Secret books of the bible

[Travesty]

Will someone please give me some historical insights on these supposed “secret apocryphal books” of both the old and new testament?

Specifically, I am curious about the book of enoch, the extra gospels, and the apocryphals of the apostles.

 

[Emly]

In ahciet times, the testiments were being put together. It was cathtolic chucrth who picked out thegosals, letters, and other books that were considered to be inspired by God. I can not give to you more info then that, maybe someone else can do better then I.

 

[vern_humphrey]

Travesty:

Will someone please give me some historical insights on these supposed “secret apocryphal books” of both the old and new testament?

Specifically, I am curious about the book of enoch, the extra gospels, and the apocryphals of the apostles.

There are no “secret books” of the Bible. There is a large collection of pseudograhia – false writings, known by the early Church Fathers and not accepted by them as inspired or canonical.

The books you mention are easily found by simply entering their titles in Google. But be warned – there is an old saying, “Those who study the Pseudographia find what they are looking for.” These writings have been used by many people to construct false doctrines and beliefs.

 

[Travesty]

Yes, I can find some of them on google, but I more concerned with the historical aspects. Mainly, When they were created, and why they were left out. Who made that decision?

 

[E.E.N.S]

Travesty:

Yes, I can find some of them on google, but I more concerned with the historical aspects. Mainly, When they were created, and why they were left out. Who made that decision?

The very same Catholic Church that codified the Bible.

 

[JimG]

newadvent.org/cathen/01602a.htm
Book of Enoch

newadvent.org/cathen/01601a.htm
Apocrypha

 

[Travesty]

Ok to be more specific. When were the 4 Gospels contained in the canonical Bible written, and when were these other “secret” Gospels written?

 

[BibleReader]

vern humphrey:

There are no “secret books” of the Bible. There is a large collection of pseudograhia – false writings, known by the early Church Fathers and not accepted by them as inspired or canonical.

The books you mention are easily found by simply entering their titles in Google. But be warned – there is an old saying, “Those who study the Pseudographia find what they are looking for.” These writings have been used by many people to construct false doctrines and beliefs.

Welllllllllll, don’t be TOO hard on the Pseudepigraphas. The inspired Roman Catholic Bible itself frequently expressly QUOTES from them.

 

[mlchance]

Travesty:

Ok to be more specific. When were the 4 Gospels contained in the canonical Bible written, and when were these other “secret” Gospels written?

All four canonical Gospels were written no later than 90 A.D. The various apocryphal gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas featured in the profoundly ridiculous movie Stigmata are later, often much later.

– Mark L. Chance.

 

[TOME]

BibleReader, is it that the 4 Gospels (Canonical) quote the pseudographia or do they all use a common source of some sort?

 

[Joseph_Bilodeau]

BibleReader:

Welllllllllll, don’t be TOO hard on the Pseudepigraphas. The inspired Roman Catholic Bible itself frequently expressly QUOTES from them.

Can you demonstrate some of these quotes, and can it be shown the Gospels are quoting the pseudoscriptural writings rather than vise-versa?

 

[JimG]

Well, you asked about the Book of Enoch, which is part of the Jewish Apocrypha, and quite different and far removed from the apocryphal “gospels,” such as the “gospel of Thomas.” Asking why these later writings were “left out” is like asking why Shakespeare’s plays were left out of the Canon of Chaucer.

 

[Kristina_P]

I find it amusing when people put the word “secret” in front of anything that isn’t widely published or common knowledge. From my experience, this is usually done to both draw attention and to lend credence to something that has been rightly ignored. Don’t be taken in by this tactic. The Church didn’t suppress (or keep “secret”) truthful writings that She just didn’t like or that supposedly threatened Her power. It’s ludicrous to portray the early church fathers as “cafeteria scripture compilers,” just picking and choosing at random among equally valid manuscripts. People like conspiracy theories, because we like to feel smarter and better than other folks. We like to feel as though we’ve been let it on the “secret.” The wonderful thing about our faith is that, unlike the pagan mystery cults of the first century (from which many of those apocryphal books draw heavily), the mystery of Christ is “revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey Him.”
Sorry for the moderately off-topic sermonizing, but given all the kerfuffle over The DaVinci Code, this is what’s been on my mind.

 

[adnauseum]

You know how certain democrats write blogs describing how President Bush planned the attack on 9-11-01?

The non-canonical books are analogous to that literature, in the sense that they share these features in common:

Agenda driven - though sometimes the agenda is a mystery

Poorly written

Publish a few facts accurately but mostly garbage

There is fringe literature in every generation. Notice the Church Fathers were aware of the fringe books, but they weren’t troubled by them - they just got down to the business of separating the clear and useful texts from the others.

Modern man is so intellectually impoverished, he’s intrigued by the mystery books, by new age clap-trap, etc. It’s the nature of the decline we live in.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Travesty:

Yes, I can find some of them on google, but I more concerned with the historical aspects. Mainly, When they were created, and why they were left out. Who made that decision?

They very largely excluded themselves - it’s not as though the bishops had to sort through a pile of books, accepting 27 for the NT, & other for the OT and excluding the rest, for no particular reason.​

The books excluded from the OT canon had already been excluded by the Jews. The Church took over the OT canon from them, plus a few more books and parts of books, some of which were eventually accepted, some of which were not, in various places; with the result that:

the OT canon of the Orthodox is longer than the Western OT canon;

which itself was abbreviated at the Reformation…

…when the Reformers returned to the canon of the Hebrew Bible; which had been the canon of some of the earliest Fathers. Far from trying to spite the CC, they were trying to get back to using the books recognised by Jesus Christ; and much of the Catholic polemic against them on this point overlooks the fact that many of the writings which witness to a longer Christian canon were simply not available to the Reformers or to their Catholic opponents. This is like our having torches, and blaming the Reformers for not having torches but only candles; when the only artificial light anyone had at the time was candles.

It’s not really possible to say more than that about the OT, because so many books are involved, and it’s misleading to talk about “the Church” doing X or Y, because one should really speak of “the Churches” - simply because the Church was not centralised. The Council of Rome in 382, for instance, and the letter of Innocent of Rome in 405 which repeats the Canon listed at the Council in 382, were of no importance in the East, but only for the West; and the East was made up of several Churches in any case. Which made their own decisions - the Armenian NT Canon has never included the book of Revelation, for example. So it’s not accurate to speak as though all Catholics after 405 accepted the same Canon; they did not.

As for secret books - it’s impossible to say very much, because people hardly ever make their meaning clear: probably because they are too ignorant to be capable of doing so, and talk like that simply because they’ve read some trashy bestseller by some pig-ignorant scribbler with money-signs in his eyes whose out to separate the gullible public from their money. When people are incapable of seeing any any difference between:

The deutero-canonical Book of Wisdom in the OT

The deutero-canonical Revelation of John in the NT

The Book of Jubilees in the OT Pseudepigrapha

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas in the NT Apocrypha

The Gospel of Barnabas in the NT Pseudepigrapha

The Book called Pistis Sophia in the NT Apocrypha

The Hermetic literature

but instead, treat them all as pretty much the same kind of thing, then there is no point in further discussion; for such people have quite obviously not even crossed the pons asinorum.

If by “secret books”, people mean that the Church has hidden away some texts which it is far too inconvenient for her to allow to be known of, all one can say is that this is downright nonsense. It’s a lie. Unfortunately, it fits in with the love of conspiracy-theories and suspicion of organised religion that has been a part of life for the last century or so - for some people, it is easier to believe that Jesus died in Kashmir than on the Cross; the rise of occultism and theosophy, with its alternative ideas, has fed the confusion. People can’t tell the difference between

…continue…]

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

…continued & ended]

• Discovering books which were little more than names, if that - the Nag Hammadi finds in 1945
• discovering older forms of books already known, with some previously unknown ones - the Qumran finds in & after 1947
• everyday academic research which sometimes has surprises in store

People who have academically-untrained minds, & are very ignorant, are often without the humility to realise that the world is not obliged to fit their narrow horizons - so some become Fundamentalists; and others among them see “secret books” where they do not exist. What one is dealing with, is a state of mind with some of the features of Fundamentalism.

The popular taste for conspiracy-theories about Jesus is an intellectual equivalent to the modern fixation on sex - it’s a sort of “herpes of the intellect”; there is the same itchiness, this time for novelty: because it’s new, not because it’s more valid than what went before. And this itch also cuts Jesus down to size: partly by being an attack on Pauline Christianity. If St. Paul is a woman-hating neurotic - why listen to him ? So - why bother with the Glorious Resurrected Christ, the Judge of all mankind, of Whom He speaks ? Attacks on St. Paul, are at bottom attacks on Christ: for people who are impure, do not like purity, unless they are converted from it. And Christ is pure; So He is attacked.

St. Paul, like Christ, would be less likely to be attacked if the Churches did a better job of exlaining his teaching; that there is a problem of widespread religious illiteracy is in great part the fault of the Churches; it is from such ignorance and illiteracy that sects & cults are born - because the hunger for God can be perverted, but never quenched; and if people are not fed with truth, they will feed on what is rotten - but they must feed on something; even if it is the garbage of “The Da Vinci Code” or the “Archko Volume” (a fabricated life of Jesus of about 100 years ago). ##

 

[Travesty]

Gottle of Gear, you pretty much answered any questions I had about these non-canonical books.

Sorry if people got heated up, a friend had brought up the discussion with me as he was trying to convince me that the church is corrupt. I had never heard of these books, so thats why I posed the question. Now that I have an understanding, I can explain to my friend how he is wrong in his assumptions. Thanks!

 

[buzzcut]

There was also supposedly a Secret Gospel of Mark which was the same as our Gospel of Mark except with extra bits in it that are not in our Gospel of Mark. This is according to Morton Smith, discoverer of a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria:

 

[BayCityRickL]

BibleReader:

Welllllllllll, don’t be TOO hard on the Pseudepigraphas. The inspired Roman Catholic Bible itself frequently expressly QUOTES from them.

Keep in mind that quoting from another source does not make the quoted source an inspired document. Only the books you find in a standard Catholic Bible are considered inspired.

 

[TOME]

About the historical background “Secret Book” you really should look at the OT books and books of the NT times separately at first to get an appreciation of how they are different but have some common traits.

The OT books were not so much secret but the problem arose over the those books that were of Hebrew origin and those that were translated into the Greek by the Jewish community in Alexandria, Egypt,commonly know as the Septugint (LXX).

What was happening amoung the Jews of the diaspora was Hebrew had become a lost language and most jews could speak Greek but not Hebrew. (As a matter of fact, few jews in Palestine at the time of Jesus couldn’t speak nor read Hebrew, so in the NT when Hebrew is references, the authors actually mean Aramaic. Which is why many scholars believe the scriptures used by Jesus and the Apostles and the Apostolic Church was the LXX not the original Hebrew).

As with any translation there will always be differences trying to translate or transliterate from one language to another. This natural problem was compounded by the fact the Hebrew Scriptures were written using consonants only. What vowels to use and where was determined in the Hebrew Texts by oral traditions. The LXX written in Greek used vowels, which at times differed from the Hebrew oral traditions which could and did not only change the word but the meaning of the passage. Added to this there were several books that were included that were not included in the Hebrew Scriptures. This would effect the Protestant rejection of these books as Inspired Books

With the growth of Christianity especially with the increase of gentile christians, the Scriptures used was the LXX (remember the NT hadn’t been formulated yet). Also, the first christians considered Christ as the fulfilment of the Law and Prophets and that all the scriptures (our OT) where inspired works pointing to this fact. In the post Apostolic Era the Church Fathers (who were practically all Greek speaking gentiles) pick up on this thought.