The Apocryphal Gospels - A Very Short Introduction

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 vastmajority 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.

List of illustrations viii
1 The apocryphal gospels – what’s in a name? 1
2 The ‘gospels’ from Nag Hammadi 26
3 The infancy gospels 61
4 Gospels set during the earthly life of Jesus 86
5 Secret revelations and dialogue gospels 117
6 Insights from the non-canonical gospels 132
Further reading 139
References 142
Index 151