There can be legitimate debates over what is the most significant manuscript discovery of modern times. Probably few would dispute the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the first lot of which was found by pure serendipity in 1947 in a cave west of the Dead Sea, just thirteen miles east of Jerusalem, as a shep
herd boy was looking for a lost goat. Other caves were searched; eleven yielded manuscript treasures.1 And what treasures they were: manuscripts possessed
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and/or produced by a sectarian group of Jews living at roughly the same time and place as John the Baptist and Jesus; copies of the Hebrew Scriptures a thousand years older than anything previously in existence, allowing scholars to check the accuracy of scribes who copied the text in the intervening centu
ries; documents that describe and legislate on the daily life of this ascetic sect of Jewish monastics, known to history as the Essenes; books that expound their apocalyptic views of the world and its approaching end; texts that reveal their worship and liturgical life. This is a cache of manuscripts that will occupy scholars for decades still to come, possibly centuries.2
The importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for early Christianity cannot be minimized. But the importance is indirect. Despite what one reads in sensa
tionalist media guides and in dramatic theories sometimes advanced by other
wise competent scholars, the scrolls never mention John the Baptist or Jesus or any of Jesus’ followers; they contain nothing Christian. They are important for early Christian studies (as opposed to early Jewish studies, for which they are directly relevant) because they give us a rare firsthand glimpse of society, cul
ture, and religion in the birthplace of Christianity at just the time Christianity was born.
What about finds of direct significance for the early Christian movement?
For a long time, the most significant discovery was one which has, again, ceased being a household term or even an object of study by laypeople interested in early Christianity. But it continues to retain its unique importance. The book known as the Didache (Greek for “teaching”; the full title is “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the Nations”) was discovered in the Patriarchal Library of Constantinople in 1873.3 Published a decade later, its impact was huge, for this was a very ancient Christian writing, probably as ancient as some of the writings that became part of the New Testament, known to have been consid
ered canonical by some Christian groups in the early centuries, a document that was totally unlike any of the books that did become canonical. This was a
“church order,” a book that gives instructions about the ethical life to be striven after by Christians and, yet more significant, directions concerning their litur
gical life, indicating how Christians are to baptize (outdoors in cold running water, whenever possible), fast (on Wednesdays and Fridays, not Mondays and Thursdays like the Jews), pray (saying the Lord’s Prayer three times a day), and celebrate the Eucharist (with prayers provided by the author, first over the cup and then the bread—the reverse order of the liturgy as it developed down to today). Moreover, the document gives extended instructions about what to do with itinerant apostles, teachers, and prophets, who are assumed to be in abundant supply, some of whom are living at the (considerable) expense of the communities they visit. The document tries to bring such prophetic freeloaders under some kind of control. The Didache thus gives significant insight into church life at the time of its composition, probably around 100 CE.
Other discoveries might be touted as even more revolutionary for our knowl
edge of early Christianity and its Scriptures. Some would point to the discov
ery, throughout the course of the twentieth century, of ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, hundreds of years older than manuscripts available to early Bible translators, such as those responsible for the King James Bible.4 Among other things, these early manuscripts are significant for showing that the books of the New Testament were not copied with the assiduous care you might think or hope for. In fact, the earliest copyists appear to have been untrained and rela
tively unsuited to the tasks; they made lots of mistakes, and these mistakes were themselves then copied by subsequent copyists (who had only the mistake-ridden copies to reproduce) down into the Middle Ages. The more recently discovered earlier manuscripts, however, are closer to the originals of the New Testament books and so more likely to give us a sense of the original wording of each book.
Unfortunately, none of the original copies of any of the books of the New Testament survives, nor do any of the first copies nor any of the copies of the copies. By the end of the nineteenth century, prior to more recent discoveries, our earliest complete texts of the New Testament were from about the fourth century—that is, three hundred years after the writings themselves had been produced, three hundred years in which scribes of varying temperament and ability copied, and often miscopied, their Scriptures. Papyrus discoveries of the twentieth century improved matters significantly, however, so that now we have fragmentary copies of some New Testament writings that date from the late third century and earlier. The earliest surviving copy of any New Testa
ment book is a little fragment called P52 (since it was the fifty-second papyrus cataloged). It is the size of a credit card, broken off from a larger page that originally formed part of an entire manuscript of the Gospel of John. It was discovered in a trash heap in Upper Egypt, probably in the city of Oxyrhynchus, and is housed now in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England. Writ
ten on both sides,5 it contains several verses from John’s account of Jesus’ trial before Pilate (John 18). Paleographers—experts in ancient handwriting—can date the fragment; it appears to have been written sometime in the first half of the second century, 125 CE ± twenty-five years, possibly just twenty-five or thirty years after John itself was first published.6 This and other early papyri finds have helped us reconstruct the original words of the New Testament books, an important task, one must admit, since it is impossible to know what the New Testament means if you don’t know what it says.
Other scholars would consider the discovery of noncanonical texts to be at least as important for understanding the history of earliest Christianity, includ
ing the Gospel of Peter already discussed, discovered in fragments about as old as our earliest New Testament texts (except for the remarkable but tiny P52).
Some would place at the top of this list of noncanonical discoveries a curious fragmentary manuscript of an “Unknown Gospel” that scholars designate Pa
pyrus Egerton 2. We do not have enough of this text to determine which Gos
pel it came from or what it was called (hence the title Unknown Gospel). It was discovered among some papyri housed in the British Museum and published
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first in 1935; the manuscript itself appears to date to 150 CE ± twenty-five years, and it contains four fragments that narrate words and deeds of Jesus: a controversy with Jewish leaders, a healing of a leper (in which the poor fellow laments that he had been traveling with a group of lepers and inadvertently became infected), a controversy over whether to pay tribute to the state au
thorities, and the story of some kind of miracle that Jesus performs on the banks of the Jordan River, a story that, unlike the other three, has no parallel in the Gospels of the New Testament.7 But even the other three are told quite differently from the more familiar canonical versions. This has led some schol
ars to think that this Unknown Gospel was produced earlier than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Others think that it was written later by someone famil
iar with these other Gospels but who had also been influenced by oral tradi
tions of Jesus that continued to be in circulation long after the Gospels of the New Testament were written. We need always to remember that these canoni
cal Gospels were not seen as sacrosanct or inviolable for many long years after they were first put into circulation; no one, except possibly their own authors, considered them to be the “last word” on Jesus’ teachings and deeds.
This is clear as well from the most recent noncanonical Gospel discovery, published in 1999 and called by its editors the Gospel of the Savior.8 Discov
ered among papyri purchased and more or less buried away in the Berlin Egyp
tian Museum in 1967, this text was not recognized as a lost Gospel until the early 1990s. The text is written in Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language. Most of its thirty surviving pages are highly fragmentary, containing just a few broken-off lines with several surviving words. But there are several nearly complete
pages, enough to provide some clues concerning what this lost Gospel con
tained. At the least, it gave an account of Jesus’ final hours. The surviving portion of the text recounts the final instructions of Jesus to his disciples, his prayer to God that the “cup” might be taken from him, and then a final address to the cross itself.
These passages differ from the parallel accounts of the New Testament in some remarkable ways. For example, when Jesus asks his Father to “remove this cup from me,” he does so not in the Garden of Gethsemane (as in the canonical accounts) but in a vision in which he has been transported to the throne room of God himself. In addition, this account records God’s replies to Jesus’ requests.
But probably the most intriguing portion of this hitherto lost Gospel is its ending, where Jesus (who is called “the Savior” throughout the narrative) speaks several times directly to the cross. At one point, for example, he cries out, “O cross, do not be afraid! I am rich. I will fill you with my wealth. I will mount you, O cross.
I will be hung upon you” (fragment 5H). We have no way of knowing what, if anything, the cross said in reply. Even so, this is obviously like the Gospel of Peter, where, at Jesus’ resurrection, God speaks to the cross from heaven, and the cross responds. Whether the Gospel of the Savior originally contained much more than these final events and sayings of Jesus’ life—for example, an entire account of his ministry—cannot be determined.
In other cases, however, complete texts of previously lost Gospels have been uncovered. And in the opinion of probably the majority of scholars of early Christianity, these are the most significant manuscript discoveries of modern times. In particular, it is the discovery of a library of texts in Upper Egypt, near the village of Nag Hammadi, that has generated the greatest schol
arly interest and media attention. This was a discovery of inestimable value, as significant for early Christian studies as the Dead Sea Scrolls were for early Jewish studies. Had the Dead Sea Scrolls not been found, scholars would con
sider the Nag Hammadi library the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times. And among the books of the Nag Hammadi library, none has provoked such attention and created such intellectual fervor and excitement as the Gos
pel of Thomas, the single most important noncanonical book yet to be uncov
ered, a collection of the sayings of Jesus, some of which may be authentic, many of which were previously unknown.