The Question of Truth Unearthed by Non-Canonical Gospels

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In life we all encounter times when we simply feel lost and confused. We all face times when we simply seek the answers and the truth to help us understand our lives. For Christians, our answers are found within the Bible where we feel the truth lies and where we can go to find the answer to the most difficult questions in our lives. But when we do this, are we as Christians limiting the knowledge that we can procure? Can we view the Bible as complete and containing a full spectrum of godly discernment? The essence of these questions center completely around one central issue: non-canonical books. When we look at the Bible and its' spectrum of knowledge, we must also look at what has been removed. When we compare canonical vis-à-vis non-canonical gospels we can see that non-canonical gospels do play a significant role in the role of the church and the formation of the Christian knowledge, which can in turn lead us to wonder about the difference between canonical and non-canonical.

When we look at the non-canonical gospels we must first start by looking at exactly what a non-canonical gospel is and what this idea really means. To many it simply means a book that didn’t make it into the Bible because it possesses incorrect information somewhere within it or it can mean that the book is in complete falsehood and as a result is not seen as fit to be read or to draw knowledge from. In reality, a non-canonical gospel is a “name given to that amorphous collection of early, non-canonical Christian writings, dating from the second century onwards, which purports to tell us about the main personage of the New Testament and the deeds of the founding apostles of various churches” (Foster 28). While many people today simply see them as use...

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..., there are good reasons why these gospels ultimately were not included into the canon it doesn’t mean that there is no good information to be gained from these books. When we take the information in stride and combine it with what we know from the Bible the information we get can be quite powerful and can add to the way that we view Christianity and Jesus.

Works Cited

Foster, Paul. The Apocryphal Gospels : A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford, 2009.

FoxTrax. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.

Foster, Paul. The Non-Canonical Gospels. London: Continuum International, 2008. FoxTrax.

Web. 15 Feb. 2014.

Shelley, Paul L. Church History In Plain Language. Nashville: Word, 1995. Print.

"Wesley Center Online." The : Noncanonical Literature. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.

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