Were There Other Gospels Beyond Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:01]Were there really other Gospels other than Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John?

[00:00:06]Hi everybody. My name is Robyn Walsh.

[00:00:07]I'm a scholar of New Testament and early Christianity and part of Patheos and Biblical Studies. Now, that might seem like an obvious question to some people, but really it does come as a shock often for people to realize that there were many other some people say dozens, some people say hundreds of other Gospels outside of the four that we're so familiar with, the Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, and the Gospel of John that made it into Bible.

[00:00:33]So, how many Gospels do we actually have?

[00:00:37]I've sort of set myself up there. It's difficult to say. We do have knowledge from discussion of church fathers and so forth in the 2nd century and onward about Gospels for which we just don't have copies anymore.

[00:00:51]Let me give you a really stark example of this, which is the Gospel of Thomas, which some some people have actually heard of and that's because it was actually discovered in the mid-20th century around 1948. We had known about it or scholarship had known about it because it had been mentioned by people in the 2nd century and onward and then it was actually discovered. And so this text that we'd had little snippets of or there had been discussion about was actually located in a cache of texts of ancient texts in Nag Hammadi.

[00:01:24]And so that was is a great example of of a Gospel that was previously sort of unknown or we had hints about it that was actually located and we could read the whole thing.

[00:01:35]Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas as I mentioned.

[00:01:41]There's a Gospel of Mary. Now, some of these Gospels are partial. They are just sort of remnants of a longer Gospel and we for one reason or another only have bits of them.

[00:01:51]Now, so these Gospels, why didn't they make it into the canon? Well, when we look at canon formation, which did take a very, very long time, there seemed early on to be this thought that there should only be four Gospels. Sometimes you see indications that it's because there are four winds and therefore four is sort of this auspicious number, should be the number of Gospels that are contained as the authoritative account of Jesus' life and death. I also think from a scholarly perspective that the synoptic Gospels, the seen-together Gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, worked really well together as a piece for a number of reasons. Uh, not only do they repeat more or less the same stories over and over again with slight variations, um, but also something like the Gospel of Matthew, which was probably second, uh, in the line of authorship, but is always put first into the Bible as a whole, it was a nice segue from the Hebrew Bible itself because it gives Jesus' genealogy. It gives you a sense of other, uh, of the Jewish scriptures, of elements of the Jewish scripture that predicted the coming of the Messiah, Jesus' significance and his teachings and so forth. So, it was a nice, um, pairing with the Jewish scriptures itself as well. Uh, and then to have that story reiterated in more or less, um, the same form in the synoptic Gospels, at least structurally and again in terms of content, because remember John has different teachings generally altogether and a really different different sort of theological approach to the story of Jesus. But those seen-together Gospels, the synoptic Gospels, do a nice job of establishing and inculcating a certain tradition of the life of Jesus.

[00:03:36]These other Gospels, it's not to say that they don't do that, but maybe, uh, there are all kinds of reasons that they maybe didn't have staying power. One could just be that they weren't that successful, they didn't hit the right notes with people, uh, maybe aesthetically the storytelling itself, or creatively it wasn't as compelling.

[00:03:56]And that's certainly one potential explanation. And then later on, certainly, once you do have an Orthodox opinion, or the church begins to establish its canon, it starts to eliminate these sort of fan fiction >> [laughter] >> alternative stories. And this is the fate of the Gospel of Thomas, as far as we can tell.

[00:04:17]But we still know that these Gospels exist. Again, we have Papias, where we might have like a little scrap of it here or there, or we have discussion about alternative Gospels here or there.

[00:04:28]We even have examples of Gospels where, you know, a scholar came, like the Secret Gospel of Mark, the scholar Morton Smith, claims that he saw in a letter an alternative ending to the Gospel of Mark. And now that ending has, although he documented, been lost, and there are questions about the legitimacy of that particular Gospel, and that's a topic for another day.

[00:04:52]But were there other Gospels? Yes. How many? Potentially hundreds, at least dozens that we know about. And depending on, you know, your criteria, there might even be more.

[00:05:05]And I think that it's really interesting to take a look at these and think about the development of Christian history and how, frankly, messy >> [laughter] >> social movements are.

[00:05:17]And the way that people, and in this case writers especially, would like to try their hand at certain interpretations of a story, and tell it many different ways. And look no further than, say, the Marvel Universe to make an analogy, or the Star Wars franchise to see what I mean by that.

[00:05:39]And sometimes you want a little bit more information about one particular character, or you want to know their opinion or their perspective. And that's something that also comes across in some of these Gospels for us to debate.

[00:05:53]Now, this kind of debate is the thing that we talk about over at the Biblical Studies Academy all the time. So, please go over to bartairman.com/bsalearning to check us out.