So-Called “Christian Papyri” Not Found in the New Testament

Many Christian papyri were produced in the early centuries ad and are not included in the Bible. These encompass a wide range of subject matter, including personal correspondence, Christian prayers, and descriptions of martyrdoms. Many of these represent Christian pseudepigraphy written under a recognized authoritative name for the purpose of promoting certain ideas. The following examples show their range of dates, language, completeness, and subject matter:

• Codex Tchacos is an Egyptian Coptic papyrus manuscript probably produced in the fourth century. Along with possibly Christian writings, it contains a copy of the Gospel of Judas, an example of Gnostic pseudepigraphy that records alleged conversations between Jesus and Judas Iscariot. The Gospel of Judas is mentioned as fictious by the early church father Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses 1.31.1).

• P. Mich. 130 is a single, incomplete Greek papyrus page kept at the University of Michigan, assigned the number 130. It contains part of the early Shepherd of Hermas, an important Christian document from the collection known as the Apostolic Fathers.

• Egerton Papyrus 2 (also known as the Unknown Gospel) was written in Greek on both sides about ad 200. It includes four partial stories about Jesus, three of which find parallels in the New Testament Gospels. A fourth story is unique, with no parallel: It is a fragmentary account of the Jordan River growing fruit from seed that Jesus had sown on it for the benefit of the crowds who witnessed the miracle.

• The Nag Hammadi library, containing 12 papyrus codices, was discovered in 1945 along the Nile River. The library yielded 45 separate works, most of them Gnostic texts written on papyrus in the Coptic language. One of the more famous among them is Nag Hammadi Codex II, a fourth-century papyrus containing the Gospel of Thomas. Because these manuscripts did not yield any New Testament papyri and most of them are directly labeled as heretical by the early church fathers (including the Gospel of Thomas [Hippolytus of Rome, logion 45; Origen, Homily on Luke 1; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.6]), they may been part of a collection that was hidden or deliberately removed from circulation following the definition of the present New Testament canon by Athanasius in ad 367.