Q:What are the "Lost" Gospels of the Bible and where can I find them?

A:The "Lost Gospels" are also called the "Gnostic Gospels." These writings were meant to be secret documents revealing wild and miraculous information about Jesus and His contemporaries. They were written 100-300 years after Jesus ascended into heaven and were never considered to be genuine Biblical writings.

The earliest Gnostic Gospel is the Gospel of Thomas, probably written around 150 A.D. The recently publicized Gnostic Gospel, the Gospel of Judas, was written around the same time. The other writings (e.g., The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Mary, The Gospel of Truth, and The Gospel of the Hebrews) were written in the 200’s and 300’s A.D. All of these works claim to be written by people close to Jesus, but they were clearly recognized to be false claims because of the late date of their writing. These writings are neither Gospels (accounts of Jesus’ life) nor were they written by the people who are named in their titles. They were simply tools to perpetuate the Gnostic belief system (the striving after greater and secret knowledge). Other factors that took these writings off the radar as authentic works were their rejection of the Hebrew Old Testament and their wild, mythical claims about Jesus. Commenting on how the Gnostic Gospels exaggerated the divine nature of Jesus, Ben Witherington III summed it up well in his article in "Christianity Today":

"The case was never that the Gnostic documents were excluded or deleted [from the Scriptural Canon]. Rather, they were never serious contenders for inclusion in the canon, either in the Eastern or Western church. As the canon list of Athanasius in 367 demonstrates, even in the home region of the Nag Hammadi texts (Gnostic writings found near Egypt) none of those texts was ever included in a canon. None ever appeared in any authoritative list, and it is perhaps also suggestive that when the Nag Hammadi texts were found, they were found without one single canonical book included with them. This should tell us something about how they were separated from and viewed differently from canonical books." ("Why the 'Lost' Gospels Lost Out," p.31).