The Canonical Gospels

is the name given to the four books which Christianity, which is to say the people who had acquired the most power in the denominationally diverse Christian world of the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, decided would become the accepted version of history and theology, while all others were henceforth declared "blasphemous" and "heretical", and therefore proscribed.

Of these four, the first three are also grouped as "The Synoptic Gospels", because they tell essentially the same story, and were probably all derived from the same original - though which if any of the three was the original is much debated. It would actually have made much more sense to only keep these three; the fourth of the approved, John, tells a very different story, of a very different Jesus, and preaches a very different theology, as we shall see!


"The Gospel according to Matthew"

Mattit-Yahu in Yehudit, which was also the name of the founding father of the Hasmonean dynasty, recently overthrown by the Romans and replaced by Edomite (Idumean) Herodians; and also also the name of the Thirteenth Apostle, the one chosen to fill the seat at the Last Supper table vacated by Judas Iscariot.

Matthew's was the first of the four Canonical or "approved" Gospels, and he had the theoretical advantage of speaking from experience, as he claimed to be one of the Twelve Disciples. Which is to say, he claims to have been a tax collector originally - we must never ignore the authorial context when books, even books as badly written as this one, acquire historical significance - from Kfar Nahum (Capernaum), right next door to Magdala, even closer to Genaseret, on the north-west shore of the Sea of Galilee, which in those days was also known by the name Genaseret :
"As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. 'Follow me,' he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him" (Matthew 9:9)
which sounds thoroughly convincing, until you read Mark 2:14 or Luke 5:27, both of which name the man as Levi ben Alphaeus, though it is plausible that our Mattit-Yahu was of the tribe of Levi... no, it isn't plausible, is it, because the Levites were the Levites, the priestly tribe, not tax-collectors.

His Gospel, so it is understood, was written for the Jews, somewhere between 50 and 100 CE - the precise date matters, and not just because the later date would have made him a very old man, and synapses wobble with old age, but mostly because his world changed radically in 70 CE, when the Temple was burned down and Jewish hegemony in the land came to an end, so a book written after that date would be likely to be very different from a book written before it; and the same applies to Mark and Luke and John.

His Gospel, as I was saying before I rudely interrupted myself, was written for the Yehudim, to tell them that their Messiah, a specifically Jewish Messiah, though not entirely clear whether he was a Moshi'a or a Mashiyach - the two are very different - had come; something that would have been unnecessary if it were true: the opening of all the graves of Nov and the Mount of Olives, and the resurrection of their dead, plus the sudden arrival of peace and harmony in a world ruled by Romans, would have signalled his arrival without requiring this book - and to demonstrate that all the Biblical prophecies had been fulfilled, which would actually have been very difficult, since there are scores of Biblical prophecies relating to the Messiah, and they are vastly contradictory, and anyway most of the prophecies attributed by Christianity to Jesus were nothing to do with him, or any other potential Moshi'a or Mashiyach, but related to historic events as many as six centuries earlier. 

Otherwise, the version given in Matthew is virtually identical to Mark, except for 10 parables and some incidents mentioned nowhere else.

In all probability Matthew did not write it and, in even more probability than that, it was not chronologically the first Gospel. More likely it was written by someone else, someone non-Jewish, who did not witness any of the events personally, who had read Mark's gospel and decided to retell it, and who made the variations he thought helpful for the benefit of his audience.

One of the reasons we can say this is because this Gospel demonstrates a quite extraordinary ignorance about even the most basic aspects of Jewish life and belief and practice in Yehudah at that time, either in the Sadducaic or the Pharisaic worlds, is entirely ignorant of Yehudit as a language, and seems to have no idea at all that most of Jesus' recorded sayings were actually quotes from others, and widely known at that time, especially the numerous borrowings from Hillel - quotes as instantly recognisable as "Ich bin ein Berliner" or "the lady's not for turning", or "I did not have sex with that woman" would be in today's world.

It is now generally believed that Matthew was written for the Hellenized Jews of Antioch, around 80 CE, possibly in Koine, the Greek demotic of its day, the first language in the Roman world, and the principal language of the New Testament; possibly written in Aramaic, and then translated into Koine Greek. This pseudonymous Matthew is also linked to "The Epistle to the Hebrews" as these are the only books written, if indeed they were so written, for the Jews.

Matthew concentrates on Jesus' preaching and teaching, and shows his powers of healing, particularly during his time in Galilee. His version depicts what is essentially a religious squabble of minor cosmic significance, between the Jewish establishment and a popular faith-healer-cum-Rabbi who challenges some, but only some, conventional beliefs and practices. In fact his ideas would have been bread-and-butter to the Jews of Hillel and Gamaliel's generation, as they would to those of the time when the book was written, who would have been aware of the work being undertaken by the Sanhdedrin under Hillel's pupil and disciple Yochanan ben Zakkai at exactly this time, beginning the construction of the Talmud Yeru-Shalmi.

Based on Matthew, there is very little in Jesus' preaching that would have upset any Pharisaic Jew of that period, including his attempts to "update" prayers - formal prayer, rather than spontaneous individual prayer, was a new phenomenon, already in progress decades before the destruction of the Temple, and a major part of the work of the second Gamliel, as well as Akiva and Yehoshu'a and others, over the next fifty years was precisely the updating of prayer to provide a liturgy for the replacement of sacrifice. "The Sermon on the Mount", for example, (Matthew 5 ff) echoes the newly-written Shacharit Blessings (Birkhot Hashachar), with variations that are mainstream Talmud - see my book "A Myrtle Among Reeds", p63 ff for a much fuller account of this.

Yishai, then, or perhaps Yeshu'a or Yehoshu'a, is portrayed as a traditional though unorthodox Jew of humanist persuasion, well-versed in scripture, but outraged by both the hypocrisy of the Pharisees (the Rabbis and their supporters) and the misplaced nostalgia of the Sadducees (the Temple priests and their supporters). He calls on men and women to keep the commandments, but offers his own Mishnah on them, as every other Rabbi of the day was also doing. A "miracle-worker" on the side of the poor, the needy and the oppressed, but essentially non-political in the broader, Roman sense, he is shown as the heir of Mosheh and Eli-Yahu, but not an Essene, or any other sect of Gnosticism, and certainly not a Zealot.


It is hard to see why either the Jews or the Romans would have considered him a threat, let alone wanted the full-scale crucifixion that was reserved for hardened political criminals; but it is also difficult to see why any Jew or Roman would have wished to follow him.

Having said which, by the time that Matthew is being written, the Temple has been destroyed, the Sadducees are no more, the aristocratic and intellectual elite of Yehudah (Judaea) have been either exterminated or enslaved, more than a million Beney Yisra-Elim have been taken away as slaves, mostly to build the Coliseum in Rome, and all that is left of meaningful Judaism in Yehudah is Yavneh. One can easily understand why the few remaining Jews, feeling that YHVH has abandoned them, might well be interested in finding a new religion; but not that of Matthew's Jesus, which is little different from the one they might now be abandoning.

There are some elements of Zoroastrianism, and of eschatology in the life, and to some extent in the teachings, of Matthew's Jesus, which may well come through his links with John the Baptist and the Essenes, but essentially he is a rather soppy altruist and humanitarian, who would likely have joined the hippie movement if he had lived in California in the 1960s, or the Green Party today, in order to spend his time protecting whales by praying for them at inter-faith tea parties. If we wish to make a comparison between Jesus and other Prophets, Matthew's depiction parallels the early Muhammad, before the conquest of Mecca; but, despite his comment about bringing the sword rather than peace, he could never have been the warlord Muhammad, who undertook the conquest of Arabia after Mecca was regained. More Buddha than Mosheh too.

Throughout the text, faith is crucial. He seeks to elucidate core values and a proper way of living, and to describe Heaven. He is only concerned with Jews, but will recognise non-Jews who believe - it is not clear whether he expects them to convert to Judaism, but he certainly doesn't expect a new religion to come into existence in his own name. Everything in Matthew's view of his life leads towards the denouement in Jerusalem, and he makes sure the disciples know this. Matthew is clearly intent throughout to demonstrate that Jesus was the Messiah, and that the Biblical prophecies were now fulfilled, and as such we must read the text as evangelical – an attempt to proselytise. There are more Biblical quotations in Matthew than any other gospel, most of them verbal citations, most of them Prophetic.


The story is told as though he is simply challenging the spiritual leadership of Yehudah, but not the political leadership by Rome. All blame for his death is placed with the Pharisaic Elders and the Sadducaic Priests, both of whom are described as being happy to be rid of him in order to protect their own authority - very llttle of which they actually had by this time. Matthew fails to point out that crucifixion was an exclusively Roman punishment, not available to the Jews, even if they had wanted it. So with Matthew begins the process of exonerating Rome, which will become the history of Europe in relation to the Jews for the next 2000 years.

In Matthew there is no mention of Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, Martha or the second Mary - and not surprisingly, for they all belong to the Tammuz and Adonis myths which are the real Jesus story, the one that does not become "resurrected" until after the fall of the Temple. Amongst the disciples Peter, James and John hold special places, but not Matthew himself.



The Gospel according to Mark

Technically the 2nd Gospel, though it was probably the first of the three Synoptics to be written, and the likely source for the expansion attributed to Matthew. The authorship is unknown, but attributed to Mark, which appears to be the Latin/Greek name of a man whose name was originally abbreviated to John - which will have been either Yonatan (Jonathan) or Yochanan (Jon), there is no name precisely equivalent to John in 
Yehudit or in Aramaic. And no, not the same non-John who wrote the fourth of the Canonical Gospels, the one that disagrees so much with the three Canonicals.

This John lived in Yeru-Shala'im. His mother, who would not have been named Mary because that is simply an Anglicisation of the Latin Maria (which is itself rooted in the name of one of the hills on which Yeru-Shala'im was built, namely Mor-Yah - "the bitter tears of the mother goddess", but millennia before Jesus) allowed the first Christians to meet in her house - her Yehudit name would likely have been Miryam.

Later he went with Paul (Yehudit Sha'ul) and Barnabas (his real name was Yoseph), his cousin, to Cyprus on the first missionary journey, but left them half-way; it isn't recorded why. Paul refused to take him on his second journey, so Mark returned to Cyprus with Barnabas. Later he went to Rome with Paul, and Paul called him a loyal friend and helper. Peter calls him "my son Mark" and traditionally it is Peter's version of the Jesus story that Mark tells.

Mark focuses on what Jesus did more than on what he taught - a sharp contrast with Matthew, which does the obverse. Probably written between 65 and 70 CE, it is the shortest of the gospels, and may have been a first draft for what became Matthew. The many explanations of Jewish terms suggest it was written for non-Jews, where Matthew was written for the Jews of Antioch.

Mark throughout seems to be offering a gloss or résumé of Matthew (for those who think Matthew came first), even using direct quotation. He elaborates on some small details but does not always seem to get the whole point of the story. There are no references to the Scriptures except in the opening fragment.

For further references to him, elaborating the account above, look at Acts 12:12 and 25, 13:13, 15:33ff, Colossians 4:10, 2 Timothy 4:11, Philemon 24:1, Peter 5:13 et al.



The Gospel according to Luke

The 3rd Gospel. Luke was a Greek-speaking doctor; he also wrote the Acts of the Apostles. A friend of Paul, he travelled with him on several journeys, including sailing with him to Rome. Luke's is the most detailed account; it was written at the specific request of a Roman official known by the nickname Theophilus.

Further references to Luke cane be found at Colossians 4:14, 2 Timothy 4:11, Philemon 24.

Luke is generally thought to mean "light", from the Latin lux; but in fact this is incorrect. As I have also pointed out in my notes to "The Gospel of Lucius", it is the name 
Lucius that comes from the Latin "lux" meaning "light"; Luke comes from the Greek "loukas" and means "a man from the region of Lucania in Italy", roughly the equivalent of today's Basilicata, south of Naples.

He was probably a "Gentile", who became a Christian (don't you just love the way Christians distinguish "Gentiles" from "pagans" in this manner!). Theophilus means "lover of God"; but which God? Being a Roman he would most likely have been a pagan, sorry I meant a Gentile, and therefore "lover of the gods", unless he followed Mithras, as most of the Roman soldiers who had come out east with Pompey did.

Interestingly, the oldest existing manuscript version yet found, and known as P4, does not attribute the book to Luke at all, as P75 does; both were written around 200 CE. The original is believed to have been written between 80 and 90 CE. Contemporary scholars also believe there was another source material, known as the Q document, which Luke used in addition to Mark (or Matthew); see my page on "The Gospel of Q", which is a modern re-invention.

For the first eight chapters Luke seems to be glossing the story with very little detail; afterwards he follows Matthew very closely, as if his copy of Matthew had the first chapters missing. Or possibly he was using Mark, as Matthew did.

Luke concentrates on Jesus' message, teachings and parables. His acts of healing are almost incidental, and the attacks from the Pharisees are brushed aside. He sometimes seems confused about precisely what happened when and where, and yet is absolutely certain of what Jesus said. The disciples and others play very minor parts. Less than Matthew, and Matthew is very limited in this, but about the same level as Mark, is Luke's understanding of Jewish politics, history or religion; for example he seems unaware that much of what Jesus says is quotation either from scripture or from contemporary Rabbis such as Hillel. There is no sense at all of the Messianic prophecies being fulfilled in Jesus.



4. The Gospel according to John

The 4th Gospel, and the only one of the "approved" that is not counted as "Synoptic".

The John to whom it is attributed (and see my note on the non-name "John", above), was the son of Zebedee and the brother of James - which would probably have been Yochanan ben Zevad-Yah in the Yehudit, with brother James most likely Cha'im. 

John was himself one of the Twelve Disciples (or Apostles if you prefer; Christian scholars seem unable to make up their minds on this), and regarded as one of the three favourites, Peter and brother Cha'im being the other two (cf Galatians 2:9). The fact that he was one of the disciples, and therefore witnessed most every detail of Jesus' life and death, should make him a valuable witness; but Matthew was also one of the disciples, through the same period, starting in the same place, and the differences between their versions are so significant, a court of law would be forced to acquit the man in the dock if there was no one else to provide clarifying testimony.

Yochanan (or it might have been Yonatan, or even Yeho-Natan) was originally a fisherman. Scholars have suggested that "he probably followed John the Baptist before becoming a disciple of Jesus", though none can substantiate this hypothesis. However, all these fish references - walking on water, the disciples as fishermen, the feeding of the five thousand, etc - need to be seen in an entirely different context: the Samaritans who were the principal inhabitants of the Galilee, had brought their cult of Oannes (the probable source of those John names) with them when they were exiled here by Nebuchadnezzar, replacing the Yehudim who had been exiled to Babylon, around 586 BCE. Oannes (the source also of Jonah) was a water-god, and the year of Jesus' supposed birth also coincides with the transition from the astrological age of Aries (the paschal lamb) to that of Pisces (the fish that would become the principal symbol of early Christianity). Click here for more on this.

He was also known to be quick-tempered, at least among those translators, theologians and scholars who haven't bothered to read the Tanach or learn either Yehudit or Aramaic. The word used is the mis-spelled and mis-pronounced Beney Regesh, given as Boanerges by Luke, who clearly knew no Yehudit or Aramaic either; it is commonly translated as "sons of thunder". But Ragash does not mean "thunder" in Yehudit; it means "gather", in the sense of a protest-meeting or an army being mustered (cf Psalm 2:1). Nor does Regash mean "thunder" in Aramaic; it means "rushing in" (cf Daniel 6:7, 6:12, 6:16). So the idea of something or someone headstrong and hyper-active may be implicit, but when the Yehudim of Jesus' day used the expression "son of thunder" to describe someone they were thinking of Exodus 9:23, and they meant someone who was passionately devoted to his religious faith, and firing words of scripture at you incessantly, pouring them out like a volcano erupting lava, desperately trying to make you more observant - precisely the sorts of behaviours that would make John and James favourites of Yeshu'a.

Jesus does indeed use the sobriquet for both James and John, so there might be a case for it having been a family name, like Smith or Jones, except that the Yehudim in those days didn't use family names: your name, plus "ben", signifying "son of", plus your father's name, and then, if necessary to distinguish you from another with a similar name, "ha" meaning "the", and then your tribe, as in "ha Levi", which is the likely explanation for Matthew being called Levi in Mark and Luke. But this is marginal stuff; what matters is the meaning of Boanerges, and "sons of thunder" does not mean "short-tempered". A much more thorough explanation of this subject can be found by clicking here.

John was with Jesus when he raised Jairus' daughter, at least according to  Matthew 9:18-26Mark 5:21-43 and Luke 8:43-48; John himself does not mention it. He was also present at the transfiguration in Gethsemane before Jesus' arrest; again, according to Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9, but not in John's account.

Although the Gospel does not claim this, he was probably "the disciple whom Jesus loved", i.e. the one who was closest to Jesus at the Last Supper, and the one who Jesus spoke to from the Cross.

After Jesus' death John, with Peter, led the church in Yeru-Shala'im, and was still there fourteen years after Paul's conversion. Traditionally he lived in Ephesus until his old age. He may be the same John who wrote "The Book of Revelation", though this is usually attributed to a different John, from Patmos.

John's Gospel was the last to be written, around 90 CE, which would have made John a very old man. It focuses more on the meaning of the events than on telling the story, which by then was well-known. It is generally claimed by Christian scholars that it was "probably" written for Greek-speaking Jews, to convince them to shed their doubts; but this is frankly implausible: its knowledge of Judaism is poor, and the Jews would have rejected it on that ground alone; but even more significantly, its tone and attitude is thoroughly pro-Roman and anti-Jewish, not a sensible position to preach to Jews from, in 90 CE, of all moments in history!

See also "The Epistles of John", thoroughly Gnostical works that preach a very different theology from either "The Gospel of John" or even "The Book of Revelation", though the latter's eschatology is comparable. The likelihood that these epistles, which date from the 2nd century CE, were written by the John of the Gospel should be rated somewhere between nought and zero.


And finally "The Acts of Barnabus", a pseudepigraphical work under the theoretical authorship of "the Apostle John Mark", purporting to tell the last years of Paul's travelling-companion Barnabus. It is now reckoned to have penned in the 5th century CE.



Copyright © 2020 David Prashker
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The Argaman Press



The Lost, Fake and Prohibited Gospels



This page is an introduction and a catalogue, but it is also a reminder of Oscar Wilde's epigram - to lose one Gospel is unfortunate, to lose two is carelessness, but to lose quite so many as this suggests a conspiracy. 

Nor is the church unwilling to confess as much. These documents are lost because they were condemned as heretical, which is to say that they did not accord with the orthodox view of Jesus, his life, his ministry, his teachings, his death, his resurrection, as ordained by those who had managed to seize power in the early years of the history of the church. They are lost because they were physically destroyed by order, because publication was prohibited, or because they were locked away in the vaults of the Vatican for safe-keeping. Stalin and Mao undertook similar measures in the 20th century, to rid themselves of the nuisance of opposition and disagreement; the role of the Lord Chamberlain in Britain achieved much the same for the theatre for four hundred years; and Judaism has used excommunication for the same purpose.


The establishment of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the four "canonical" Gospels, and the consequent suppression of all others, is largely the work of Iranaeus, the Greek-born Bishop of Lyons at the end of the 2nd century CE. A full account of his life and work can be found here.

In addition to those "Canonical Gospels", all or part of an unspecifiable number of additional Gospels may still be in existence, though not all of them are accessible to all readers or scholars. I have divided these into four categories, but you will see that there are some overlaps and repetitions, because without access we cannot be sure, in several cases, whether they are lost, locked up, fake, or the same as another that is known, as has often been speculated.

Archbishop Wake's account of all the New Testament books that have been proscribed or lost can be found here; it includes non-Gospel books, no further work on which is intended by TheBibleNet. The book will prove invaluable to you if you are interested in reading what survives of these Gospels, as he includes such text as was available to him.






Copyright © 2020 David Prashker
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The Argaman Press



Oxyrhynchus


fragment of a poem about the Labors of Heracles. 3rd century
One final fragment to complete our list of lost, hidden, invented or simply hypothetical gospels; this one is known as Oxyrhynchus, a word that means "sharp-nosed" in ancient Egyptian, though the place is now called el-Bahnasa in modern Arabic; it is located in Upper Egypt, about 120 miles south of Cairo, and has been a site of almost continuous archaeological excavation for decades, yielding huge numbers of papyrus manuscripts that include "The Gospel according to Thomas", the plays of Menander, and even fragments of Euclid's "Elements".

Oxyrhynchus was originally a fish, and in Egyptian mythology it was the very fish that swallowed Osher's (Osiris') penis after he had been gored by Set into fourteen pieces; Eshet (Isis) found them, on the coast of Kena'an (Canaan) south of Tsur (Tyre), in that area that would become the tribe of Asher. But before Alexander of Macedon renamed the town Oxyrhynchou Polis, it was known as Per-Medjed, and the tributary canal of the Nile on which it sits was known as Bahr Yussef, the Canal of Joseph, adding weight to the suggestion that Yoseph was a native Egyptian (or a scion of the conquering Hyksos) and not a son of Ya'akov at all, any more than was his brother Ben-Oni, also known as Bin-Yamin.

Bronze amulet of the Medjed fish. 664-30 BCE
It was the capital of the 19th Egyptian "nome", or administrative district, and in Hellenic times it was the third city of Egypt. It became a Christian town, but was effectively abandoned after the Arab invasion in 641, after which the canal system failed, and the place was turned into a garbage dump for the next thousand years; but a relatively dry garbage dump, because the Nile does not flood there, so what was trashed remained accessible to archaeologists.

Christian texts found there include fragments of early non-Canonical Gospels; Oxyrhynchus 840 from the 3rd century CE; Oxyrhynchus 1224 from the 4th; parts of Matthew 1 in a 3rd century rendering, as well as chapter 11:12 and 11:19 from the same period; the whole of Mark 10–11 from the 5th and 6th centuries; John 1 and 20 from the 3rd; Romans 1 from the 4th; the First Epistle of John from the 4th; chapters 12–14 of the Jewish apocryphal "Apocalypse of Baruch" written down in the 4th or 5th century CE; "The Gospel of the Hebrews"; a work known as "The Shepherd of Hermas" from the 3rd or 4th century; and some of the writings of Irenaeus. I wish I could remember which of these it was that I used to show students, in the school library at Clifton College; and I wish I knew how the school came to be in possession of it.

Oxyrhynchus 840 


The fragment of Oxyrhynchus 840 that has survived begins with a moral sermon on the subject of planning ahead, reminding the reader of the need to think "afterlife" and not "carpe diem".

It then recounts a confrontation between Jesus and his disciples and a senior Pharisaic priest, who instructs them to leave the Temple as they are ritually unclean. The Jesuitic response - that ritual cleanliness, achieved by mikveh, is equivalent to a harlot bathing in water used by dogs and pigs - shows a remarkable lack of understanding of Judaism by the author, or by Jesus if the piece is genuine; the whole point of the mikveh being that it cannot be standing water, but must be natural and flowing, so that its source is pure; indeed, exactly what Jesus in this tale then describes as "the life-giving water that flows down from Heaven in baptism".

Jesus is called "Saviour" (the Greek word used is σωτήρ - pronounced "sotèr), which is rare in the Christian Bible; but, and more importantly, the Greek word really means "protector" (it was one of Zeus' epithets for precisely that reason) or "preserver", which is an entirely different concept of "saving" from either the political Mashiyach or the priestly Moshi'a, which are the two Yehudit words from which English takes its somewhat confused concept of a Messiah.

There are some suggestions (by historians, interpreting the text) that the author belonged to a sect that followed John the Baptist, and may have been based in Syria. I am unable to identify the sources that support this hypothesis.



The Oxyrhynchus Hymn

Oxyrhynchus 1224

Two small papyrus fragments have survived, carbon dated to the late 3rd or early 4th century; six pieces of writing that are not long enough to call passages, each more or less a single sentence. Two of the longer ones are probably misquotations from Mark 2:17 and Luke 9:50. Faith-committed Christians have attempted to date the composition as early as 50 CE (AD in their calendar), but it is highly unlikely; 150 CE is the estimation of the scholars. 

The Irish scholar John Dominic Crossan, who knows as much as anybody on this subject, and a good deal more than most, is convinced that the text "does not seem to be dependent on the New Testament gospels.... As an independent gospel, it belongs, insofar as its fragmentary state allows us to see, not with discourse gospels involving the risen Jesus (e.g., the Secret Book of James and the Gospel of Mary), but with sayings gospels involving the earthly Jesus (e.g., Q document and the Gospel of Thomas)."





Copyright © 2020 David Prashker
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The Argaman Press

The Signs Gospel

Like "The Gospel of Q", "The Signs Gospel" is entirely hypothetical, and it too owes much to the work of Rudolf Bultmann. He promulgated the theory that "The Gospel of John" was not the authentic document; that John had died before completing it, and that the work was finished by someone else, or possibly several other people over an extended period of time, using John's drafts, and augmenting them with synoptic materials from the other three gospels, as well as oral accounts, especially of Jesus' miracles.



Copyright © 2020 David Prashker
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The Argaman Press


The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew

which is also known as "The Infancy Gospel of Matthew", though back in the day, when it was first published, it was known as "The Book About the Origin of the Blessed Mary and the Childhood of the Saviour".

Clearly fictitious, it was driven by ideology rather more than by capitalism, which is to say that, yes, it sold lots of copies and therefore made a decent profit for the author, but the number of souls acquired for the new religion outweighed this considerably.

I mention this vulgarity of commercialism because Matthew spent the early part of his own adult life as a tax-collector for the Romans, making sure that people rendered unto Caesar the tithes that were Caesar's, and caring very little how much undeclared spiritual income was havened away at the local synagogue; all of which made him somewhat despised by his fellow disciples, and highly likely therefore that he wrote his book as much to demonstrate the seriousness of his changed commitment as it was for the taxable extra revenue.

Book - or books. For the one I was meaning in the above was "The Gospel of Matthew", the first of the four Canonicals, and not this account of the Messianic childhood attributed to him. Matthew, incidentally, should be Mattit-Yahu, the Mattit being "a gift", "Yahu" one of the names used for the Jewish deity, and Mattit-Yahu as a whole best known as the founding father of a very different sect and movement, that of the Hasmoneans, who overthrew the Greek conquerors of Yehudah during the 160s BCE, and established the dynasty that ruled the land, under the Seleucids until 110 BCE, fully independent until the Roman conquest in 37 BCE.


Mattit-Yahu was the son of Alphaeus, and a member of the tribe of Levi, which gave him the hereditary right to serve at the Temple. 

The fact that we first encounter him in Kfar Nahum (Capernaum) may be because he happened to be there, but it is an interesting coincidence that the north-western corner of the Sea of Galilee has several villages (Tiberias wasn't built yet), of which Mary Magdalene came from Magdala, whence her last name, Mattit-Yahu, and several other disciples, were met at Kfar Nahum, the feeding of the five thousand took place at Tabgha, the Sermon on the Mount in the foothills of Mount Korazim immediately above Tabgha, and Yishai (Jesus) himself was rather more likely born at Genaseret (today's Ginosar), which is a village and also another name for the Sea of Galilee - and all these villages, as the adjacent map illustrates, within less than a mile of each other. 

And if Mattit-Yahu did come from Kfar Nahum, and Yishai from Genaseret, then he would likely have known, or been able to easily find out, the story of Yishai's childhood, which is the subject-matter of "Pseudo-Matthew". But if it were truly believed that Mattit-Yahu of Kfar Nahum had written it, why would it be called "Pseudo-Matthew"?




The childhood of the Saviour, then, from Hejirah to the former slave-pots of Egypt, as far as Bar Mitzvah preparation at the Temple - these being the stopping and re-starting points of the Canonical Gospels; but actually it was the Life of Mary that really interested people, and in the Middle Ages, when the art of fresco enabled every Catholic church in Europe to teach the doxology to the illiterate by simply painting it on the church walls, it was from "The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew" that virtually every one of those Piagetian images was taken (and what a shame that, in Britain anyway, good Queen Bess had the entire history of fresco whitewashed from those walls, with explicit instruction to make the whitewash thick enough that they would never be recoverable).



The manuscript that we have today opens with an exchange of letters between Jerome and two Bishops, Comatius and Heliodorus, enabling us to put definite dates and locations on the work: Jerome was born at "Stridon, on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia", which is to say Ljubljana in today's Slovenia, in 347 CE, and died in Bethlehem in 420. 

The request from said Bishops was for Jerome to make a translation of "a Hebrew volume, written by the hand of the most blessed Evangelist Matthew", concerning the birth of the virgin mother and the infancy of Jesus. Jerome a logical choice given his vocation as the translator of the Masoretic text, and his expertise in the Hebrew language - he was taught, by correspondence, by a Jewish convert, during his two-year hermetic retreat at Chalcis. Nor is it even certain that he carried out the task - scholars ever since have argued that the style simply is not his: "no one who is acquainted with the style of Jerome's letters will think this one authentic" as one scholar has expressed it. Other scholars think he actually wrote the original himself, still others that the style doesn't feel like his precisely because he was a good translator, and therefore stayed religiously with the style of the original.

But the letters insist that he did (unless there was a second person, also named Jerome; it was a very common name, after all), that he took care to "render it word for word, exactly as it is in the Hebrew, since it is asserted that it was composed by the holy Evangelist Matthew, and written at the head of his Gospel," which affirms the good-translator hypothesis, but which is then undermined by Jerome himself expressing grave doubts about the authenticity of the actual document.





What then of the coming-of-age tale, the bildungsroman epic. Like all good family histories, this one begins a generation earlier, with Mary's parents Yo'achim and Chanah, or Joachim and Anne in English versions: it tells how upset the grandparents were that they couldn't have a child, how badly treated they were for being childless, Joachim's exile (it isn't entirely obvious why he was exiled: I need to look that up), and his return to find Anne pregnant (most people don't realise that the Immaculate Conception was Anne's pregnancy with Mary, not Mary's with Jesus), and then the birth of Mary.

Chapter Two then follows Mary's childhood, her entry into service as a Temple virgin, her life of prayer and vow of chastity, her choice of Joseph as her husband and guardian when she reached the age that she could no longer serve as a Temple virgin - I do need to interrupt at this point to say this: that not one single piece of this could have any historical validity, because what is described is early Church practice, and Temple practices were completely and entriely different.

So we come to the Annunciation, and Joseph's distress at finding his wife pregnant - the text has told us that he married her, so her being pregnant should not have required angelic intervention - and his eventual acceptance of her honesty. After this, he and Mary are summoned to the Temple to be questioned, and her continuing virginity and innocence is accepted by the people, and no one questions Joseph's potency, or wonders if an unconsummated marriage should not be annulled. But these are not matters raised in the text, only by it.

All the above suggests a traditional Tammuz or Adonis cult, a fertility tale of the type we are accustomed to from the Tanach (Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel, Chanah etc) in which the powers of the fertility goddess are rendered ceremonial through the account of a barren woman who manages to conceive, and the subsequent dedication of the child to the shrine; it reflects, in other words, Christianity as the Rebirth of Tammuz, and not Christianity as the coming of the Jewish Messiah.

For those of you who have already read my page on the "Protevangelium of James", much of the above will be remarkably familiar, and the truth is that "The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew" was probably plagiarised from it. Though not entirely, because James does not include the Hejirah to Egypt (no other known source does, so GPW probably made it up), and there are similarities elsewhere to the "Infancy Gospel of Thomas". But the real clincher for the importance of this text does not lie in its apparent coalescing of those two works, but rather in the fact that this was the first recorded confirmation of the presence of both an ox and an ass at the Nativity.



Botticelli, La Nativita Mistica, complete with ox and ass

GPW was included by Jacobus de Varagine in his book "The Golden Legend", published in 1260, and one of the few literary accounts of Jesus' life to reach a significant number of readers outside the theological world - the point, made above, being that about 98% of the Christian population of Europe was illiterate at that epoch, so it was more likely that you had the book read to you by somebody who could, than actually scanning a copy of the text yourself. But the impact was huge, leading to literally dozens of bandwagonners, plagiarists and people who insisted that their work was "derived", "based on" or "influenced by", and therefore entirely valid, legitimate and not open to accusations of breach of copyright. 

The two most famous of these were the "Libellus de Nativitate Sanctae Mariae", a name whose title I leave you to translate from the Latin for yourself (Libellus is the key word here, and you will translate according to your personal faith-position), but which only tells the tale from Annunciation to Nativity; and the "Arabic Infancy Gospel", which is full of some absolutely wonderful flights of fancy, similar to the fairy tale of Muhammad's trip to Jerusalem one night on a winged, talking horse - and that one made it into the Qur'an, Surah al-Isra (I wonder if that's where J.K. Rowling got the idea for quidditch?).

And lastly, and painfully, because it compels me to acknowledge that imperialist bully of useless bot-knowledge Wikipedia, because someone else quoting it informed me about this terribly important side-detail: that "The Cherry-Tree Carol", so central to every school Nativity play and Joan Baez concert, was based on the tale as told in GPW (click here to hear her sing it, and note oddities like Mary as "Queen of the Galilee", and the existence of cherry trees in that part of the world).

You can read the full text of "The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew" by clicking here.




Copyright © 2020 David Prashker
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The Argaman Press


The Gospel of Q

also known as the "Q document", was invented in 1900, in Germany, and was given the initial Q from the German word Quelle, meaning "source".

The claim was that such a document had once existed in written form, and that it combined material that was common to both Matthew and Luke, and may even have been the source material that Matthew and Luke used for their Gospels.

The hypothesis might be read by an outsider as not really that surprising, given that it was in Germany that the various schools of Bible Criticism had grown up, with scholars such as Holtzmann and Bultmann applying to the Christian scriptures the theories that had been applied to the "Hebrew Bible" previously: a Christian Q where J, E, P and D had attempted to source the Jewish oral traditions. In fact, the "synoptic problem" had already been raised in England, in Herbert Marsh's translation of Michaelis' "Introduction to the New Testament", to which he added his personal opinion that the gospels had borrowed from each other.

A history of the development of the Q doctrine is worth reading, but not here alas. For the purposes of this document, the above paragraphs are sufficient.



Copyright © 2020 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press


The Gospel of the Nazoraeans

is an invention of the theologians, a theoretical name to meet the need to anthologise all manner of non-Canonical versions, references, allusions and passing comments on the life and ministry of Jesus that reflect his Jewish background.

Traditionally the Gospels that do this are the Ebionite and the Hebrew; this text excludes those two.

The names "Nazaraeans" and "Nazarenes" are also both used, mostly because scholars can never agree on anything, including what to include, or indeed to exclude. Currently only 36 verses are accepted, 23 of them from Jerome, the rest from later mediaeval sources.

The idea for such a work belongs to Paschasius Radbertus (790-865), the Abbot of Corbie in northern France, whose best-known work is "De Corpore et Sanguine Domini", an explanation of the nature of the Eucharist, written around 831 CE. Why he chose to name this pseudo-gospel after the Nazarenes is unclear, as they had long been declared heretical, and the texts that Radbertus was attributing were not: they rejected observance of ceremonial law, and regarded Paul as superior to Jesus when it came to elucidating revealed truth in a way that even a heathen could comprehend; but beyond this they were fairly mainstream in their faith and practice.

Nazarenes, by the way, has nothing to do with the town of Nazareth - they were called Nazarenes because they practised Nazirut, a period of "retreat" such as would become the custom of Lent later on, and which Jesus himself practiced during his "forty days in the wilderness" (Matthew 4), though he got the Devil tempting him added on.

Nevertheless, scholars down the ages have assumed that it was connected to the town of Nazareth (click here), where Jesus is said to come from, according to the Synoptic Gospels. But... there was no town of Nazareth at the time of Jesus! There was an ancient shrine and cemetery at what is now Kibbutz Kfar ha Horesh, about three miles from what would become Nazareth, but no Nazareth itself. Why the belief that there was? I shall return to that in a moment. But first; if he did not come come from there, where did he come from:

Jesus spent most of his ministry around the Sea of Galilee, preaching at Kfar Nahum (Capernaum), feeding the five thousand at Tabgha, involved with Mary of Magdala, and finding his Apostles on the shores of the lake at exactly the same north-western corner - all those places just named are within less than a  mile of each other. The Yehudit name for the Sea of Galilee is Genasseret, and the village of Ginosar sat within that same square mile - easy enough to slip the G and have Jesus of Genasseret become Jesus of Nazareth, especially when Isaiah 11:1-4 (apparently, but see my commentary) has prophesied the coming of a Messiah:
"A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of YHVH will rest on him, the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord - and he will delight in the fear of the Lord."
By whom Yesha-Yahu meant Chizki-Yah(Hezekiah), who would indeed become the next Mashiyach (sacred king). But leave that minor point aside.

In Yehudit the first of these verses reads, phonetically: "Va yatsa choter mi geza Yishai, ve netser mi sharashav yiphreh (וְיָצָא חֹטֶר מִגֵּזַע יִשָׁי וְנֵצֶר מִשָּׁרָשָׁיו יִפְרֶה)". The key word is "netser" (נצר), meaning "branch". 

The term "Christian" was not the name by which the earliest Christians were known in their native land. They were called, as they still are today, Notsrim (נצרים), and in Arabic and Aramaic as Nasara, from the same source. Notsrim and Genasseret; by the time the gospels were being written, by men who had not lived in Yisra-El, and were not themselves witnesses, and who did not speak Yehudit or even Aramaic as their daily language, and who may well not have known Yehudit even as a scriptural language, the town of Nazareth (נצרת - correctly Natsaret) had indeed been founded, or a village anyway, probably a single farm on a hillside that later expanded to become a village. Why was it given the name Natsaret? Perhaps because it was an early convert to Christianity who established it. Perhaps because this was where Mary went to live, after the Crucifixion, though tradition insists that she came from Nazareth, thirty years before the Crucifixion.

The logo at the top of this page confirms that there are churches in the world today which identify themselves as Nazarene, and if you type the word into a search engine you will easily be able to identify them: Olney, Troy, even a Theological Seminary, though that one appears to me to be Wesleyan. Probably these churches are picking up the account of Tertullus prosecuting Paul, in Acts 24:5, and describing him as "a nuisance" and "a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes", which is clearly Tertullus not knowing the correct name of the sect. And probably these churches are recognising Tertullus' error, but choosing, perhaps even ironically, to take back the name, calling themselves Nazarenes in order to support him from a temporal distance.

After that one-and-only reference in Acts, the name makes no further appearance in known history until Eusebius, in his "Onomasticon", speaks of the "Nazoreans", which may be a different version of the same error, or a completely different error, or even possibly correct, but in a different context, though this is the least likely, as Epiphanius confirmed when he made a clear differentiation of the two in his "Panarion" (4th century CE). From his time onwards, Nazarenes have been regarded as those early Christians who followed James the Just, the brother of Jesus, rather than Paul, or Peter. Most of them continued to live in Yeru-Shala'im, or at least within Roman Judea, and are said to have kept some aspects of the Mosaic Law  - though after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, and until the "substitute" had been established by Yochanan ben Zakkai after that event, there were actually very few of these that anyone could follow. 

Finally there is the work of Robert Graves and Joshua Podro, the former an expert on all things cultural in the ancient Greek world, the latter a distinguished Hebrew scholar. It took them fully ten years, and a great deal of furiously pleasant argument, before they finally agreed the compromise which is the published work, claiming it to be the "true and authentic life of Jesus". The Church Times refused to advertise it, reviews were universally hostile, and Graves twice sued for libel. So clearly it has some substance and value or the Church would just have ignored it!






Copyright © 2020 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press