easily have become part of the New Testament, such as the Letter of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas.
Most of what he does include are fragments, often of only a few sentences on an otherwise blank page. There are a few interesting excerpts from the Jewish historian Josephus and the Pagan Celsus and others, but not enough to rescue this work from being a massively missed opportunity. If you want a collection of “the forgotten gospels” you’d do far better to pick up one of Bart D Ehrman’s earlier books, the far more substantial yet less expensive Lost Scriptures: Books that did not make it into the New Testament.
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