'The Many Faces of Christ': Forgotten gospels are part of Christianity, too

PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
By Rebecca I. Denova

PUBLISHING---When a newly discovered gospel or fragment makes the news (The Gospel of Judas; “Jesus’s Wife”), the media hype suggests the idea that the early Catholic Church suppressed these texts. The implication is one of a tyrannical attempt to control belief systems, a characteristic we assign to institutional power-brokers. Biblical scholar Phillip Jenkins refutes such a conclusion, claiming that these lost gospels and stories (known as apocrypha, or non-canonical) were well-known and in some cases, beloved, throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages. They are not, in fact, a new discovery of modern academics. [link]


Amazon.com: "The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels" By Phillip Jenkins, Basic Books ($27.99).