Q.
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What are the Apocrypha, Gnostic Gospels, Dead Sea Scrolls?
Jewish literature, such as The Apocalypse of Abraham, as well as in the Chris-
tian tradition, such as The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which tells of Jesus’
childhood misadventures. Although they may have had a religious purpose
or have been “folklorish” complements to sacred texts, they have never been
considered sacred.
Another set of literature is the “pseudepigrapha” or “deuterocanonical”
texts. These are books that appear in Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental
Orthodox Bibles as part of their Old/First Testament but are not included in
the Jewish Canon/Torah. They were included in the Septuagint, the Greek
Translation of the Torah, which was used by the early Christian community.
Protestants did not retain these books as part of their canon.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a different set of documents. Discovered in the
1940s and 1950s at Qumran, near the Dead Sea, these documents include some
of the only known copies of biblical documents made before 100 B.C.E. and
give us much information about Judaism during the Second Temple period.
Other documents are thought to be sacred texts of the Essenes, an ascetic Jew-
ish community that practiced celibacy and ritual bathing. They are important
because they tell us about a Jewish movement that is roughly contemporary
with Jesus’ life. Some scholars have even proposed that Jesus was an Essene,
or at least practiced Judaism in a similar way.
The gnostic gospels generally refer to a set of literature found in 1945 in
Nag Hammadi, Egypt. These thirteen scrolls—including the gospel of Thomas
and the gospel of Mary, among others—are representative of Christian gnosti-
cism. Gnosticism was a movement in the fi rst centuries of the Common Era
that held that the present world is an illusion and that through the attainment
of secret knowledge (gnosis) we could break out of our illusory existence into
something truer and more fulfi lling.
These were excised from Christian communities as heretical, but are
important because they tell us something about the diversity of Christian
practice in the fi rst few centuries C.E. It would be incredibly rare to fi nd any
contemporary Christian community that would hold the gnostic gospels as
sacred texts. Though the popularity of The Da Vinci Code raised considerable
interest in these documents, we know so little about their theological context
and much of their meaning is so obscure, even to knowledgeable scholars, that
their introduction into a religious community would be a complicated venture.Suggested Additional Sources for Reading
- Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer, eds., The Gnostic Bible: Gnostic Texts of
Mystical Wisdom from the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Shambhala, 2003). - Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths
We Never Knew (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005).