THE APOCRYPHAL BEING THE WHOLE BODY OF THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS AND OTHER EXTRA NOT BEFORE APPEARED IN ENGLISH. IN CONTINUOUS NARRATIVE FORM, WITH NOTES, SCRIPTURAL PREFACE The object of this work is to make accessible to the reader of English, in a form easily grasped, the whole body of that comparatively ancient extra-canonical literature which pretends to tell at first hand something of the Life and Words of Jesus Christ. That literature, it must be admitted, discloses to the investigator but few golden grains amidst an intolerable deal of chaff. Yet weighted down, as it is, with the dreary verbosity of Gnostic madness, and the preposterous, if lighter inventions of mediaeval legend-mongers, it certainly bears across nearly nineteen centuries a few words from the divine Author of Christianity, and a few particulars as to His history upon which the four Gospels are silent. It is not possible to resolve this extra-canonical literature into its constituent elements. No final book can be written upon the Agrapha, the Heretical Gospels, the Apocryphal Gospels, or Legends about Christ, and seriously pretend completely to separate any one of these elements from the rest; they are inextricably intertwined. The Agrapha, for instance, almost certainly contain some reliable tradition; yet, in the form in which we now have them, they are as certainly largely heretical and apocryphal. The Heretical Gospels, again, of which fragments are extant, were mainly but corrupted copies of canonical ones; yet it is certainly demonstrated that most Apocryphal Gospels had their origin in heresy. The best established legends, moreover, rest mainly upon apocryphal sources. The plan here followed has, in consequence, been to combine all these elements, allowing them to tell their own stories in the unaltered words of their authors, and explaining, as far as possible, by the use of foot notes, the resulting narra |