




                       The Lost and Hostile Gospels

                                 An Essay

 On the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First
                Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain.

                                    By

                        Rev. S. Baring-Gould, M.A.

Author of "The Origin and Development of Religious Belief," "Legendary
Lives of the Old Testament Characters." Etc.

                           Williams and Norgate

                            London, Edinburgh

                                   1874





CONTENTS


Preface.
Part I. The Jewish Anti-Gospels.
   I. The Silence Of Josephus.
   II. The Cause Of The Silence Of Josephus.
   III. The Jew Of Celsus.
   IV. The Talmud.
   V. The Counter-Gospels.
   VI. The First Toledoth Jeschu.
   VII. The Second Toledoth Jeschu.
Part II. The Lost Petrine Gospels.
   I. The Gospel Of The Hebrews.
      1. The Fragments extant.
      2. Doubtful Fragments.
      3. The Origin of the Gospel of the Hebrews.
   II. The Clementine Gospel.
   III. The Gospel Of St. Peter.
   IV. The Gospel Of The Egyptians.
Part III. The Lost Pauline Gospels.
   I. The Gospel Of The Lord.
   II. The Gospel Of Truth.
   III. The Gospel Of Eve.
   IV. The Gospel Of Perfection.
   V. The Gospel Of St. Philip.
   VI. The Gospel Of Judas.
Footnotes






                               [Cover Art]

[Transcriber's Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter
at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]





PREFACE.


It is advisable, if not necessary, for me, by way of preface, to explain
certain topics treated of in this book, which do not come under its title,
and which, at first thought, may be taken to have but a remote connection
with the ostensible subject of this treatise. These are:

1. The outbreak of Antinomianism which disfigured and distressed primitive
Christianity.

2. The opposition of the Nazarene Church to St. Paul.

3. The structure and composition of the Synoptical Gospels.

The consideration of these curious and important topics has forced its way
into these pages; for the first two throw great light on the history of
those Gospels which have disappeared, and which it is not possible to
reconstruct without a knowledge of the religious parties to which they
belonged. And these parties were determined by the fundamental question of
Law or No-law, as represented by the Petrine and ultra-Pauline Christians.
And the third of these topics necessarily bound up with the consideration
of the structure and origin of the Lost Gospels, as the reader will see if
he cares to follow me in the critical examination of their extant
fragments.

Upon each of these points a few preliminary words will not, I hope, come
amiss, and may prevent misunderstanding.

1. The history of the Church, as the history of nations, is not to be read
with prejudiced eyes, with penknife in hand to erase facts which fight
against foregone conclusions.

English Churchmen have long gazed with love on the Primitive Church as the
ideal of Christian perfection, the Eden wherein the first fathers of their
faith walked blameless before God, and passionless towards each other. To
doubt, to dissipate in any way this pleasant dream, may shock and pain
certain gentle spirits. Alas! the fruit of the tree of {~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, if it opens
the eyes, saddens also and shames the heart.

History, whether sacred or profane, hides her teaching from those who
study her through  glasses. She only reveals truth to those who
look through the cold clear medium of passionless inquiry, who seek the
Truth without determining first the masquerade in which alone they will
receive it.

It exhibits a strange, a sad want of faith in Truth thus to constrain
history to turn out facts according to order, to squeeze it through the
sieve of prejudice. And what indeed is Truth in history but the voice of
God instructing the world through the vices, follies, errors of the past?

A calm, patient spirit of inquiry is an attitude of the modern mind alone.
To this mind History has made strange disclosures which she kept locked up
through former ages. The world of Nature lay before the men of the past,
but they could not, would not read it, save from left to right, or right
to left, as their prejudices ran. The wise and learned had to cast aside
their formulae, and sit meekly at the feet of Nature, as little children,
before they learned her laws. Nor will History submit to hectoring. Only
now is she unfolding the hidden truth in her ancient scrolls.

It is too late to go back to conclusions of an uncritical age, though it
was that of our fathers; the time for denying the facts revealed by
careful criticism is passed away as truly as is the time for explaining
the shadows in the moon by the story of the Sabbath-breaker and his <DW19>
of sticks.

And criticism has put a lens to our eyes, and disclosed to us on the
shining, remote face of primitive Christianity rents and craters undreamt
of in our old simplicity.

That there was, in the breast of the new-born Church, an element of
antinomianism, not latent, but in virulent activity, is a fact as capable
of demonstration as any conclusion in a science which is not exact.

In the apostolic canonical writings we see the beginning of the trouble;
the texture of the Gospels is tinged by it; the Epistles of Paul on one
side, of Jude and Peter on the other, show it in energetic operation;
ecclesiastical history reveals it in full flagrance a century later.

Whence came the spark? what material ignited? These are questions that
must be answered. We cannot point to the blaze in the sub-apostolic age,
and protest that it was an instantaneous combustion, with no smouldering
train leading up to it,--to the rank crop of weeds, and argue that they
sprang from no seed. We shall have to look up the stream to the fountains
whence the flood was poured.

The existence of antinomianism in the Churches of Greece and Asia Minor,
synchronizing with their foundation, transpires from the Epistles of St.
Paul. It was an open sore in the life-time of the Twelve; it was a sorrow
weighing daily on the great soul of the Apostle of the Gentiles. It called
forth the indignant thunder of Jude and Peter, and the awful denunciations
in the charges to the Seven Churches.

The apocryphal literature of the sub-apostolic period carries on the sad
story. Under St. John's presiding care, the gross scandals which defiled
Gentile Christianity were purged out, and antinomian Christianity deserted
Asia Minor for Alexandria. There it made head again, as revealed to us by
the controversialists of the third century. And there it disappeared for a
while.

Yet the disease was never eradicated. Its poison still lurked in the veins
of the Church, and again and again throughout the Middle Ages heretics
emerged fitfully, true successors of Nicolas, Cerdo, Marcion and
Valentine, shaking off the trammels of the moral law, and seeking
justification through mystic exaltation or spiritual emotion. The Papacy
trod down these ugly heretics with ruthless heel. But at the Reformation,
when the restraint was removed, the disease broke forth in a multitude of
obscene sects spotting the fair face of Protestantism.

Nor has the virus exhausted itself. Its baleful workings, if indistinct,
are still present and threatening.

But how comes it that Christianity has thus its dark shadow constantly
haunting it? The cause is to be sought in the constitution of man. Man,
moving in his little orbit, has ever a face turned away from the earth and
all that is material, looking out into infinity,--a dark, unknown side,
about whose complexion we may speculate, but which we can never map. It is
a face which must ever remain mysterious, and ever radiate into mystery.
As the eye and ear are bundles of nerves through which the inner man goes
out into, and receives impressions from, the material world, so is the
soul a marvellous tissue of fibres through which man is placed _en
rapport_ with the spiritual world, God and infinity. It is the existence
of this face, these fibres--take which simile you like--which has
constituted mystics in every age all over the world: Schamans in frozen
Siberia, Fakirs in burning India, absorbed Buddhists, ecstatic Saints,
Essenes, Witches, Anchorites, Swedenborgians, modern Spiritualists.

Man, double-faced by nature, is placed by Revelation under a sharp,
precise external rule, controlling his actions and his thoughts.

To this rule spirit and body are summoned to do homage. But the spirit has
an inherent tendency towards the unlimited, by virtue of its nature, which
places it on the confines of the infinite. Consequently it is never easy
under a rule which is imposed on it conjointly with the body; it strains
after emancipation, strives to assert its independence of what is
external, and to establish its claim to obey only the movements in the
spiritual world. It throbs sympathetically with the auroral flashes in
that realm of mystery, like the flake of gold-leaf in the magnetometer.

To be bound to the body, subjected to its laws, is degrading; to be
unbounded, unconditioned, is its aspiration and supreme felicity.

Thus the incessant effort of the spirit is to establish its law in the
inner world of feeling, and remove it from the material world without.

Moreover, inasmuch as the spirit melts into the infinite, cut off from it
by no sharply-defined line, it is disposed to regard itself as a part of
God, a creek of the great Ocean of Divinity, and to suppose that all its
emotions are the pulsations of the tide in the all-embracing Spirit. It
loses the consciousness of its individuality; it deifies itself.

A Suffee fable representing God and the human soul illustrates this well.
"One knocked at the Beloved's door, and a voice from within cried, 'Who is
there?' Then the soul answered, 'It is I.' And the voice of God said,
'This house will not hold me and thee.' So the door remained shut. Then
the soul went away into a wilderness, and after long fasting and prayer it
returned, and knocked once again at the door. And again the voice demanded
'Who is there?' Then he said, 'It is THOU,' and at once the door opened to
him."

Thus the mystic always regards his unregulated wishes as divine
revelations, his random impulses as heavenly inspirations. He has no law
but his own will; and therefore, in mysticism, there, is no curb against
the grossest licence.

The existence of that evil which