Lost New Testament

good evening and welcome to our history theology and philosophy lecture series my name is john hamer and i serve as the coordinator of this meetup and also pastor of community of christ toronto congregation we always begin our activities with our mission which is to invite everyone into community to continually learn and grow to abolish poverty and needless suffering to promote peace and justice and to live life meaningfully together we'd like to remind you that all of our programming is listener supported and so we very much appreciate your donations that make these streaming services possible you can always go to our website centerplace.ca and support centerplace through giving via paypal and also the buttons on facebook thank you next week we have kind of a fun lecture on manichaeism and maybe maybe you've heard of manichaeism and maybe you haven't but manichaeism is the world religion that was in fact the um most significant rival to christianity prior to uh the creation of islam and man manny the prophet uh manichaeism spread from europe all the way across to china before it went extinct and so it is also the only major world religion to go extinct and so we're going to look at the rise and fall of the manatees what they believed and what happened to them our topic tonight is lost new testament i think a lot of folks think um in christians who are quite devote think that essentially the bible uh fell out of heaven in its present circumstance and it just is written front to back uh by one author who's speaking sort of shakespearean english but in point of fact actually uh it was a compilation and there was lots more texts that didn't make it in to the over uh what the canon than what did make it in and so we want to look tonight at what how that happened what's the historical development what text made it in what texts were left out and why so the new testament it's not just one um text it's not one book by one author it's in fact uh and it's not written as a single book in fact it's multiple different texts uh as it's presently configured there's 27 different books that went into the new testament and actually several of these books are in fact compilations themselves they weren't written by one author but were assembled together to produce the text that becomes one of the 27 books that is now part of the new testament but what we sometimes don't realize is that there's actually a bunch of other texts that look just like the different texts that are included in the new testament that were in fact not included and so in fact actually the number of uh scripture-like texts that were written around the same time and with the same general kinds of contents of the new testament the ones that didn't get included are actually far outnumber the ones that did included did get included and we're going to look at how that happened so first of all i want to look for a second at what actually made it in and so if we take a look at the new testament canon the 27 books that did get canonized and are printed in together now as the new testament you can kind of see how it all works there's the four canonical gospels matthew mark luke and john luke is the author of acts and so there's also a book of acts and you can see that between those that is accounting for a majority of the contents in terms of length but then there's a very significant component which are these epistles these letters uh and a lot of those are all written by paul or written in paul's name so people who are pretending to be paul are writing in paul's name and those letters are included in there and then there's a couple of other letters that make their way in uh on top of that and then finally there is an apocalypse which is the book of revelation and so um between all of those that's the new testament canon as it made it into the bible and so in terms of that we have four gospels which are texts that contain narratives and sayings of jesus during his lifetime his ministry there is a book of acts there's a single book of acts which is a history like book a book of how christianity expanded after jesus's death uh in within the roman empire within the roman context like i say there's 21 letters primarily by paul and people continuing paul's work pretending to be paul and one one apocalypse one vision of the future and that made made it in and so essentially those are the components that exist but in every case there's actually many many more gospels that did not make it in there were plenty of other books of acts of various early christian leaders there were a lot more letters that people wrote in the early christian time periods and then there was also a lot of apocalypses so these are different kinds of books of which these are characteristic of the new testament but these are only the ones that made it in okay so how did the canon take shape how did we get to this 27 books you might think oh well they probably figured this out at the council of nicaea actually no i will look at it surprisingly the very earliest list of a canon the very first time that anybody tried to make a canon is a guy named marcian in the early second century a.d and marcion only included 11 books so his canon is much smaller than the 27 that ultimately uh comprise the christian new testament marcion um is a sort of a um appalling christian who takes it way farther so it's a person who is not interested in christianity's jewish roots and instead is interested in its greek roots it's pauline roots and so in fact he actually omits from his canon the gospels of mark matthew and john favoring only the gospel of luke which is probably written by a greek so in other words the one of the four canonical gospels that is not written by somebody who was born jewish and is also otherwise only taking the letters of paul the important ones and so marcion is very much in favor of paul and he also rejects the entire old testament the hebrew bible and so he tried to create kind of a very spiritualized a very hellenized a very greek christianity he's ultimately viewed as a a heretic by the later christian church and so his cannon is not the one that goes forward nevertheless the fact that he had an idea of making a cannon that was something they're like oh yeah okay we need to make our list now and so after that all kinds of other christian leaders created their own lists and collections of which books they felt should be included in the canon which ones they thought were scripture unfor but not until the year 367 so not until the 4th century does the actual final list of 27 books that we now have first appear and so this is uh written in a letter of bishop athanasius of alexandria and so he says this is the list for him this is what he considers to be the canon nevertheless just because that guy thinks it's the canon that doesn't mean that everybody agrees it's simply the first time that we get that list the list that ultimately becomes the canon a little later in the century saint augustine who is the bishop of hippo in this area of north africa the area is now tunisia one of the most important thinkers in the latin middle age is the latin west he holds a series of synods and councils where they try to decide okay what is the canon what books are we going to accept as scripture as our new testament and so in augustine's councils that's when the church a church council first rules on the canon and accepts the present 27 books previously anybody who'd ever talked about it might had a quite a different list a slightly different list and so then what had happened was a little bit before that but then um uh uh to becoming more and more prominent uh the pope pope demasias um commissioned what's called the vulgate uh you know a little bit earlier than that around the same time and he asks saint jerome to translate all of these 27 books from the greek into latin so that people in the west who don't speak greek and instead speak latin can have access to the scriptures and so saint jerome creates this early translation into latin because it's called the vulgate it's called that because it's vulgate means vulgar means common and so he's translating it into a very common form of latin and so saint jerome picks those books and translates those books and so again that's starting to make in the west because they only have now those 27 books translated into latin there's other these other greek books that they don't have that starts to be their canon but it's only for the greek church so in the greek church they don't need the translation they can read all of the other texts and so many of the local churches have their own letters and their own acts and their own gospels that are important to them and so it's only in the 5th century so 100 in 100 years that follow augustine's councils that the eastern church says okay yeah we agree with you um that all of the books that you have on your list of 27 are part of the canon the very last one to be accepted is revelation a lot of people in the east were very hesitant to include the book of revelation in in the new testament we'll look at why okay so essentially um what are the books so these are this is a timeline of the 27 books that are in the canonical new testament in terms of the order in which they were written so they're all from the 1st century to the early 2nd century is when the books that made it in were written and so the earliest are these ones that are in yellow first thessalonians philemon galatians first corinthians 2 corinthians romans those are the books that paul wrote and then we can see these other books that are the gospels in blue some of the later letters and the book of revelations when those are all written so those are the books that made it in and when they were written but we can also see here there were a bunch of other books um that were presents um that even including some early ones that did not make it into the canon and then that continued new new um scripture-like texts continued to be written throughout the second century and many people felt that some of these should have been making their way into the new testament although they did not okay so let's look first at paul so paul is the very earliest christian whose writings have survived and we have here made all these different um scrolls that are showing uh letters that are by paul or letters that are attributed to paul and so uh they start here with the yellow ones and these are the ones that scholars uh feel largely that paul wrote the orange ones are ones the scholars are on the fence maybe paul wrote these maybe one of paul's followers wrote it the red ones are ones that most scholars agree paul didn't write these books but nevertheless they made it into the canon so they're in the new testament even though they're they're technically frauds they're technically forgeries they are not written by paul but they claim to be and they are in the canon and then finally then there's these purple ones and this is not an exhaustive list it actually goes on past this and the purple ones are ones that are forgeries all scholars agree in other words paul didn't write these but they also didn't make it into the canon and so there's a whole lot of these the one of these that is at the very front uh i called here lost corinthians this is maybe the earliest one it didn't make it into the canon because we don't have it but what happens is in when paul writes his first letter to the corinthians which is in the canon and which paul did write he says in my last letter i talked about this well we don't have that letter and so so there was a zero corinthians a a letter that was before first corinthians to the corinthians and that's that's been lost so what makes it into the canon so lost corinthians didn't make it in and like i say all of these purple ones the acts of paul and thecla the apocalypse of paul the prayer of paul the letter to the laodocians another apocalypse of paul letter third corinthians and the letters of paul to the philosopher seneca none of those made it into the canon and of course the lost corinthian letter has also just simply been lost so none of those were in the canon the other ones did make it in even though paul probably didn't write some of them okay so what texts make it into the canon so how do they what are the criteria what can we say about the text that made it in so one of the most important things is antiquity and it does turn out that most of the oldest texts that survive made it in but we are certainly aware that there was a bunch of other lost texts that were earlier even in some cases that were not included so that lost book of corinthians as an example the lost gospel of q is another example of an extremely early christian text that didn't make it into the canon so one of the ways that um texts were included when or when the different um uh early christians were thinking about that was they could kind of tell this is an old one they know this one's been around and so that was it another thing that they were very interested in was is this text attributed to an apostle or possibly an apostolic companion whether real or putative and so um if they have the sense that the text was written by peter or you know who was an apostle you know the main apostle of jesus one of the twelve or john one of the apostles then they're like okay well this has apostolic authority so we're going to include it it actually turns out that this is not a um not a good criterion because in in no case uh do we actually have a text that was written by one of the actual 12 apostles of jesus if uh those characters who are relatively legendary to the extent to which they are real like so peter and john for example are very real characters historically we have a lot of we have attestation for them nevertheless the books that are attributed to them are not written by them and so um for early christians when they were using this criterion this is actually one that led them into error the one about antiquity they did a pretty good job with so third criteria third criteria is the text addressed to an audience with successful heirs in later christianity so the reality is there's a bunch of different ways that early christianity was experienced and lived and different ways that people formulated what was important and so the things that ended up uh winning let's say the ideas of what became what was originally called proto-orthodox and ultimately became uh the early uh roman slash orthodox catholic church those with the contents that cohered with that did very well and those were included however if it was in part of a um like a community like the gnostics or like the judaizing christians who had ideas that were not consistent with proto-orthodoxy those were not likely to make it into the cannon because in a sense those guys didn't win we we always have here in in toronto uh you know the fire engines and everything else so you'll just bear with me on that and finally then therefore then are the teachings in the text consistent with doctrine that became orthodox and later christianity if there was something in the text that could be used let's say by gnostics or it could be used by aryans to prove kind of their point then later christian uh leaders said well we really this is a good text but we really can't put it in because it might lead people into error as they understood it or as they saw it and so that's what essentially were the criteria for putting the books in or not so what kept books out so if they didn't have any apostolic authority then it didn't make it in so there's important very early writers like clement or ignatius or polycarp or the shepherd of hermas and they wrote some of our earliest texts but they were nevertheless left out of the canon because they didn't claim to be apostles when they were writing if they addressed an audience that died out so like i said if it's the if it was somebody writing to ebianites or nazarians which is to say the judaizing christians people who um were jewish christians who believed that you still needed to um uh follow levitical law if their teachings were ultimately rejected as heretical so gnosticism docetism adoptionism um we'll talk a little bit about what gnosticism is docetism is uh uh well we'll talk about all of these when we when we get but essentially these are a different christological controversies and as people were trying to come to um the understanding of how do we understand even though we're monotheists and we and we believe that there's only one god how do we understand then that christ is also god and so ultimately texts that could be read in conjunction with trinitarianism is what made it in and so other texts like adoptionism the idea that jesus is born as a human being but who simply lives a perfect life and is that at certain point adopted by god and perfected and made uh divine adoptionism um you know or docetism seemed like he's a god agnosticism where he's actually not human at all all of those are judged as heretical and so left out if they included stories that are simply too fanciful to be believed then they also had a lot of things that that was a criterion that went against them and we'll see with the infancy gospel of thomas which is to say a gospel that is talking about or trying to write about what jesus is doing as a child it just ends up being too much of a fantasy novel and so therefore that didn't make it in and then if the text is just just an extremely obvious forgery like that i mentioned before these this series of letters that were supposedly between paul and the roman philosopher seneca but were very clearly not written by either of the two um those were also left out okay so the book of revelation we mentioned was the last one uh to make it in so that was the one that was still being challenged uh by especially people in the east it has a couple reasons why that would be so in the first place its apostolic authority is quite ambiguous so many people imagine that the fact that it's written by a guy named john means that that's the same as the apostle john john the beloved as he's sometimes called but many early christians could tell otherwise because the text is written in such a very odd kind of greek so anybody in the greek east could tell that the guy who wrote this book the apocalypse there's no way that that's the same author as the person who wrote the gospel of john or the epistles of john and so therefore um it's very clear and it's and no one uh no scholar today uh believes that this guy was uh the apostle john um and so as a result of that their the apostolic authority at best was ambiguous in the west they said okay well this is the same guy because they're reading it in translation it was also beloved by a community that became heretical who are called the montanas who were an apocalyptic christian group who uh essentially believed the end of the world was going to happen they used the apocalypse of john as their text they went and lived up on uh you know what went in community and waited for the world to end uh and then and then we're quite disappointed when it didn't end um so that also uh is a criterion for why some such and such a text wouldn't make it in um there's a bunch of imagery and teachings in it that are kind of borderline as regards to later orthodoxy and certainly um some of the people like the nestorians who are not um nicene christians the other other christian groups reject it and even martin luther when the protestants are pulling different texts out of the biblical canon martin luther almost pulls the apocalypse out before deciding to read it in a very non-literal way and then deciding that it's an important book so he changed his mind on it but it almost for protestants got knocked out of the canon too so tonight our topic then is lost texts and i want to look at different ways that texts in the new testament were lost and also found or texts that might have made it into the new testament but didn't and so some of these texts just to start are lost texts that are totally unknown and we only know them by name so for example i mentioned that earliest letter that paul wrote to the corinthians he said my last letter i said this and this and this well we'd only know that he wrote that based on that one mention we don't have it it's lost it's gone we don't have any quotes from it we only say what he said he said likewise there was an authentic letter to the laodosians by paul we have we only have a fake one and so that's not present we don't have it we just have the name of these lost texts so those are really lost we also have some lost texts that are known only in quotation and so this includes for example the gospel of the hebrews the gospel of the ebionites the gospel of the nazarians all of these cases these are gospels of early christian groups that continued to practice jewish law levitical law so all of these groups ended up dying out in the 5th and 6th centuries a.d and so their texts died with them but in the meantime proto-orthodox orthodox christians wrote long books where they talked about why these guys are heretics and why they're wrong and they frequently quoted out of their gospels the gospel of the hebrews the gospel of the eb knights etc and to say why they were wrong and so we have quotations therefore from this but we can't be sure that they're accurately quoted and we certainly since these are negative sources these are sources of where people are are trying to make the gospel of hebrews ebonites and nazarians look bad um we you know again that we only have a negative view of them or we have to try to find them based on the fact that uh that the position where we find them is negative there's a bunch of different texts that have been lost um as free-floating texts that were later absorbed into texts and then have been recovered by scholars and so one of these is the sayings gospel cue and the science gospel so we had a whole lecture on actually both of those and so the idea of it is that there was may have been hypothetically there may have been floating these texts that existed in the first century and in the case of the sayings gospel q the authors of matthew and luke had access to this and they both took those sayings and used them to create their texts now that later their that text that they had ceased to exist and nobody copied it and we don't have it but because they copied those those authors copied almost all of it into their text we have the footprints of it so we can kind of reconstruct what it is and there's an idea in terms of the science gospel that the one of the authors of the gospel of john did the same thing where they took this earlier text to science gospel and expanded it by putting their parts of it into their their ultimate text then there were a bunch of texts that were lost for hundreds of years and not copied in the west and not found in the time period in the early modern age when when people started printing things printing presses but were later found in manuscripts buried in libraries like the uh well in the case of the nag hammadi uh texts the dead sea scrolls kind of thing but the nagamati in the middle of the uh 20th century in a big jar in buried in the desert in egypt uh all of these uh gnostic gospels were recovered um others have been recovered for example in um uh the monastery in mount sinai and other places where a text otherwise hadn't been seen and so some of these like the gospel of thomas or the dialogue of the savior are texts that we knew about but had been lost and now though have been recovered because of finding ancient manuscripts and then finally in terms of what we call lost new testament they're just texts that were omitted from the canon but but we didn't really lose them i mean people still had them they just weren't calling them the bible and so examples like this include uh the infancy gospel of thomas which is quite different from the gospel of thomas and we'll talk about that a text called the shepherd of hermas a text called the acts of paul and thecla so those were texts that continued to be copied and known and technically not lost but they were not included in the canon so i want to look at each one of these kind of things and we'll kind of look at the scope of these texts and so when we're looking at the ones that are known only through their quotations and so therefore we only have fragments an example of this is like the gospel of hebrews and so this is probably a very early gospel it's probably composed in the first century it could have been in the middle of the second century it was written for jewish christians and it was probably written in greek in egypt where there was a massive jewish population in alexandria and the surrounding areas and also a large christian jewish population it's quoted and condemned by cyril of jerusalem jerome origen didymus clement of alexandria so in other words a whole host of very early orthodox christian writers um and what clear from those quotations is that it's not based on either the synoptic gospels or john so in other words we have these quotes we can say oh well that's quote is exactly the same as mark so it must be a gospel that is coming from uh the tradition of the synoptics mark matthew and luke or the other tradition here the fourth gospel john in this case no it's a it's a independent um witness an independent uh gospel column that is unfortunately lost so here's a quote from jerome in his commentary on isaiah when he's talking about and quoting from this lost gospel of the hebrews he says and it happened that when the lord came up out of the water of baptism the whole fountain of the holy spirit came down on him and rested on him it said to him my son i was waiting for you in all the prophets waiting you waiting for you to come so i could rest in you for you are my rest you are my first begotten son who rules forever well we can see that's a very different description of the baptism story of jesus i mean the holy spirit coming and resting upon jesus and and saying you know you're my my begotten those kind of things are existing but this is a different a very different um uh interpretation and you can imagine it also has probably different theological implications here's another quotation this is quoted twice by origin and three times by drums in other words they thought this was pretty scandalous and they kept talking about this this is from the gospel of hebrews jesus said just now my mother the holy spirit took me by one of my hairs and brought me to tabor the great mountain and so in this case the gospel of hebrews is making the theological claim that the holy spirit so as we're you know as we're talking later in terms of you know like christian understanding of trinitarianism the holy spirit is one of the beings of the trinity one of the persons of god and christ is a different one in this case in the gospel of hebrews the holy spirit is identified as heavenly mother jesus's mother and so this is not part of orthodox christology and so this is why again like i say origen and jerome both thought this was quite scandalous and thought that the gospel of hebrews needed to be condemned and not used as part of the new testament so what do we look at then what can we tell about the gospel of hebrews it contained a unique narrative gospel it viewed the holy spirit as female and as the spiritual mother of christ it saw jesus physical mother mary as the incarnation of the archangel michael we didn't show a quote to that but it's another interesting thing so in other words there's a bunch of feminine divine going on here um it's written for an early christian community that died out and it had a christiology and a theology that was viewed as very heretical by proto-orthodox christians and so as a result we don't have it um it would be a pretty neat one to have if we did have it because we can just see just from those snippets uh a different idea that was kind of interesting okay next i want to look at texts that god absorbed uh into other texts and now in modern times have been reconstructed by scholars and so the sayings gospel q is our great example of this so the most likely solution as we've said before in our big long lecture on this to the synoptic problem requires the existence of this hypothetical text so we know for example that there is literary dependence between matthew mark and luke somehow some of them something's going on where one of them is copying the other or whatever is happening in order to have direct literary uh dependence and so the most common answer for this is the two source solution and so matthew and luke are dependent on mark and a lost saying's gospel q and so possibly though q is the earliest gospel it's written maybe in the mid-first century and it's prior to matthew and luke for sure since we know that both of those evangelists are using q in order to construct their gospels it's written in greek in palestine its contents are for a rural audience it's non-narrative and it actually consists primarily of the sayings of jesus so it's a very interesting texts um another one that we talked about a second ago was the science gospel and so scholars postulate that this is an early source that's embedded in john unlike unfortunately luke where the texts are very seamlessly combined john in has very stark seams you can definitely tell we know for sure something's going on in john there's multiple texts going on in multiple authors because it's not cleanly put together and so we don't know for sure that there's a science gospel as part of it but that's one of the theoretical possibilities hypothetical possibilities if so it's even possible that the science gospels the earliest gospel might have been written anywhere between the year 50 and 90 in greek for christian jews and it primarily consists of probably seven signs anyway of signs for sure who are designed to prove that jesus is uh the jewish messiah the josiah messiah of israel that's the idea of the science gospel okay well so let's look now at the next layer of these so these are texts that were lost but we now have found them um like i mentioned our our premier standout example of this is the gospel of thomas it was known at this entire time but it had been lost since antiquity and as i mentioned it was recovered among the nakamati library in egypt in the middle of the 20th century the manuscript as we recover it recovered it is a coptic translation of a greek original so coptic is the um classical egyptian language so the egyptian language that's spoken at the time of the roman empire greek fragments of this gospel also exist so we have little sections of it that are in the original greek like q thomas is a sayings gospel so it doesn't really include any narratives it's not talking about jesus going to a wedding feast at kana or turning over the tables in the temple or being crucified and in fact actually conspicuously it doesn't include a passion narrative so there's nothing about uh crucifixion that whole component which is a third of the canonical gospels so let's look just a second at the gospel of thomas one of the quotations here in um saying number 20 the disciples said to jesus tell us what heaven's imperial rule is like tell us what the kingdom of heaven is like he said to them it's like a mustard seed it's the smallest of all seeds but when it falls upon prepared soil it produces a large plant and becomes a shelter for the birds of the sky so for those of you who are christian and who are familiar with the sayings of jesus the mustard seed parable that's something that you're probably familiar with but this is a little bit is expressed a little bit differently um so let's compare this i just had that here the um the thomas version comparing it here now with the marx version mark's version we read that same thing to what should we compare god's imperial rule what do we compare the kingdom of heaven or what parable should we use for it and he said contin consider the mustard seed when it is sown in the ground though it is the smallest of all seeds on earth yet when it is sown it comes up and becomes the biggest of all garden plants and it produces branches so that the birds of the sky can nest in its shade so quite similar here in terms of thomas's version to mark which is the probably simplest and earliest version that we have of this parable there's also it's also in queue and so but the idea of it you know let's look at the q versions what is god's here's from luke so luke and matthew are both quoting from this lost gospel q which also has the saying what is god's imperial rule like what does it remind me of it is like a mustard seed which a man tossed in his garden it grew and became a tree and the birds of the sky roosted in his branches and then finally in matthew heaven's imperial rule is like a mustard seed which a man took and sowed to the field though it is the smallest of all seeds yet when it has become grown up it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds of the sky come and roost in its branches and so in both of these cases we actually have the idea that the mustard seed is actually becoming a tree which it doesn't really but nevertheless uh they're both these two versions are improving it so that this is becoming uh anyway a changed saying and teaching so that it's making uh the kingdom of heaven into something grand you know which is to say this eternal world tree so as with the mustard seed saying many of these sayings in thomas overlap with sayings that are also included in mark and in queue unlike with the synoptics the thomas sayings don't betray literary dependence and so in the case of the synoptics as i was talking about matthew mark and luke these are definitely depended on each other the thomas sayings are not literally dependent on them it's another witness to these sayings and in fact actually the sayings in thomas are frequently shorter and more difficult which is to say that means they're probably less massaged by a later editing because what ends up happening is people take a difficult saying and they try to explain it and they make it longer they take something that is very uncomfortable that they don't like and they try to make it something that they say oh we really meant was this and so in other words they try to make it less difficult and so because the thomas sayings are actually shorter and more difficult they actually may be closer to the original oral tradition closer to what the historical jesus would have said so here's an example from the gospel of thomas saying number three jesus said if your leader said to you look father's imperial rule the kingdom of heaven is in the sky then the birds of the sky will precede you if they say it's in the sea then the fish will precede you rather kingdom of god father's imperial rule is within you and is it outside you when you know yourselves then you will be known and you will understand that you are children of the living father but if you do not know yourselves then you live in poverty and you are the poverty okay so this is interesting uh oh and it goes on uh here's another here's another example so uh this is from the first and second sayings then right before that in the gospel of thomas as we have it right now and he said whoever discovers the interpretation of these things will not taste death jesus said those who seek should not stop seeking until they find and when they find they will be disturbed and when they are disturbed they will marvel and they will reign over all okay so what is going on with these so there's some very um common things that we were hearing in that but then there's also some significant differences and so um the nagamadi library is largely a collection of texts that are interesting to gnostic christians so we mentioned the gnostics as a an early christian group who had a different understanding of the religion than the people who are orthodox or for example also than the people who are jewish christians who are still following levitical law and nevertheless um what we can say here is that the thomas isn't necessarily initially from these gnostics but they have uh they have a version of it here that this potentially been added to and edited into the context where it becomes proto-gnosticizing so the coptic version of thomas that has been found at nagamati includes a whole bunch of either gnostic sayings or gnosticizing or protognostic sayings that are intermixed with the sayings that are akin to those in the synoptic tradition that are akin to both mark and q so the likely scenario we have here again is just like with q that gets expanded into matthew or expanded into luke or let's say just like the science gospel that it gets expanded into john we probably have an early thomas that has now been redacted and expanded by either gnostic or protognostic writers who have now added some of these kind of gnostic ideas into the sayings gospel and so let's look at then the relationship if we're trying to make kind of a chart of this there were those original oral sayings that the historical jesus had that are passed on person to person to person um those get written down in the first place by mark the author of the gospel of mark the author of the boss sayings gospel q and the author of that first edition of thomas and then in terms of the literary dependence fusing those texts once a text is written down somebody who has composed matthew somebody has composed luke has used those two texts mark and q to create their gospels and indeed somebody has also used that lost early thomas to use the thomas that we have now that is been translated into coptic and has been found so again that means that this earlier first edition hypothetical edition of thomas that didn't have all the gnostic stuff in it has also been lost and is only uh available to us within the current gospel of thomas that we have okay so let's look at some of these other texts so these are texts that are totally lost that are and have now been found and these are ones that let's say are not as important in terms of uh because they're not as early and they're not necessarily telling us very much about the historical jesus but nevertheless are talking telling us about different kinds of early christians and so other texts were found in this nakamati library including ones that are very gnostic and so one of these is called the dialogue of the savior and so this manuscript as we have it is a coptic translation of a greek original that is again written in the late first or early second century and overall though this really is a gnostic text that combines several sources in the first place a dialogue then a creation story then a wisdom list and finally an apocalyptic vision and so let's look a little bit at this text so this is a quotation from the dialogue of the savior chapter 14 verses one through four matthew said lord i want to see that place of life that place where there is no wickedness but rather there is pure light the lord said brother matthew you will not be able to see it as long as you are carrying flesh around matthew said lord even if i will not be able to see it let me know it the lord said everyone who has known himself has seen it in everything given to him to do and has come to it in his goodness so so gnostics here again are dualists they are interested in knowledge secret knowledge um but and but knowledge is always about the spiritual which is to say the non-material and the material the flesh is an illusion the flesh is what's bad and so if you're going to achieve the place of pure light and life and experiencing that you are casting off the physical in the flesh that's the overall gnostic contention okay so let's look at that the dialogue of the savior then is a dialogue between jesus and three named disciples matthew mary and jesus judas and then a bunch of other unnamed disciples wisdom is very very prized and mary is frankly described as a woman who fully understood and so in the gnostic tradition mary is one of the most important apostles uh mary magdalene and is actually generally speaking um elevated as is actually judas and the not for the gnostics gnostic dualism is antagonistic to physical bodies born you know bodies that are born of women and instead sees light or spirit that is to say born of truth as the superior world the real world everything that we see around us in physically and physical universe is is actually false uh that the actual truth uh for gnostics like platonists and things like that is uh things that are eternal things that don't decay physically because they are representing a higher non-material mathematical spiritual truth okay so another text that was lost but is found is a text called the decay the teaching of the twelve apostles um this is not uh one that is coming from a heretical text sect uh it was lost uh for a different reason so it was known in antiquity and it was considered for canonization so a lot of when i was talking about those early canon lists a lot of early church leaders including proto-orthodox would put this text the dedicated on there it's very ancient it's one of our earliest christian texts and so it's first century for sure it's rejected by early church writers on the counts that it's not apostolic so it doesn't say the teachings of the apostle andrew if they had just somebody had just forged a name on there and said the apostle andrew wrote it this thing would make it in the new testament it is however canonized in the ethiopian orthodox church um so it is there and it was and it has continued to be in the ethiopian orthodox bible the greek text though itself was lost until a manuscript was discovered in the late 19th century the current edition that we have results again from this later editorial expansion but the source document describes a very early first century church structure and practices so the text actually is very interesting because it includes our oldest extant summary of christian doctrine ethics prayers rituals sacraments so it describes an early form of christian church organization and it's one where still apostles and prophets still have key roles so that isn't going to be the case in the second century where apostles and prophets have ceased to be offices or cease to be roles that anybody was legitimately allowed to have in the christian church that's not true here in the decade still so here's a quote from that text chapter 11 verses three through six and concerning the apostles and the prophets act thus according to the ordinance of the gospel let every apostle who comes to you be received as the lord but let him not stay more than one day or if need be a second as well but if he stay three days he is a false prophet and when an apostle goes forth let him accept nothing but bread till he reaches night's lodging but if he asks for money he is a false prophet so we have right here we can kind of see this very earliest idea of mendicant missionaries apostles and prophets who are preaching by the word who are coming it doesn't say here two by two but we have that in luke and other places and the idea of them is that they are not to be carrying around their their their uh they're not to be carrying around purse or money or anything like that but they are living by mendicant means by begging and in the same way that uh jesus's prayer is give us this day our daily bread so they're allowed to have that daily bread from you but if they ask you for money that means they're a false prophet is what the dedicated is saying so that what's happened here is that at a certain point um uh you know it's a hard job to be an apostle missionary you can't stay more than a couple days you know they say you're supposed to only stay there one day okay he can say a second day but he can't stay three days because then he's a false prophet you can give him bread and you can give him them lodging but if you if you want money no that's a false prophet and so you can already see um how this is uh evolving in the early church here's another quotation from the dedicated chapter 7 verses 1 through 4 which is talking about very early christian practices concerning baptism baptize thus having rehearsed all these things baptized in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit in running water but if thou has no running water baptize in other water so the idea already is in other words they wanted to have it be in a river or creek in other words running water living water but if you don't have that okay you know you know then you can use a pool that's fine and if thou can snot in cold because you should definitely be feeling how cold and awful it is when you break the ice and have to baptize somebody but if you don't have cold water then okay warm water that's fine if thou has neither then pour water three times on the head in the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit so even though the idea here of baptism in the earliest practice here is immersion they're already making allowances in the decade that if you don't have it and it's too much work and all this kind of thing that you can already do with sprinkling baptism and before the baptism let the baptizer and him who is to be baptized fast and any others who are able and thou shalt bid him who is to be baptized to fast one or two days before so they're wanting to make sure that this is an important life transformational sacrament but nevertheless it's already becoming practical right okay so we also have in terms of lost in new testament texts that were omitted from the canon but were technically never lost so in some of the cases these are texts that are continued to be popular and monks continue to copy them and nuns but they just didn't get on the canon list for different reasons um generally speaking because they're they're too fantastical and you couldn't believe them they're um people still did kind of believe them but they didn't but the authorities didn't so one of these is the infancy gospel of thomas this is not to be confused with the gospel of thomas that i've already mentioned the sayings gospel that we recovered at nah hamadi this is a different text that we've had the whole time so this one is composed in the later second century in greek probably in syria maybe in syria anyway and it tells stories of jesus's childhood and jesus as he's growing up in nazareth begins as kind of a petulant and frankly a dangerous supernatural being because he's able to have all the powers of god even though he's hanging around as a little bratty kid playing with little other kids in his village and he ultimately grows into his role and begins using his powers for good as you can imagine because it's full of all this kind of supernatural stuff it was very popular and widely circulated and indeed there's um still medieval cathedrals that have survived where they have illustrations of this from this gospel on the walls let's read a little part of this chapter 4 verses 1 through 4 of the infancy gospel later he jesus was going through the village again when a boy ran by and bumped him on the shoulder shoulder jesus got angry and said to him you won't continue your journey all of a sudden he that boy fell down and died some people saw what happened and said where has this boy come from everything he says happens instantly the parents of the dead boy came to joseph and blamed him saying because you have such a boy you can't live with us in the village or else teach him to bless and not to curse he's killing our children so you can see um it's a dangerous thing to have like an omnipotent little kid brat who's just saying random things to all the other boys killing you're killing our children by doing this so it's a interesting and fun text it's quoted potentially in the uh in the quran so one of the episodes in in that made its way into quran and so it's possible that the christian community in syria that considered the infancy gospel to be scripture is the one that muhammad knew and learned from here's another example of a text that never got really lost but didn't make its way into the new testament and this is one that's called the acts of paul and sekla so this is essentially an acts of the apostles story but it's about paul and his um fantasy missionary companion thekla uh who doesn't actually exist as a person but anyways exists in this book so it's composed again in the later second century in greek and it was super popular a book there was actually a longer book but people took the part of it that they liked the paul and declare stories out and circulated it separately um it's written really in the form of an entertain entertaining roman adventure romance so in the uh this time period um late in in antiquity uh romans had all kinds of um what we think of as like romance novels but novels where adventure stories where people uh get kidnapped by pirates and have all kinds of adventures and things like that and this is the kind of thing that's happening in paul and thecula so paul's missionary companion is this heroic female apostle named thecla and and she's still considered a saint in the byzantine church especially and she has a shrine and she's really popular in the byzantine east in turkey let's read a little bit from the acts of paul and thecla but a love sick suitor humiliated by chase thakla says zach decla is very pure and she's there's all these suitors that are chasing after her and wanting to marry her but she's going to be chased she's not going to marry anybody brought her before the governor so this guy is humiliated because her his um his marriage suit to thekla has been turned down and when she confessed that she had done this um in other words that she turned him down the governor condemned her to the beasts he's going to throw her to the wild animals in the in the say a stadium and then they did put in many beasts while thekla stood and stretched out her hands and prayed and when she had ended her prayer she turned and saw a great tank full of water and said now is the time that i shall wash myself and she cast herself in saying in the name of jesus christ i do baptize myself on the last day so she self-baptizes so this is a pretty amazing thing um so she's not only a woman apostle a a an amazingly powerful companion of paul but she also self-baptizes herself and all the women seeing it and all the people wept saying cast not thyself into water so that even the governor wept uh you know this this pagan roman governor who was throwing her to the beasts he doesn't want her to die you know he is so sad that this beautiful woman this greater beauty should be devoured by the seals so there's a it's a tank full of wild beasts seals and so then she cast herself into the water in the name of jesus christ in the seals seeing the light of a flash of fire floated dead up to the top of the water and there was about her a cloud of fire so that neither did the beast touch her nor was she seen to be naked so you know you can't even she's so glorious she's self-baptized she's glowing and even though you have to be naked to be baptized nobody can see that so she's continuing to be pure and it just kills all the seals all the poor wild beasts okay so um i hope you can kind of see the the nature of all of the texts that we have some of which have survived some of which have not but have been able to be reconstructed by scholars some of which didn't survive but have been now recovered uh either by digging up lost texts or finding them in ancient monasteries and some of which have been continued to be known but just aren't particularly known to us and so while the texts within the new testament canon really do have diverse contents and perspectives the texts that aren't included actually show a very greater diversity of content purpose and perspective among early christians which were a very interesting uh diverse group that have very actually conflicting ideas about what it means to live a meaningful life about how to understand who christ is and how indeed to be one with god be one with their creator and so that is my summary of lost new testament i hope you found that interesting i'll ask um do we have questions we only have okay so i'm going to invite you guys to if you um for reactions if you maybe are familiar with any of those texts or other texts that you um were hoping i would mention but failed to about where maybe you might want to find these or any other things so if you have questions or comments please go ahead and and uh um and give them i mean while i have a couple uh rhone wagner could ask could the gospel of thomas be the saying book of q and it doesn't seem like like that that's the case um sp and the reason for it is so the reason for it is is that as we have been able to reconstruct q it's because of literary dependence uh and so the reality of literary dependence is we can see okay there's no way um there's no way that this is going through the game of telephone where somebody has heard something and then told somebody something something something something and then and then brings it out again what you can tell with literary dependence is somebody has got a text in front of them and they're using that to write their text and so we can tell that the authors of matthew and luke both have in front of them this the same text or a similar a very similar text to text that is literally dependent that the author of thomas as we have it doesn't have a text in front of them that is in that same literary dependent tree it is aware of similar sayings but those sayings are finding their way to the oral tradition and so what we probably have here is that there is a oral tradition of sayings and one person wrote them down and that became q and that made their way and another person wrote it down it became mark and another person wrote that down and that became that first edition of thomas and those all made their way and so what we have i think is a independent witness of uh the oral tradition and and and the fact that these sayings were circulating uh independently of each other before being written down okay um we ran a poll asking what should we do with non-canonical gospels the majority opinion is that we should read them but that we should keep them non-canonical so is that you're saying we did that in the in the in the readings oh that's cool well that's probably the way it should be um what i'd say is that there are a couple um of these texts that are old and that are at least have this should have probably the same level of priority as some of the texts that made their way into the new testament and so i mentioned a couple of those so the sayings gospel thomas the dedicated and there's a couple others that are that are very early but i'm i'm i like you guys in the in the comments i'm actually not in favor of adding them to the canon because the dedicate and thomas each have one verse each that i don't want added to the canon and and it's it's it's no big deal because there's actually plenty of every other book in the new testament has a verse that i don't want added to the new testament i mean so you know there's all kinds of things that are being said in that i don't agree with in let's say the second peter or in the letter of titus or something like that and i wouldn't add them if if they weren't in there because of that and so the problem with the both uh the sayings gospel thomas and also the dedicate is that they have problematic verses um i mean if they were already in there wouldn't be a big deal because we would have a way so that we we deal with with with problematic verses but um that's probably why you know the best two texts that we have um can't be and shouldn't be added so um you can always but you can always use them and there's no reason we quote from we quote from both of those in in church and there's no reason why we can't go to those karen lee music mara writes i have heard um that there were texts written by several women any info on them so we had a um a lecture that suggested that it's possible that we could read that the gospel of luke was written by a woman um it's uh we don't know the name of the actual author luke is simply a traditional attribution uh luke is the let's say the most of of the christian um text from first century luke is the one that's most likely to be written by a woman um a lot of these so you may have heard that there's a gospel for example of mary magdalene there's no particular reason to think that the gospel of mary magdalene was written by a woman and so so there are there's a gospel of mary for sure but that doesn't mean that it's written by that was written by a woman so yeah we don't really know for sure but yeah i'd say um i think it's there's some strong compelling arguments to make about that luke may have been written by women aaron duffer writes um i want to know if there is a book of mormon class and so um i there is i have done lectures on the book of mormon i've done a whole several lecture series on the book of mormon we haven't done that recently we'll have to we'll have to find a links to send you to some of the lectures if you type in to google john hamer book of mormon podcast or something like that it's going to come up so you'll find that um that's probably the easiest thing to do uh but i've yeah i've given maybe five or six lectures on the book of mormon um rowan wagner uh where i'm sorry were there other books adopted by other christian sects but not adopted by roman and greek texts sects so um if the other christian sex then that you're talking about for example are syriac armenian and ethiopian um uh yeah the answer is yes so for sure the ethiopian church um has a bigger cannon today than uh the rest of the christian in the east uh do and so they have um uh i'm trying to think of what they all are but i think that so for example the shepherd of hermas i think is in there there's several other um texts that made it into the ethiopian canon um i i do not know i have to tell you i don't know the answer in terms of um the uh for example the chaldean church or the or the um assyrian church of the east and the nestorians and i don't i haven't seen a list of their actual official canon um i would think that this is probably similar but it means i don't think it's i don't think it's that different i think the ethiopian churches may be the main existing church that has a different canon bruce nelson writes um were the texts objects for the communities to draw their identity from as the book of mormon later became or did the texts come out of the communities um and i'd say both so in some cases in the earliest communities so one of the things that we we were able to find out about these communities when we talk about a community a lot of the communities the way we know about them is because of the text and so we assume a cue community or a matthew in community or a lucan community or a johannine community we we understand that the existence of a johannine community because we have the texts and that allows us to understand what those folks were writing about so in the johannine community based on the text we can tell that these are our people that include for example samaritans these are people who were largely drawn out of jewish christianity who were smarting from the fact that they had gotten kicked out of the synagogues and so there are different things that we can tell about that community that we m more or less only know about based on the fact that that clues within the text allow us to tell that and so in that sense the text is formed out of the community's identity in other cases though like you to your point a text the people would have gotten a hold of a text and that would have been important to them and they would have had that be identity forming because they had that text and one of the things we can say is that for example the inheritors of that signs gospel that text that may be embedded in john that was important to them and they and they felt it was it was very vital but they also the the later writers who are expanding john are um don't necessarily agree with it and so uh and so the whole point of the science gospel was to that jesus had given seven signs to prove that he was the jewish messiah but as the texts get ex gets expanded um there's a a um a feeling on the part of the writer that you shouldn't be looking for science and so it's asking why do you always look for signs you know what why you're not going to get any more signs why do you think there should be signs and so actually the text is although the text was important to them the idea of it actually gets flipped by the community that held it dear and so that's the case where if you've inherited a text and not written it you might actually have to create your own apologetics that are actually right running counter to the text itself ron wagner asks are there some books adopted by catholics that are not adopted by protestants and so um yes the uh catholic church not in the new testament so what we're talking about here is new testament um the catholic church uh and the orthodox greek orthodox church both for their version of the hebrew bible use which is to say the old testament for christians the old testament for them is the septuagint which is the early greek translation of the hebrew bible and so for the greek orthodox they just they just read the septuagint that's scripture the for the latin church for the catholic church they the vulgate again saint jerome translated the septuagint into latin and that becomes the canon so later afterwards when rabbinic judaism is founded which is what we think of as judaism now they created their own canon based on the hebrew scriptures that is not referencing the greek translation it's not translating not referencing the subtwo again and so so rabbinic judaism's canon is smaller it doesn't have all of these other books these books that are called by in catholicism the deuterocanonical books and it's called by protestants the apocrypha and so those are not part of the rabbinic judaism canon and so what happened was in the protestant reformation scholars protestant scholars who wanted to translate the bible into their own languages into german into english into french they decided oh we have to go back to the original hebrew and so they would go to the local synagogue and they would get the texts from the local european jews that were there and they realized wait a second there's so many fewer books here and so then they they took all of the books that were um in the christian old testament out of the protestant old testament because they are not part of the jewish old testament so if that makes sense so the answer is yes but not in the new testament the new testament is the same because again when they went to the synagogue they're translating those from greek you know the jews don't have the new testament so they didn't they didn't find any problems there but the difference is between the the old testament all right all right well those are great questions thank you so very much i appreciate you sticking with us and i hope you found this interesting um next week we'll have something i think it's an obscure topic but very fascinating as we look at the manikins um the the most important world religion to go extinct so thank you very much and we'll say good night

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 76,645

Keywords: history of christianity, early christianity, liberal christian, religious sudies, christianity, judaism, ancient israel, history, lecture, new testament, lost gospel, forgotten gospel, bible, life of jesus, evangelists, council of nicaea, gospel of thomas, gospel of mary, gospel of judas

Id: 1Em2s66Mo1M

Length: 76min 5sec (4565 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020