Volume 50, Number 16 · October 23, 2003
The Other Christians
By Birger A. Pearson
Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
by Elaine Pagels
Random House, 241 pp., $24.95
In 1897 two British scholars, B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt, excavated an ancient garbage dump at the site of the Greco-Roman town of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt (modern el-Bahnasa), and discovered the largest cache of ancient papyri ever found anywhere. Publication of these papyri began in 1897 and is still going on. The very first to be published, called P. Oxy. 1, consists of a single leaf from a papyrus codex datable to as early as the second century and inscribed in Greek on both sides with what Grenfell and Hunt referred to as 'Sayings of our Lord.' Another papyrus fragment with additional 'new sayings of Jesus' was published in 1904, together with eight small fragments of 'a lost gospel.' These papyri, very fragmentary, were duly noted by scholars and included in standard collections of New Testament 'apocryphal' writings, but no notice was taken of them by the public.
Review, 3983 words
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