Showing results by author "William Wake" in All Categories

This is a collection of 14 works of biblical apocrypha for students of lost Christian writings. The Apocrypha are a loosely knit series of books, written by early vanguards of Christianity (covering the eras of both the old and new testaments), which comprise somewhere between about a dozen to several hundred titles, depending on whom you ask and how that person defines the word Apocrypha. A small selection of these can still be found included in the Catholic bible, while a majority of the books in question, were abandoned by church officials in the early centuries of Christianity.

In the early centuries of Christianity (first to fourth century), the composition of the Bible was not fixed, as letters and manuscript were often kept separate, and different communities had different collections of texts. Many letters and sermons of the nascent Christian church in the first few centuries were persevered, even though they were not included in the New Testament.

The authorship of this Gospel has been widely disputed. Some scholars accept that it was really written by Nicodemus, the Pharisee who visited Jesus by night, as described in chapter three of John’s Gospel. Others have conjectured that the Gospel was a forgery made towards the close of the third century by some zealous believer who imagined it would aid the spread of Christianity. Jeremiah Jones notes that such pious frauds were very common among Christians even in the first three centuries, and that the circulation of forgeries of this nature seems natural and probable.