The Lost and Hostile Gospels / An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain

by S. Baring-Gould

Now the account in the Gospel of the Twelve removes this discrepancy. John does not know Jesus till after the light and the descent of the dove and the voice, and then he asks to be baptized by Jesus.

It is apparent that the passage in the lost Gospel is more correct than that in the Canonical one. In the latter there has been an inversion of verses destroying the succession of events, and thus producing discrepancy with the account in St. John's Gospel.

With these passages from the Gospel of the Twelve may be compared a curious one from the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. It occurs in the Testament of [pg 146] Levi, and is a prophecy of the Messiah. “The heavens shall open for thee, and from above the temple of glory the voice of the Father shall dispense sanctification upon him, as has been promised unto Abraham, the father of Isaac.”

The passage quoted by St. Epiphanius is wholly unobjectionable doctrinally. It is not so with that quoted by St. Jerome; it is of a very different character. It exhibits strongly the Gnostic ideas which infected the stricter sect of the Ebionites.

It was precisely on the baptism of the Lord that they laid the greatest stress; and it is in the account of that event that we should expect to find the greatest divergence between the texts employed by the orthodox and the heretical Nazarenes. Before his baptism he was nothing. It was then only that the “full fount of the Holy Ghost” descended on him, his election to the Messiahship was revealed, and divine power was communicated to him to execute the mission entrusted to him. A marked distinction was drawn between two portions in the life of Jesus—before and after his baptism. In the first they acknowledged nothing but the mere human nature, to the entire exclusion of everything supernatural; while the sudden accruing of supernatural aid at the baptism marked the moment when he became the Messiah. Thus the baptism was the beginning of their Gospel.

Before that, he is liable to sin, he suggests that his believing himself to be free from sin may have precipitated him into sin, the sin of ignorance. And “even in the prophets, after they had received the unction of the Holy Ghost, there was found sinful speech.”[215] This quotation follows, in St. Jerome, immediately after the saying [pg 147] cited above enjoining forgiveness, but it in no way dovetails into it; the passage concerning the recommendation by St. Mary and the brethren that they should go up to be baptized of John for the remission of sins, comes in the same chapter, and there can be little doubt that this reference to the prophets as sinful formed part of the answer of the Virgin to Jesus when he spoke of his being sinless.

St. Jerome obtained his copy of the Gospel of the Hebrews from Beraea in Syria, and not therefore from the purest source. Had he copied and translated the codex he found in the library of Pamphilus at Caesarea, instead of that he procured from Beraea, it is probable that he would have found it not to contain the passages of Gnostic tendency.

These interpolations were made in the second century, when Gnostic ideas had begun to affect the Ebionites, and break them up into more or less heretical sects.

Their copies of the Gospel of the Hebrews differed, for the Gnostic Ebionites curtailed it in some places, and amplified it in others.

In reconstructing the primitive lost Gospel of the Nazarenes, it is very necessary to note these Gnostic passages, and to withdraw them from the text. We shall come to some more of their additions and alterations presently. It is sufficient for us to note here that the heretical Gospel in use among the Gnostic Ebionites was based on the orthodox Gospel of the Hebrews. The existence of these two versions explains the very different treatment their Gospel meets with at the hands of the Fathers of the Church. Some, and these the earliest, speak of this Gospel with reverence, and place it almost on a line with the Canonical Gospels; others speak of [pg 148] it with horror, as an heretical corruption of the Gospel of St. Matthew. The former saw the primitive text, the latter the curtailed and amplified version in use among the heretical Ebionites.