The apocryphal tradition is not a literature of ideas. It is not even first-class religious literature. The church's intellectuals, with a few notable exceptions, have not always been comfortable with the 'devotional' church - the church of ordinary believers. (Would Thomas Aquinas have visited Lourdes if Lourdes had been around in his day?) The apocryphal tradition is the literature of ordinary belief, impassioned, unstructured, repititious, naive. What one can see in these gospels are the undeveloped paths in Christian belief which, in choosing the canon it did, the Catholic church chose not to follow. In pursuing the apocryphal tradition, however, it is just as well to remember that these undeveloped paths follow by means of a crude literary logic from paths already laid out by the authors of the canonical books. In answering the question, What did Christians believe in the first centuries of the church's existence? reference must be made to both authorised and secret gospels.
The New Testament provides two accounts of the birth of Jesus in the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke. These conflict in several important ways, which suggests that the two evangelists were working from variant traditions incorporating different historical and legendary details.
The early Christians were fond of such stories. In response to the demands of the faithful, some writers, following the lead of Matthew and Luke, went on to provide even fuller narratives of the birth of Jesus and accounts of his family history. These accounts will not be familiar to many today, chiefly because their status in the official life of the church has been marginal and occasionally controversial.
The Secret Gospels brings together, for the first time in a consecutive narrative, the major apocryphal sources of the Jesus tradition. Composed between the second and seventh centuries C.E., the "secret" or "hidden" gospels were influential in shaping Christian belief and doctrine for well over a thousand years. They include stories of the "lost" years of Jesus as a boy in Nazareth, the wanderings of the holy family, the death of Joseph and the assumption of the virgin Mary into heaven. Newly translated and harmonised by R. Joseph Hoffmann, a specialist in early church history, these sources provide an unparalleled view of the devotional life and legend-making skills of the Christian church. They also offer important insights into the making of the New Testament canon and raise significant questions about the way in which belief in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth developed.
This comprehensive introduction to the apocryphal tradition is essential reading for anyone interested in the life and thought of the formative period of Christian belief. Enhanced by running notes and commentary, The Secret Gospels includes a unique supplement on the apocryphal Jesus tradition in Islam as well as long-unavailable sources from the Eastern, Coptic-Egyptian and Arab-Christian traditions.
R. Joseph Hoffmann is Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow at Westminster College, Oxford. His published works include What the Bible Really Says, Jesus in History and Myth and Biblical versus Secular Ethics.