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“The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen including the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Philip, Bartholomew and Mary Magdalen.”
[Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Random House, 2006), 95.]
These words from Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion sum up a common view of the Gospels outside the New Testament. What should we make of these Gospels of Thomas, Peter, and Mary Magdalene that he’s talking about? Do they really exist, or are they just part of an atheist conspiracy theory that imagines that there must have been more than just Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
The truth in Dawkins’s statement is that there really was a large sample of Gospels, usually called “apocryphal” or “noncanonical” Gospels, other than just the four in the New Testament. We know this because ancient Christian authors refer to them. We also have actual manuscripts of many of them, which show that they really are ancient texts. So they differ from two other Gospels that have sometimes attracted publicity. One of these is the Gospel of Barnabas, an Islamic book that argues that Jesus was preparing the way for Muhammad. This is not a genuinely ancient work: it comes from late on in the Middle Ages. The other is the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, which was allegedly “discovered” in 2012. After a buzz of media attention, detective work on the seller of the manuscript and scholarly analysis of the text both showed that the manuscript was a forgery. Scholars demonstrated that the text was copied from a website containing the Gospel of Thomas, because the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife fragment reproduced one of the Coptic language mistakes on this website. And investigative journalist Ariel Sabar identified the forger as a former Egyptology student from Germany who, via curating a museum, working in a car-parts business, and a stint in online pornography, became a dealer in forged manuscripts and eventually admitted the manuscript was a modern fake. But the Gospels that Dawkins mentions . . . do really come from the Roman Empire in the early centuries of the Christian era (though scholars don’t usually consider them to be as old as the Gospels in the New Testament). In fact, Dawkins’s reference to “a dozen” is a bit of an underestimate. One scholar in 2005 wrote an article entitled “Forty Other Gospels.” And there have been more manuscripts of other Gospel texts discovered even since then.
. . . Where Dawkins and others go wrong is in thinking that there’s something just “arbitrary” about the four New Testament Gospels belonging together, and nothing really distinctive about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. . . . The first point [is] just about what the Gospels say—that the four New Testament works contain presentations of Jesus that in crucial ways are similar to each other, but that the apocryphal Gospels discussed here are different. The second argument is that this is not a historical accident: the reason the portraits of Jesus in the four Gospels are similar is that they all emerge out of the same form of Christianity, and follow what the apostles preached. But the apocryphal Gospels surveyed here come out of different religious stables.
We can begin by learning what these early apocryphal Gospels are about. . .
The apocryphal Gospels covered [here] are those that scholars usually consider the most significant alternative Gospels. Some of them have also entered wider public debate. The Da Vinci Code focuses on the Gospel of Philip. Dawkins, quoted earlier, mentions the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, and Mary. Christopher Hitchens’s book God Is Not Great mentions the Gospel of Mary and Gospel of Thomas, and has a brief discussion of the Gospel of Judas. These apocryphal Gospels are all very old—dating from sometime in the second or third centuries. They are also Gospels where we have a good idea of what their main aims and themes are. The exception is the Gospel of Mary, which only survives in quite small fragments. Most experts think that the seven apocryphal Gospels that I’m going to look at here originated in or around the second century CE, although—just to be clear—no scholars really think that the apostles Peter and Thomas and Philip and Judas and Mary Magdalene really wrote these Gospels. In fact, in most cases, we don’t know who wrote them. . .
The Gospel of Peter
. . . Like Marcion’s Gospel and the New Testament Gospels, the Gospel of Peter tells a story of Jesus’s ministry. The long fragment that survives covers the death and resurrection of Jesus, although originally the book as a whole was probably a full-length Gospel, beginning with Jesus’s birth or baptism. The Gospel of Peter is noteworthy because it is the only example of an apocryphal Gospel we know to have been read out in a church (in Rhossus in Syria), at least for a short time, alongside the canonical Gospels. It was probably written sometime around 150–180 CE.
Although it has a lot in common with the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s death and resurrection, there are three features of the Gospel of Peter that stand out. First, in the account of the crucifixion, Jesus is entirely silent except for the words spoken at the moment he dies: “My power, O power, you have abandoned me” (Gos. Pet. 5:19). Second, when he rises from the dead, Jesus’s resurrected body is gigantic, towering above heaven itself. Jesus walks out of his tomb accompanied by a talking cross that gives verbal confirmation that Jesus after his crucifixion went down to the underworld and preached to the souls of the dead there. Third, the Gospel of Peter also differs in tone from the canonical Gospels, and has a clear anti-Jewish emphasis: the actions of the Roman soldiers in the canonical portrayals of Jesus’s crucifixion are, in the Gospel of Peter, all transferred to Jews: the decision to execute Jesus, the mockery, the presentation of the crown of thorns and of the vinegary drink, and the crucifixion itself. As a result, a curse comes over Judea and upon the Jewish people, according to this Gospel . . .
The Gospel of Thomas
Not to be confused with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which is an account of Jesus’s childhood, this other Gospel of Thomas is a kind of a database of Jesus’s teaching. It was probably written sometime between 140 and 180 CE. The book is a mixture of pithy sayings (like “Become passers-by!”) and parables (like a version of the parable of the sower) as well as dialogues between Jesus and his male and female disciples. About half of the collection is familiar from the canonical Gospels, while the other half is a compilation of more esoteric teaching. The most striking saying perhaps is the finale, in which Jesus promises to make Mary Magdalene male so that she can enter the kingdom of heaven.
The main theme of the Gospel of Thomas is the unique revelation of the divine that Jesus unveils. This revelation contains the sacred “knowledge” that is a major theme in the Gospel. (In contrast to one reference to faith, there are thirty-two references to “knowledge” or “understanding.”) This knowledge leads to a transformation that can separate disciples from the material body and the physical world, and can reunite them with their true spiritual origin in Jesus. In response to Jesus’s disclosure of the truth, disciples of Thomas’s Jesus must master the content of this revealed truth and understand its hidden meaning. This is the true path to salvation and immortality, as the opening of the book shows . . .
These Gospels are obviously not all the same and don’t make up some kind of alternative canon. Some are Gnostic, others Valentinian, one is Marcionite, and the others can’t easily be assigned to a particular group. They don’t agree with each other theologically but represent facets of the diversity of second-century Christianity and provide different windows into how a variety of different people understood the figure of Jesus at that time. What they are all attempting to do, just like the New Testament Gospels, is to present the good news about Jesus: the word “gospel” simply means “good news.” The claim to write a “good news” book is a claim to present the gospel message of how Jesus has brought salvation. [T]here are important ways [however] in which these apocryphal Gospels all differ from the four New Testament Gospels, which are united in their thinking about Jesus and the good news.
— Simon J. Gathercole is professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Cambridge. He is chair of the NIV translation committee and has served as editor of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament and New Testament Studies. His publications include The Apocryphal Gospels and The Gospel and the Gospels: Christian Proclamation and Early Jesus Books.
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Excerpted from The Genuine Jesus and the Counterfeit Christs: New Testament and Apocryphal Gospels by Simon J. Gathercole (Eerdmans, 2025). Used by permission.
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In this concise and engaging book, New Testament scholar Simon Gathercole shows that crucial theological features link Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John together—and also set them apart from other ancient accounts of Christ’s life.
Writing in a clear and highly accessible style, Gathercole analyzes the New Testament Gospels alongside some of the earliest and most controversial apocryphal gospels. He shows that the canonical Gospels share key elements of theological content—content that consistently aligns with what the apostles taught about Jesus. Specifically, what distinguishes Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is that they faithfully represent Jesus’s messiahship, his saving death and resurrection, and his fulfilment of Scripture. This stands in sharp contrast to the apocryphal Gospels, which either represent such teaching incompletely, ignore it, or actively reject it.
In short, what separates the canonical Gospels from their noncanonical counterparts covered in this book is that the former are faithful portraits of Christ the savior; the latter are less-than-authentic representations. The Genuine Jesus and the Counterfeit Christs will appeal to everyday readers who want to know more about apocryphal gospels, and to students in biblical studies who are interested in questions of authority and canonicity.
“Simon Gathercole’s The Genuine Jesus and the Counterfeit Christs gets to the heart of why the four Gospels are genuine: they embody the message of Christ and the apostles, a message that fulfills Old Testament expectations. The apocryphal gospels, though, don’t reflect this message. This learned yet accessible volume deserves wide readership and belongs on the shelves of lay people, students, pastors, and teachers. Highly recommended!”
— Benjamin L. Gladd, The Carson Center for Theological Renewal
Find The Genuine Jesus and the Counterfeit Christs at Eerdmans, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Christianbook.com, Books-A-Million, and Walmart.
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