Do We Have the Right Books?

The NT books were not chosen by a political council. They were recognized as the writings closest to the community surrounding Jesus — documents with a direct connection to his life and teaching. Jesus's disciples mentored the apostolic fathers, who in turn commented on which writings had authentic history going back to Jesus.

In December 1945, near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, a farmer discovered thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices in an earthenware jar. Some were burned as kindling. The surviving codices are now in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

Chief among them was the Gospel of Thomas — 114 sayings attributed to Jesus with no narrative framework. Unlike the canonical Gospels, it contains no account of Jesus's birth, ministry, death, or resurrection. Its opening: 'These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke.'

The Gnostic texts bear names of apostolic figures — Thomas, Peter, Mary, Judas, Philip — but ancient pseudepigraphy worked opposite to modern plagiarism: authors composed their own ideas and attached a recognized authority's name for credibility.

Both the content and dating indicate they were composed long after the named individuals had died. The Nag Hammadi codices are Coptic translations of 2nd-3rd century Greek originals.

Richard Bauckham in 'Jesus and the Eyewitnesses' compared name frequency in the Gospels with Tal Ilan's database of Palestinian Jewish names. In first-century Palestine, nine popular male names accounted for 41.5% of the population; in the Gospels, the figure is 40.3%.

The Gospels use disambiguating qualifiers for common names ('Simon called Peter,' 'Simon the Zealot') and none for rare names (Bartimaeus, Zacchaeus). When applied to Gnostic gospels, the results are markedly different — the Gospel of Judas contains names matching Egyptian patterns, not Palestinian Jewish conventions.

The four canonical Gospels, written by four different authors, each pass this onomastic test. The non-canonical gospels do not.