Bart D. Ehrman - The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament

The Other Gospels

Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament

EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY
BART D. EHRMAN AND ZLATKO PLEE

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research,
scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dares Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Oxford University Press 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The other Gospels : accounts of Jesus from outside the New Testament / edited
and translated by Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Plee.
pages cm
Concise edition with English text only.
Rev. ed. of: The Apocryphal Gospels : texts and translations. c2011.
ISBN 978-0-19-933521-3 (hardcover: alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-19-933522-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Apocryphal Gospels. 2. Apocryphal books (New Testament).
I. Ehrman, Bart D., editor of compilation. II. Plese, Zlatko, editor of compilation.
BS2850.A3A66 2013
229.8052dc23 2013020110

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To our faculty colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

THE GOSPEL OF THE NAZAREANS

THE GOSPEL OF THE EBIONITES

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE HEBREWS

THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS: THE GREEK FRAGMENTS

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARY: GREEK FRAGMENTS

Two years ago we published a four-language edition of the various Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations. It included all of the early accounts of Jesus words and deeds found in Greek, Latin, and Coptic; for each of these texts we provided a new English translation, with the original language on the left-side page and the English translation on the right. Our goal was to make these valuable works available to scholars, graduate students, and even advanced undergraduates who had facility with one or another of these ancient languages. Altogether the collection contained some forty different documentsGospels down to the Middle Ages, and several important ones from later times, as they could be found in our three target languages.

Sometimes these books are called the apocryphal Gospels. The term is not altogether apt, as apocrypha means hidden things, and these books are not especially hidden, although some of them are indeed hard to find, either in the original languages or in English translation. But the term apocrypha eventually came to refer to the books that did not come to be included in the canon of Scripture, and it is in that sense that they are best applied to these other Gospels. In any event, Oxford University Press published our book in 2011.

It then occurred to us that by creating a new edition with just the English translations of these valuable, noncanonical texts we could perform a service to the reading public at large, which, alas, is not, as a rule, trained to read the ancient languages. This would be an edition for lay readers who want to know what the Gospels from outside the New Testament have to say. And thats what the current book isa translation of the Gospels down to the Middle Ages (and some from beyond that time) from outside the New Testament, which survive either in their entirety or only in fragments. Our definition of Gospel is reasonably broad: by it we mean a book that records the words, deeds, and experiences of the earthly Jesus (or of others, such as Pontius Pilate, who are important only because of their connection to him). We do not include books that are concerned only with revelations that Jesus allegedly delivered after his resurrection (for example, the Apocryphon of John) or those that happen to be entitled Gospels but are not, in some way, about Jesus earthly life (e.g., the Gospel of Truth). In this English-only version of our book we have included a couple of additional texts not found in the four-language edition: a new translation of the Gospel of the Savior, and of the Discourse Upon the Cross (sometimes called the Stauros [= Cross] Gospel) that is closely aligned with it, and of new fragments that have turned up of the Gospel of Judas.

Some of the Gospels we include here are relatively well known to students of the Apocrypha: the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, and the Gospel of Mary, for example. But others are very difficult to find in English translations, such as the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Story of Joseph the Carpenter, and the Death of Pilate. Our collection includes Gospels that survive from antiquity in a complete form, with beginning, middle, and end (e.g., the Proto-Gospel of James and the Gospel of Nicodemus), those available only in fragments (e.g., the Gospel of Peter; Papyrus Egerton 2), and those known not from surviving manuscripts but by quotations in the writings of the church Fathers (e.g., the Gospel of the Egyptians; the Greater Questions of Mary).

We should point out that similar collections of noncanonical texts do exist, but none exactly like the one we present here. Some of these others are intended only for scholars and are not widely used by those without scholarly aspirations, such as the two-volume New Testament Apocrypha by W. Schneemelcher or the one-volume Apocryphal New Testament by J. K. Elliott. Other collections present just a fraction of the available Gospel texts. This is true both of the somewhat misnamed book The Complete Gospels by Robert Miller, a very nice collection which contains, however, just thirteen of the over forty texts we provide here, and one of the editors (Ehrmans) own Lost Scriptures, which contains seventeen of these Gospels (out of the forty-seven texts that it includesthe others being epistles, and apocalypses, and so on, rather than Gospels).

The forty some Gospels we give here are in our own translations, and the translations have not been altered from our earlier book, The Apocryphal Gospels (with the exception of the fore-mentioned Gospel of Judas). Each text is also provided with an Introduction that has been modified somewhat from its earlier incarnation. Essentially, we have tried to make the Introductions more accessible to lay readers by eliminating most of the technical discussions that are not of broader interest and by rephrasing some of the corresponding jargon. There are several technical terms and symbols that we simply have to use on occasion, however, and these are defined in the Table of Technical Terms that follows this Preface. In addition, we have tried to keep the bibliographies as simple as possible, giving non-English titles only if they are mentioned in the Introduction itself.