Before the Bible: The Christian Books That Disappeared

Season 2 · Episode 23

Full episode description

Before the New Testament was a closed book of twenty-seven texts, there was a much larger Christian library. The canon is what survived a long process of selection and filtering. Part 1 of this two-part episode walks the books that did not make the cut, the ones that almost did, and the first man who tried to settle the question by publishing his own answer.

This episode walks:

• the Apocalypse of Peter, a vivid tour of heaven and hell that was widely read in the second century and almost made the canon
• the Acts of Paul and Thecla, where a female apostle baptises herself and travels with Paul, a text wildly popular among early Christian women
• the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945
• the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where the child Jesus performs miracles and curses playmates who annoy him
• the secret revelations, including the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Mary, in which Jesus delivers esoteric teaching after the resurrection
• the outer edges, including texts so strange they were rejected by every party
• Marcion of Sinope, who in the 140s CE became the first Christian to publish a fixed canon, a stripped Gospel of Luke and ten Pauline letters and no Hebrew Bible at all

Marcion is the hinge of the story. Until him, the question of what counted as Christian scripture was open. After him, it was unavoidable.

Part 2 will follow what Marcion forced into being, the editing question, and the slow process by which a canon hardened.

Not from tradition. From evidence.