WHAT was all the excitement about? The magazine was commenting on the recent popular interest and activities centered on a collection of pseudo gospels, epistles, and apocalypses discovered in the mid-20th century in Nag Hammadi and elsewhere in Egypt. These and other documents of this type have generally been referred to as Gnostic or Apocryphal writings.a

Was There a Conspiracy?

In an age when people generally are cynical about the Bible and orthodox religions, the Gnostic or Apocryphal writings seem to have struck a responsive chord. These writings have had a great influence on the way many view the teachings of Jesus Christ and Christianity itself. As one magazine stated: “The Gospel of Thomas and other apocryphal [works] speak to the heart of a group of people that continues to grow in modern times: those who are eager for spirituality but distrust religion.” It has been calculated that in Brazil alone “there are at least 30 groups whose beliefs are based on the Apocrypha.”

The discovery of these documents has popularized the theory that in the fourth century C.E., the Catholic Church conspired to cover up the truth about Jesus, that some accounts of his life presented in the Apocryphal writings were suppressed, and that the four Gospels found in modern Bibles were altered. Elaine Pagels, professor of religion, put it this way: “We now begin to see that what we call Christianity​—and what we identify as Christian tradition—​actually represents only a small selection of specific sources, chosen from among dozens of others.”

In the opinion of scholars like Pagels, the Bible is not the only source of Christian faith; there are other sources, such as the Apocryphal writings. For example, a BBC program entitled Bible Mysteries, “The Real Mary Magdalene” observed that the Apocryphal writings present Mary Magdalene as “a teacher and spiritual guide to the other disciples. She’s not just a disciple; she’s the apostle to the apostles.” Commenting on the supposed role of Mary Magdalene, Juan Arias writes in the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo: “Today everything leads us to believe that the early Christian movement, founded by Jesus, was profoundly ‘feminist,’ since the first domestic churches were women’s houses, where they officiated as priests and bishops.”

For many, the Apocryphal sources seem to carry far more weight than the Biblical source. This preference, however, raises some important questions: Are the Apocryphal writings a legitimate source of Christian faith? When they contradict clear Bible teachings, which source should we believe​—the Bible or the Apocryphal books? Was there really a conspiracy in the fourth century to suppress these books and alter the four Gospels to exclude important information about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and others? For answers to these questions, let us consider one of the four Biblical Gospels, the Gospel of John.

Evidence From John’s Gospel

A valuable fragment of John’s Gospel was found in Egypt at the turn of the 20th century and is now known as the Papyrus Rylands 457 (P⁵²). It contains what is John 18:31-33, 37, 38 in the modern Bible and is preserved at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, England. This is the oldest manuscript fragment of the Christian Greek Scriptures in existence. Many scholars believe that it was written about 125 C.E., a mere quarter of a century or so after John’s death. The amazing thing is that the text of the fragment agrees nearly exactly with that in later manuscripts. The fact that a copy of John’s Gospel of such antiquity had already circulated to Egypt, where the fragment was discovered, supports the conclusion that the good news according to John was really recorded in the first century C.E. and by John himself, as the Bible indicates. The book of John is therefore the work of an eyewitness.

On the other hand, the Apocryphal writings all date from the second century on, a hundred years or more after the events they describe had taken place. Some experts try to argue that the Apocryphal writings are based on earlier writings or traditions, but there is no proof of this. Thus, the question is appropriate, Which would you put more faith in​—the testimony of eyewitnesses or that of people who lived a hundred years after the fact? The answer is obvious.b