Speaker 2
What was left out then? And what happened to the texts that were left
Speaker 1
out? Right. So that's the interesting thing. And because throughout history, scholars have known that there were other books available, but for the most parts, we didn't have the books. We had some of them. We have a gospel, for example, that claims to be written by Jesus' brother James. It's mainly about the life of Jesus' mother, Mary, in order to explain why she was chosen to be the one who had bear the Son of God. And James, Jesus' brother, writes this account of Mary's birth and her upbringing in her life and then the birth of Jesus. It was a popular gospel throughout the Middle Ages. It was very, very popular. In some ways, it was more popular than the New Testament gospels. We know that because the artwork, if you look at medieval artwork, scenes from this proto gospel of James, as it's called, are everywhere in medieval art. So we knew of sun books. But most of the books we know about now that we actually have have been fairly recent discoveries, including, for example, a gospel of Peter that was discovered in the 1880s, which is an amazing account of Jesus' trial, death, and resurrection. Because in this account, there's actually a narrative of Jesus coming out of the tomb, which you don't get in the New Testament. Very, very interesting. And we have a gospel allegedly by Thomas, who was thought to be Jesus' twin brother, not just a brother, but his twin brother, did anest Judas Thomas, is his name, and it's a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, half of which we don't have in the New Testament. The other half are kind of like the New Testament. And so we have these books right now, and we have letters, allegedly written by Paul, in the New Testament. We have first and second Corinthians. Outside the New Testament, we have third Corinthians. And in one part of the church, it's still accepted as part of the canon, not in Protestantism or Catholicism. We have an apocalypse of Peter, and we have an apocalypse of Paul. So yeah, there are lots of other books out there. These are called the Christian Apocrypha, and they are very, very interesting in their own right. But they're interesting historically, in part because some of them almost made it in.