A Gospel No Ancient Writer Ever Named

Every apocryphal gospel scholars usually discuss has some kind of paper trail: a title, a claimed author, at least a mention in an ancient heresy hunter's list of texts to avoid. Egerton Papyrus 2 has none of that. When the British Museum bought a handful of fragmentary papyrus leaves in 1934 and the papyrologists H. Idris Bell and T. C. Skeat published them the following year, they were publishing a gospel text that no surviving ancient source names, quotes, or refers to in any way. It became known, faute de mieux, as the Unknown Gospel, a name that describes the scholarship's ignorance rather than the text's own claims.

What survives reads like the canonical gospels without copying any of them: a controversy dialogue with religious authorities that echoes exchanges in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John without matching any one closely, a healing miracle, and sayings material with a similar flavor to Jesus's recorded speech elsewhere. Scholars disagree about whether its author knew the canonical gospels and paraphrased them freely, or drew on the same oral and written traditions those gospels themselves later drew on independently, a question the fragmentary state of the surviving text makes very hard to settle either way.