Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament

Bart Herman, is a good scholar, and probably (for good reasons) anti-clerical: the christians church, seem to have distorted, modified, and destroyed most ancient texts and books (autodafe's) which did not fit their goals.
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Related suggesting readings:
Edwards Gibbons ("Decline and fall of the roman empire"): suggested that there are little or no historical evidence of Romans persecutions of Christians. He rather suggest that this claim was a pretext... to persecute!

Thomas Jefferson: ("Writings of Thomas Jefferson") wrote much about the corruption of the church, albeit several of his friends were ecclesiastics!

Tyndale was burned at the stake in England, for doing a "too good translation of the bible": it made a mockery of the "Book of sins" that the english church created to generate revenues. Canondale, wrote from it a "less good translation of the Bible" which was a compromise with the king James and the archbishop of Canterburry.
So read the Tyndale Bible rather than the now classic KJB.

The Vatican could open its libraries to scholars: when it will do so it will mark a long era off corruption! Many of the books there are among the best, saved from the inquisition many autodafes!

The recently published (and carbon 14 dated) gospel of Judas, makes now a mockery the long time accusation of the Jews of deicide. Judas looks now (along with much vilified Mary Magdelain) as the closest and best friend of Christ.

A.G.

`Lost Scriptures' by leading biblical scholar and translator, Bart D. Ehrman, has a sensational and slightly misleading title for a relatively scholarly and `ordinary' book, as New Testament era scholarship goes. The misleading aspect of the title is that the ancient documents of which translations are presented herein are not `lost' and, with some important exceptions, have not been lost for quite some time, to those who study such things. Several of the documents here are from the Nag Hammadi cache of documents discovered in Egypt in the 1940s, most especially the `Gospel of Thomas'. Some other very early documents, such as the Didache, were recovered in the 1880s in a Turkish monastery library; however this and its companion documents were known well to the ancients, and were misplaced for a few centuries.
Some may be surprised to know that some of the documents herein have even been used as material in some famous popular novels and movies. One which comes to mind is `The Silver Chalice', starring Paul Newman in what may have been his very first (and quite forgettable) movie performance and Jack Palance as Simon Magus, a magician briefly mentioned in `The Acts of the Apostles', and the main character in `The Acts of Peter'.
Ehrman's greatest contribution with this book is to make these works easily available to a wide audience, and to have translated many of the works himself. In fact, a large number of these works are taken, with permission, directly from Ehrman's two volume translation of the `Apostolic Fathers' for the Loeb Classical Library. Since these two volumes cost over $40 and this paperback lists for less than $20, this is a real bargain, except that you don't get the original Greek text which, if you don't know Greek, doesn't do you much good anyway.
The subtitle, `Books that Did not Make It into the New Testament' gives the impression that somehow we are missing a lot of important stuff by this omission. The fact is that these works are really only interesting from an historical point of view, especially for our understanding of variant early Christian doctrines which, some may wish to have us believe, are `just as good' or `just as important' as the canonical works. My humble opinion is that most of the material in these works repeats, with less detail, doctrines in the canonical scriptures, and that concentration on the New Testament canon will cover much of the range of doctrines found in these works. It's just that some more extreme positions may be somewhat clearer in these works. For example, the Letter of Barnabas seems to reflect an extremely unfavorable take on Jewish piety and faithfulness to their God, suggesting that they rejected his covenant as far back as Moses return from Sinai. But, the interpretation there is not radically different than the opinions in Stephen's apology speech in Chapter 7 of `The Acts of the Apostles'.
If this book does anything, it will confirm that the canonical testaments really do give us a complete picture of all the very earliest writings, and the `winners' of the battles over orthodoxy in the first four centuries of the `common era' really did get it right.

The Greek Old Testament has a number of books not included in the Hebrew because Jews excluded them believing they were not divine. These books are referred to as Apocrypha and I have a Revised Standard Version (RSV) with these books. I've read them and its not hard to see why they were excluded but I was not aware the same thing happened in the New Testament. These books were excluded because the Catholic Church considered them not Christian. I was curious about what they may have said so I bought this book to find out and if you're like me I would definitely recommend it. Ehram notes in his General Introduction this book is just a reference for it contains the biblical books excluded from the New Testament in his book "Lost Christianities: The Battle For Scriptures And The Faiths We Never Knew" he goes into the history and the people that surrounded these non-canonical texts and what happened to them. I think Amazon allows you to buy both as a set I only bought this text because I was curious about what these texts said.

Ehram's book contains around 37 non-canonical scriptures and he includes an English translation of the texts where he can and some of these are his own work. A complete text is provided for: the gospel according to Thomas, Peter, Mary, Philip, and the gospel of the Saviour which is mostly untranslatable. He can't include the text for the books of the Gospel of Nazareans, Ebionites, Hebrews, Egyptians, and the Unknown gospel because its been lost but he compares and contrasts them with other books. I like how he doesn't judge the text he just tells us what they say and how they differ. The Secret Gospel of Mark is interesting because it seems to be additions to the standard gospel since there is two to three endings I was not surprised. There are many other books but you can see them all by using Amazon's "Search inside this book feature" although its for an older edition this book has the same books that are in that edition.

I was shocked and fascinated by this book. Its really exciting to be able to see what the first to second century Christians believed and how they perceived Christ. I thank Ephram for this book and in retrospect I am so glad I bought it. Out of all the books he includes in this volume I would have to say my favorite was the gospel according to Thomas I don't know why the Christian Church chose to exclude this book because I think it really should be in the Holy Bible. What I liked so much about Thomas' gospel is that it sort of summarizes the teachings of Jesus and I am disappointed now that I've read it that this text was left out of the Holy Bible.

Admittedly I am a conspiracy theorist by nature so given the depth of this book and the controversial (and somestimes contradictive) writings of these books I can understand the Vatican and Roman Catholic Churches reasoning for denying entry of some of these books into the King James Version of the Bible. However, I believe these books only help to DEEPEN my beliefs and BROADEN my understanding, NOT dis spell or deny them. As the good book says, "seek the truth and truth will find you."

It is a very interesting book. There's a reason many of these books aren't in the New Testament but other books are of great value