The Lost Gospels
In addition to the four synoptic gospels that we all have in our Bibles, there are countless more that have been found and yet to be found by archeologists. Some truly are written by church leaders, some were modified by Gnosticism to fit their beliefs, and some should not even be considered gospels at all. They range from being almost exactly like the synoptics with a short history of Jesus’s life and a passion narrative, or being more like a book of Confucius with just sayings attributed to Jesus. There are also a couple books I found that are just assumed to have existed and no text has actually ever been found for them, and most of the texts I found any information on at all exist only in fragments preserved by early church writers. In this paper I will attempt to explain a little more about the other gospels that I have found: what they say and how they differ from the gospels that we commonly read today.
First I’ll start with the hypothetical books I mentioned in the beginning. These are books that nobody has actually found any text for but are believed to have existed as sources for the writers of Matthew and Luke since there are so many similarities in the two. The first one I’m referring to is simply known as “Q”. It is short for the German word “Quelle”, which simply means source. Believers in this theory are said to believe in a two part hypothesis and is accepted by most scholars. This is also sometimes referred to as the synoptic sayings source or sayings gospel since the majority of it’s supposed material is just sayings from Jesus. Again, this gospel is not actually known to have ever been written, it is just a assumed hypothesis based on similarities between Matthew and Luke.
Another gospel that is supposed to have existed is the signs gospel. Believed to have been written about 50-90 C.E. this is another book that is hypothetical. It includes miracles of Jesus but it is not known whether it includes a narrative or is...