What If We Found A New Letter Of Paul? (Part One)

The recent and ongoing decipherment of the Oxyrhynchus papyri raises a question of what the Christian community would do if we found a new Christian document purporting to be from the first century, say a new letter of St. Paul or a "lost gospel."

The paramount question in folks minds would be: Should this be added to the New Testament?

There are parallels for this already.

In the 20th century we found a whole slew of early Christian and semi-Christian documents. In particular, the Nag Hammadi find gave us a bunch of Gnostic gospels dating from the second and third centuries.

Did those get added?

Nope. We got a bunch of breathless documentaries on The History Channel and A & E, and a bunch of folks got confused by them, but there was no serious move to add them to the New Testament. Not even the Jesus’ Seminar’s publication of the Gospel of Thomas alongside the four canonical gospels caused any serious move to add it to the New Testament in the broader Christian community.

The reason is that these documents have almost no historical value and were written way after the apostolic age, automatically disqualifying them from New Testament inclusion in the eyes of traditional Christians.

If Oxyrhynchus turns out to have more of the same, expect more of the same.

But what if we find something from the first century?

Again: It’s already happened.

We’ve long had Clement’s epistle, which dates from the late first century. We’ve also got things like the Epistle of Pseudo-Barnabas and the Didache, both of which are first century texts.

There has been no move to include these in the New Testament either. While Clement was a pope, he wasn’t closely enough associated with the apostles for his epistle to make it in. It also contains material that, to modern eyes, would make it problematic to include (e.g., his seeming treatment of the phoenix as if it were a real bird).

Pseudo-Barnabas is even worse in that regard (he gets his biology demonstrably wrong regarding rabbits–saying that hares develop a new bodily orifice [apparently on their posteriors] for each year of life, kind of the way trees get rings).

And the Didache, despite its presentation as "the teaching of the twelve apostles" was demonstrably late and not clearly written by apostles or their associates, however much useful info it may have on first century Christianity.

So the mere find of a first century document would not create a mass movement to stick it in the New Testament.

The only way that would even conceivably get started would be if we found what appeared to be a first century gospel, proto-gospel, or epistle of an apostle.

If we found something that looked like the epistle to the Hebrews, for example, that contained lots of neat doctrine but doesn’t claim to be written by an apostle, no mass inclusion movement would begin.

Even if we got something by a known New Testament figure, like Timothy or Sylvanus or Apollos, there wouldn’t be a big inclusion movement.

Only if we got an apostolic epistle, a gospel, or a proto-gospel would a significant inclusion movement even get started.

What would happen then?

See next blog post.