Still Later Gospels
Still Later Gospels
We will not explore in any detail gnostic “gospels” later than Thomas. This is because they tend to be more “gnostic” than Thomas, offering fewer parallels with authentic Jesus tradition and even fewer signs of Jesus’ original milieu. In other words, few of their sayings offer much good claim to derive from the Jesus of history, however much they may teach us about what people were teaching in his name in a subsequent period. Such later “gospels” include the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary. The Gospel of Truth is a purely gnostic meditation, even further from a “gospel” form.
The majority of churches (what we might call the “mainstream” of churches, what has traditionally been called “orthodox”) rejected gospels composed based on gnostic “revelation.” They insisted instead on the standard established by first-century Gospels, composed by eyewitnesses or those who knew them. This reflects not simple bias on their part but their insistence on materials known to be early, publicly believed to be from the apostolic circle that knew Jesus, and those who learned from them directly. This was a claim that the later gnostic works, despite their attributions, could not meet; traditions supposedly passed on in “secret” were rightly suspected of being later inventions.
Thus, apart from some disputed sayings in Thomas, it is unlikely that any of the apocryphal or gnostic gospels reflect any degree of authentic Jesus tradition. 109 Groups that claim “secret” traditions, as the gnostics often did for their works, thereby concede their lack of public attestation, in contrast to the widely circulated Gospels accepted by the mainstream of early Christianity.110
As noted above, gnostic “gospels” constitute an entirely different genre than the “biographic” genre now generally assigned to the four Gospels later deemed canonical.111 Conclusions concerning them should not, therefore, be read back into studies of the canonical Gospels.