Gnostic Gospels
III. How Were Gospels Included or Excluded from the Canon?
From the earliest days of the church the four Gospels that we have in our New Testament were recognized to have come either from an apostle (Matthew, John) or from an immediate associate of an apostle (Mark with Peter; Luke with Paul, who had special authority as the apostle to the Gentiles). This apostolic association was the basis of the authority found in the Gospels. The earliest church was gathered together as one community in Jerusalem for upwards of nearly twenty years. The eyewitness accounts by the apostles of Jesus Messiah’s life and ministry (cf. Acts 1:21-26) were supplemented by Mary, Jesus’ mother, and Jesus’ brothers, who were vital participants in the early Christian community (Acts 1:14).
The result is what may be called the standardized, fixed, oral tradition of the early church about Jesus. It is standardized because it was told over and over again by the passionate new church. And it became fixed because any errant variation would quickly be corrected by the eyewitness apostles. Their time in Jerusalem enabled them in that oral culture to memorize massive amounts of Jesus’ passion, teaching, and narrative life story.
The conservative evaluation of the evidence suggests that the three synoptic Gospels were composed within about thirty years of Christ’s death, well within the period of time when people could check up on the accuracy of the facts they contain. This is supported by the testimony of Christians as early as Irenaeus near the end of the second century, who attributes the writing of Matthew and Mark to the first generation of church history, i.e., before the fall of Jerusalem to Rome in A.D. 70.9 And the most reliable early tradition suggests a date for John around the 90s.10
Church fathers Clement (writing in the mid-90s) and Ignatius of Antioch (around 110) both quote or allude to words of Jesus from the four Gospels, indicating that they were recognized and accepted as authoritative. The earliest formal list of accepted writings was in the Muratorian Canon, dating around 180, which recognizes Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the orthodox records of Jesus life and ministry. All the later lists of authoritative writings included these four as “canonical” or authoritative Scripture.
These four Gospels set an apostolic basis that became the standard early in the second century for evaluating any other accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry, and no other gospels were ever seriously considered within the church as authoritative equals to them.
IV. The Gnostic Gospels
The Gnostic gospels have been given the most attention by far by recent scholars and the media. Although from the church fathers’ quotations and citations these writings had been known throughout church history, it was only since their discovery in 1945 at Nag Hammadi that more complete manuscripts have been available. Gnosticism was a religious movement that valued secret knowledge (gnõsis) of God and salvation, and disdained the physical world as inferior to the spiritual realm. This latter characteristic caused them to deny the incarnation of Jesus. As noted by Clint Arnold in the related article in this issue of Sundoulos, there is no evidence of Gnosticism as a movement prior to the mid-second century, and a paucity of evidence for the existence of a uniform Gnostic movement in the Greco-Roman world. This undercuts the claim of scholars who contend that Gnosticism was a competing strain within Christianity. Rather, from its rise in the second century it was recognized as a heretical movement that had departed orthodoxy.
The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of thirteen papyrus codices of Gnostic scriptures and commentaries. The original versions were written in Greek in the second or third century, but the codices themselves are fourth century translations into Coptic (the ancient Egyptian language written using Greek letters).
Of the basic 52-53 texts found at Nag Hammadi, eight are either called gospels or have gospel material. Two other documents, the Gospel of the Savior and the Gospel of Judas, were discovered in Egypt but not at Nag Hammadi. They bear similar strains of Gnostic teaching. The Gnostic gospels attempt to revision the canonical understanding of Jesus Christ under the influence of heretical Gnostic beliefs.