Somewhere, rumour has it, someone (usually the Vatican!) is hiding facts about Jesus they do not want us to know. From time to time, the newspapers run out of hard news and feed us with this kind of nonsense. And from time to time, writers like Dan Brown manage to weave a popular thriller using this conspiracy theory as a background. And people who would dismiss as fantastic the idea that the British government employs agents with code numbers from 001 to 009 who are 'licensed to kill', will happily believe that as the result of a great cover-up by the institutional church, we are being denied important information about Jesus' life and relationships.
Our four Gospels, and indeed the rest of the New Testament, are not pieces of journalism: they do not relay titbits about the life of Jesus in the way in which newspapers, for example, recount titbits from the life of Princess Diana. They are written to 'tell the Good News', to tell us what God, through Jesus, has done for us. They do not set out to tell us all that Jesus did, or said. A handful of Jesus' sayings has filtered down to us from other sources. Some are probably genuine: "It is more blessed to give than to receive," reported by Paul (Acts 20:35). Some may well be genuine: "Whoever is near me is near the fire; whoever is far from me is far from the Kingdom," reported by Origen, writing around 210 AD. Some we can keep an open mind about: "Where there are two, they are not without God, where there is one alone, I am with him. Raise the stone and there you shall find me, split the wood and there I am."
This last saying is interesting. There were obviously many literate people in the early church, and clearly a lot more letters were written than the handful in the New Testament, and a lot more accounts of Jesus' life than we have in our four Gospel narratives. Some of these were eagerly copied and handed down: Clement's letter from Rome to Corinth, written at the end of the first century, the letters of Ignatius, a book called 'The Shepherd' attributed to a slave called Hermas, all formed part of the best church libraries. Other writings were more dubious. We know from our New Testament that there were 'false teachers', and they also were prolific writers. They too set up churches, but their churches have not survived.
From time to time, archaeologists in the Middle East dig up papyri. The saying above is from one such papyrus, discovered at Oxyrhinchus, some 160 km south-east of Cairo, in the early 20th century. Other papyri there contained parts of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John, of Paul's letter to the Romans, and the first epistle of John, as well as 'The Shepherd' and other 'orthodox' writings. So, it seems reasonable to regard the unknown papyrus as 'orthodox' too.
But a lot of writings have been dug up which are far from orthodox. Nobody conceals their content: they are interesting to scholars, because they give an insight into the other religions which were around at the time of Jesus: especially Gnosticism, a belief that the material world was evil and that the only escape from it was to acquire a secret 'knowledge', whereby the enlightened few could lead a life of incorruptible purity, while the masses would simply be destroyed.
Here is an extract from the 'Gospel of Judas', to show what sort of wild ideas these writings contain:
Adam was in the first luminous cloud that no angel has ever seen among all those called 'God.'... He made seventy-two luminaries appear in the incorruptible generation, in accordance with the will of the Spirit. The seventy-two luminaries themselves made three hundred and sixty luminaries appear in the incorruptible generation, in accordance with the will of the Spirit, that their number should be five for each.
The multitude of those immortals is called the cosmos - that is, perdition - by the Father and the seventy-two luminaries who are with the Self-Generated and his seventy-two aeons. In him the first human appeared with his incorruptible powers.... And look, from the cloud there appeared an angel whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood. His name was Nebro, which means 'rebel'; others call him Yaldabaoth. Another angel, Saklas, also came from the cloud. So Nebro created six angels - as well as Saklas - to be assistants, and these produced twelve angels in the heavens, with each one receiving a portion in the heavens.
It took over three hundred years for (most of) the church to agree which books made up our New Testament. The four Gospels and Acts were never in dispute, but it took time to select which of the letters would be included - those known to be written, or believed to be written, by the apostles. Other books, even if they claimed to be written by apostles, were excluded. But there was never a conspiracy to conceal them. If they were rubbish, they, and the congregations which followed their teaching, ended up buried in the desert - for archaeologists centuries later to dig up and speculate about! If they were worth reading, they survived, and can still be read today, for an insight into the mind of the early Church, as they strove, then as now, to worship and proclaim God in their time.
HD