Penguins on Parade: The Apocryphal Gospels!

Some Penguin Classics come like thieves in the night, stepping carefully and gently as they go. This might be reprehensible, but it’s natural too, particularly when it comes to subjects like religion – which is of course central to one of the newest additions to the Penguin Classics line, The Apocryphal Gospels, a volume of off-brand Christian writings edited and translated by Simon Gathercole. 

The volume includes infancy gospels like the Protevangelium, two dozen ministry gospels like the famous Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Eve, the gospels of Peter and Judas and Mary, and a final section titled “Two Modern Forgeries”: “The Secret Gospel of Mark,” and “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” Some of these apocryphal works are fragmentary or very short, and Gathercole presents each one of them in a new translation with separate introductions and notes in every case. Readers who’ve only encountered some of this material the old Meridian paperback The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden (a surprise hit edited by Rutherford Platt) will find this new Penguin Classics The Apocryphal Gospels an invaluable scholarly update, an endlessly fascinating look at all the parts of Christianity that were excluded from Christianity by editors, censors, and politicians in various Church councils over the centuries. 

Things like, for instance, the “Jewish Anti-Gospel” that’s quoted extensively by the Platonist philosopher Celsus in a book of his called “The True Word” and then re-quoted by the Church Father Origen around AD 250 for purposes of refutation in his own book Against Celsus. From those fragmentary third-hand quotations, it sure seems like this “Anti-Gospel” would have made for some lively reading, with its author hectoring Jesus directly the whole time:

But why was it necessary for you to be taken off to Egypt when you were still a child, in case you were murdered? It is hardly likely that a god would be afraid of death. But – ah, yes – an angel came from heaven, instructing you and your family to flee, and if you did not leave you would die. But would the great God not be able to preserve you, his own son, there? He had already sent two angels because of you!

But as wonderful as this new Penguin volume is, it still wants to sell in America. And huge swaths of the United States are vicious science-denying theocracies who might frown on the appearance of a book like this in the God-fearing bookstores. At least, that’s the only explanation I can come up with for some of the very puzzling things Gathercole writes in his Introduction, which starts off with these astonishing lines: “A good deal of the apocryphal literature has no particularly subversive purpose. It is pious legendary material supplying complementary narratives to the existing canonical Gospels. The Gospel material in this category does not in any sense seek to challenge the conventional picture of Jesus, and indeed in some respects it emphasizes or exaggerates the orthodox view …” 

Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth – something Gathercole himself acknowledges only a few paragraphs later, when, for example, he’s talking about the Gospel of the Egyptians, an almost entirely ethereal account that “scarcely seems to touch down on planet earth unti the very end.” He follows this summary directly with this: “The Gospels of Judas and Thomas are no less subversive, but – unlike the Gospel of the Egyptians – they do seek to undercut the New Testament Gospels on their own terms, that is, by presenting accounts which resemble the canonical four to some degree.” 

So we go from “not subversive” to “subversive'' in the span of one page, and only a moment or two actually reading the texts Gathercole so expertly translates will tell readers which one it is. Almost all of these texts were clearly written either before the Christian literary orthodoxy began to harden into place or else were written explicitly to challenge that orthodoxy. That’s precisely why the early orthodox Church hated them so much.

Or did they? Again, this edition must walk a fine line. Hence, another of Gathercole’s astonishing lines, this time dealing with the fact that only a minuscule fraction of what was clearly a sprawling body of literature has actually survived from antiquity: “The scarcity of copies is not the result of any kind of systemic destruction.”

Your jaw just drops. We’re talking about texts that portray Jesus as a psychotic with supernatural powers, that portray the Disciples as drunken illiterate louts, that portray the early ministry as either a crowd-funded wine-soaked orgy rolling through the Judean countryside or else as something that never actually happened on Earth at all. Of course the early codified church destroyed as many of these documents as it could get its hands on. Of course that’s why so few of them survive. Implying anything else about an organization that had sole and unchallenged control over Western society for fifteen centuries – and which based that control on Scriptural authority – would be the height of naivete if it weren’t so obviously publishing-world circumspection instead. 

“During to [sic] the relative lack of manuscript evidence,” Gathercole writes, “most of what we know about the fate of apocryphal Gospels in the early period comes from the church fathers.” These works were read privately by prelates who wouldn’t read them publicly nor allow others to read them, and a great deal can be learned from their various commentaries. This Penguin Classics The Apocryphal Gospels is wonderfully full of that learning. Here’s hoping even readers in the Bible Belt stumble across it some day.