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In the spring of 367, a bishop in Alexandria sat down to write his annual Easter letter. These festal letters were routine documents. Their main job was to tell the churches of Egypt when to celebrate Easter that year. But Athanasius used his thirty-ninth letter for something far more consequential. He listed, by name, the books that Christians should treat as divinely inspired, and for the first time anywhere, the New Testament he described matched the twenty-seven books found in almost every Bible printed today.
Anything not on that list was, in his words, the invention of heretics. You can read his reasoning for yourself in the surviving translation of Festal Letter 39, and it is worth doing, because the tone is revealing. This is not a scholar weighing evidence. It is a pastor building a fence.
What follows is a tour of the territory on the far side of that fence. Ten books, each of them read as sacred by someone, somewhere, before the boundary hardened. Some were quoted by bishops as scripture. Some were bound into the oldest Bibles we possess. One is even quoted by name inside the New Testament itself. Together they show that the story of how the Bible came to be is less a story of revelation dropping from heaven fully formed and more a story of choices, arguments, and quiet acts of preservation by readers determined that certain voices would not vanish.
A Canon Is a Decision, Not a Discovery
It helps to start by clearing away a common assumption: that the Bible arrived as a single, sealed volume. It did not. For roughly three centuries, Christian communities read from overlapping but different collections. Local churches kept their own lists. A Roman catalogue now called the Muratorian fragment, usually dated to the late second century, accepted some books and hesitated over others. A stichometric list preserved in the sixth century Codex Claromontanus recorded the length of various books by line count, a practical tally for copyists, and several titles on it are absent from modern Bibles.
The great fourth century Greek Bible known as Codex Sinaiticus is perhaps the most striking evidence of this fluidity. After the Book of Revelation, where a modern reader expects the text to end, it keeps going. The Epistle of Barnabas follows, and then the Shepherd of Hermas. Scholars disagree about what that placement meant. Michael Kruger, for example, argues that these works sat at the end of such codices as edifying reading rather than as scripture, following the pattern of canon lists from the same era. Others see it as evidence that the borders of scripture were still genuinely open. Either way, the physical book shows us a church that had not finished making up its mind.
That is the context for everything below. None of these texts were “lost” by accident. They fell on the wrong side of a decision.
The Gospel Where the Traitor Is the Only One Who Understands
Of all the books Athanasius excluded, the one that caused the greatest modern sensation was the Gospel of Judas. Its only surviving copy sits in a Coptic papyrus book known as Codex Tchacos, which turned up near El Minya in Middle Egypt in the 1970s and then endured a bizarre odyssey through dealers, a theft, and roughly sixteen years mouldering in a New York safe deposit box. National Geographic recounted the codex’s long and strange journey when the restored text was unveiled in April 2006. The papyrus itself dates to around the late third century, but it is a translation of a Greek original that is considerably older. Parts of it crumbled away before conservators could save them.
What makes the text so jarring is its inversion of the familiar story. In this gospel, the disciples are praying over bread when Jesus laughs at them. The deity they are thanking, it emerges, is not the highest God at all, but a lesser cosmic ruler. Only Judas grasps who Jesus truly is and where he comes from: a transcendent realm the text calls Barbelo. The other twelve, the men later honoured as saints and founders, appear in a vision Judas describes as the ones attacking him.
The cosmology is unmistakably what scholars call Sethian. The world is administered by subordinate powers, one called Nebro, meaning rebel, and another called Saklas, meaning fool. It is Saklas who proposes creating humanity in the divine image, so the famous Genesis line is spoken by a figure literally named for folly. Within that framework, the act we call betrayal becomes something else entirely: Judas helps release Jesus from the physical body he inhabits. The gospel closes not with a trial, a cross, or an empty tomb, but at the moment Judas accepts payment and hands him over.
Is Judas a hero here or a tragic figure? Translators genuinely disagree. A Coptic word applied to him has been rendered as “spirit” in the first edition and as “demon” by other scholars, and the choice changes the whole tone of the book.
What is not in doubt is the age of the idea. Around the year 180, Irenaeus of Lyon attacked a sect that honoured Cain and other villains of scripture and that possessed a book it called the Gospel of Judas. Later writers labelled this group the Cainites. Whether Irenaeus actually read the text or only heard about it has long been debated, but a detailed study by Johannes van Oort in the South African journal HTS argues that Irenaeus very likely knew the gospel first hand. Either way, this was a living scripture for some believers before the New Testament had been formally settled.
Angels, Giants and the Birth of Demons
If the Gospel of Judas questions the identity of the creator, the Book of Enoch questions where evil itself came from. Its opening section, often called the Book of the Watchers, tells of two hundred angels who gather on Mount Hermon, bind themselves together with an oath, and descend to take human wives. Their offspring are giants of absurd size who consume everything humanity produces and then turn on humanity itself.
The angels do not come empty handed. Each teaches a forbidden art. One, Azazel, introduces metalworking for weapons alongside jewellery and cosmetics. Others teach sorcery, the cutting of roots, astrology, and the movements of the sun, moon and clouds. In other words, Enoch frames much of what we call civilisation as a gift smuggled down by rebels. Azazel’s punishment is to be bound and buried beneath jagged rocks in a desert pit until the final judgment, and when the giants die, their spirits linger on earth, hungry and restless. That is Enoch’s explanation for demons: the ghosts of the Watchers’ children.
Here is what makes Enoch exceptional among excluded books. The New Testament quotes it. The short Letter of Jude cites a prophecy it attributes to Enoch, seventh in line from Adam, and the words correspond to the first chapter of 1 Enoch. Jude, along with 2 Peter, also echoes Enoch’s picture of angels held in chains of darkness. Tertullian argued around the year 200 that Jude’s citation was reason enough to accept the book. The wider church disagreed, and Enoch survived complete only because the Ethiopian Orthodox Church kept it in its Bible. The Scottish traveller James Bruce carried Ethiopic copies back to Europe in 1773, and Aramaic fragments later found among the Dead Sea Scrolls proved parts of the work date to the third century BCE.
A Bargain With the Chief of the Spirits
Enoch’s demons reappear in another book that once stood remarkably close to scripture: the Book of Jubilees. Written in Hebrew in the second century BCE, Jubilees retells the story from creation to the Exodus as a secret history dictated by an angel to Moses on Sinai. It divides all of time into blocks of forty nine years and follows a 364 day solar year, which locks every festival to the same weekday year after year.
Its most startling episode follows the flood. God moves to imprison all the evil spirits, but their leader, Mastema, protests that without some of them he cannot carry out his work among humanity. God concedes. Nine tenths are locked away, and one tenth remains free. Mastema then surfaces wherever Genesis is silent: sending birds to strip the seed from the fields, prompting the test of Abraham’s son, and helping Pharaoh’s magicians against Moses. The angels, meanwhile, teach Noah remedies against these spirits, which he writes down in a book of healing.
How seriously was Jubilees taken? James VanderKam’s overview notes that fragments from a dozen or more Hebrew manuscripts were found at Qumran, a number exceeded only by a handful of books we now call biblical, and that the community’s own legal texts cite it by name. Like Enoch, it remains canonical in Ethiopia and absent nearly everywhere else.
A Hell With a Door in It
The oldest surviving Christian tour of the afterlife is not in the Bible either. The Apocalypse of Peter, written in Greek sometime between about 100 and 150, takes Peter on a guided journey through places of punishment where each torment mirrors the sin that earned it. Blasphemers hang by the tongue. Those who perverted justice wallow in a lake of burning mud. Moneylenders who profited from interest stand in a pool of filth of their own. It is graphic, systematic, and some twelve centuries older than Dante.
For a time it had real standing. The Muratorian list names it alongside the Revelation of John as accepted, while admitting that some did not want it read aloud in church. Clement of Alexandria quoted it around 200 and appears to have regarded it as scripture. Then it faded, known only through quotations until excavators working at Akhmim in Upper Egypt in 1886 and 1887 recovered a Greek fragment, reportedly from a monk’s grave, though that detail has never been confirmed. In 1910 the scholar M. R. James recognised that an Ethiopic text published shortly before was a fuller version of the same work.
The most intriguing part is a passage preserved in a small Greek fragment held in Vienna. According to the summary of the manuscript evidence for the Apocalypse of Peter, it suggests that the righteous may pray for the condemned, who are then baptised in the Acherusian lake in the Elysian field and saved. Most scholars think this belonged to the original, and that later copyists dropped it precisely because of what it implied. A hell that can be emptied by compassion was a difficult doctrine for a church building its authority on judgment.
The Church Appears as a Woman
The Shepherd of Hermas was one of the most widely read Christian books of the second century, and it begins in an unexpectedly human way. Hermas, a former slave living in Rome, sees the woman who once owned him bathing in the Tiber, helps her out, and privately wishes he had a wife like her. Later she appears to him in a vision and rebukes him for that single passing thought.
From there the book unfolds through visions, commandments and parables. An elderly woman, eventually revealed to be the Church herself, shows him a tower under construction on water. Its stones are believers. Well shaped ones are set into the walls, and cracked or crumbling ones are discarded. Hermas also encounters an enormous beast whose head bears four colours, symbolising the present world, its coming destruction, the purified survivors and the age to come, and he walks past it unharmed because an angel has shut its mouth. The angel’s name appears in no other surviving ancient text.
The book’s moral centre is severe: after baptism, a believer who falls gets one chance at repentance, not an endless supply. Irenaeus quoted its first commandment as scripture, Codex Sinaiticus bound it in after Revelation, and Athanasius himself recommended it for new converts while still keeping it out of the canon. It was, in effect, too useful to discard and too disputed to crown.
Hidden Books and Coded Laws
Two of these texts share a fascination with what is concealed. In 4 Ezra, a Jewish apocalypse written around the year 100 in the aftermath of Rome’s destruction of the Temple, Ezra argues with the angel Uriel about why God allows his people to suffer. Uriel answers with impossible challenges, such as weighing fire or recalling a day that has passed. The book is full of eerie signs of the end, along with a vision of an eagle with twelve wings and three heads, widely read as Rome, that is finally burned. It even sketches a messiah who reigns for four hundred years and then dies before the world falls silent for seven days.
Its ending is the most suggestive part. Ezra drinks a cup of fiery liquid and dictates for forty days to five scribes. Ninety four books result. As the Posen Library’s introduction to the passage explains, twenty four are to be published for everyone, while seventy are reserved for the wise alone. The book that claims most revelation was deliberately withheld from ordinary readers was itself withheld. Later Latin Bibles moved it to an appendix, and it reached English readers in the Apocrypha section of the King James Version under the title 2 Esdras.
The Epistle of Barnabas approaches concealment from a different direction. Written sometime between 70 and 135, it reads the law of Moses as a cipher. Dietary rules become moral allegories: avoiding certain animals is really about avoiding the vices folklore attributed to them. The scapegoat ritual of Yom Kippur is recast as a rehearsal of the crucifixion. Most famously, Barnabas takes the 318 servants circumcised by Abraham and reads the number through Greek letters, in which the letters for eighteen form an abbreviation of the name Jesus and the letter for three hundred is shaped like a cross. It also works out an end to history: six days of creation, a thousand years to each divine day, and therefore six thousand years before the great rest.
Clement of Alexandria quoted Barnabas as apostolic, and Origen gave it a title implying it was addressed to the whole church. Eusebius later classed it among the rejected writings. Yet the scribes of Sinaiticus still copied it in, right behind Revelation, in the very century Athanasius drew his line.
The Ark Beneath the Ground
Written in the same generation as 4 Ezra and often bound alongside it, 2 Baruch reimagines the fall of Jerusalem with a defiant twist. As the Jewish Encyclopedia summarises the opening chapters, four angels with torches stand ready at the corners of the city, but before they set it alight, another angel removes the holy objects of the Temple and commands the earth to take them. The ground opens and swallows them, to be kept until the end of days. The conquerors burn an empty house.
For a community that had just watched Rome destroy the Second Temple, this was more than legend. It was a refusal to concede that what was holiest could be captured. The book goes on to describe a coming age of staggering abundance, with the primordial monsters Behemoth and Leviathan served as a feast for the survivors, the dead raised in their familiar forms, and the righteous transformed into a radiance like the stars. Baruch closes by sending a letter to the scattered tribes of Israel carried by an eagle.
Only one complete copy survives, in a sixth or seventh century Syriac Bible now kept in Milan, rediscovered and published by Antonio Ceriani in the 1860s. Here again the outsider was kept alive by being bound inside a Bible.
A Woman Who Baptised Herself
The Acts of Paul and Thecla, a second century Greek romance from Asia Minor, tells of a young noblewoman in Iconium who overhears Paul preaching from a neighbouring house, listens for three days without eating, and calls off her engagement. The consequences are brutal. She is condemned to be burned, but a storm extinguishes the fire. In Antioch she resists a powerful man’s advances in public, humiliates him, and is sentenced to the beasts. A lioness defends her. When Paul still will not baptise her, she throws herself into a pool of water in the arena and baptises herself in the name of Christ. Afterwards she dresses as a man, finds Paul, and receives his commission to teach.
The text also contains the only ancient physical description of Paul, short, balding, bow legged, with joined eyebrows and a hooked nose, which may explain part of its enduring charm.
Its fate was sealed by the uses people made of it. Around 200, Tertullian complained that Christians were citing Thecla’s example to justify women teaching and baptising, and he claimed the author was a presbyter in Asia who had been removed from office after confessing he had written it out of devotion to Paul. Philip Harland’s discussion of Thecla, Tertullian, and the controversies over women’s leadership shows how this little narrative became a battleground over who was allowed to hold authority in the early church. The story did not disappear, and Thecla remained a beloved saint, but the book that told it never made it into the canon.
The Jar at the Foot of the Cliff
In December 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging for nitrate-rich soil when he struck a sealed jar. He hesitated, fearing it might contain a jinn. When he broke it open, there was no spirit and no gold, only a dozen or so leather-bound papyrus books containing more than fifty texts. Some pages are said to have been burned as kindling before anyone understood their value.
Among those texts was a complete copy of the Gospel of Thomas, a gathering of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, without a nativity, no miracles and no crucifixion. It introduces itself as secret words recorded by Didymus Judas Thomas and promises that whoever finds their meaning will not taste death. Greek fragments discovered decades earlier at Oxyrhynchus, as the e-Clavis entry on the Gospel of Thomas details, turned out to come from at least three separate ancient copies, which tells us the gospel circulated widely.
Its sayings place the kingdom of God within and around the seeker rather than in a distant sky. They speak of making the inner and the outer one, of bringing forth what lies within you, and of finding Jesus under a lifted stone or inside split wood. In one passage Thomas receives three private words from Jesus that he refuses to repeat, warning that the others would stone him if he did. It is easy to see why third century writers like Origen filed it with the heretics, and equally easy to see why modern seekers find it luminous. In 1993 the Jesus Seminar printed it alongside the canonical four as a fifth gospel.
Why was it buried? A long-standing hypothesis, associated with James Robinson, connects the find to the nearby Pachomian monasteries, among the great monastic houses of fourth century Egypt. In 2015 Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott built out the case that the codices were produced and read by Christian monks, most likely Pachomians. If that is right, then in the same century and the same region where Athanasius condemned such books, someone chose to hide them carefully rather than destroy them.
What Gets Lost When a Message Is Edited
It would be easy to turn all of this into a conspiracy story, with villainous bishops suppressing the real truth. That is too simple. Many of these texts contradict one another as sharply as they contradict the canon. The Shepherd’s stern single repentance sits uneasily with the Apocalypse of Peter’s hint of universal mercy. Barnabas’s claim that Jewish law was always secretly Christian would trouble the authors of Jubilees, who treated that law as eternal. Early church leaders were trying to establish a shared foundation amid enormous diversity, and some of their concerns, about forgery, about wildly speculative cosmologies, about coherence, were genuine.
Still, every edit has a cost. The canon that emerged placed its weight on atoning sacrifice, a single creator, a clear hierarchy, and a final, irreversible judgment. What fell away included a Jesus who points inward rather than upward, a woman who claims spiritual authority without waiting for permission, and an afterlife where compassion has the last word. That pattern echoes a theme explored in our earlier piece on the Bible’s detour and how the original message was hijacked, where Aaron Abke and Melissa Denyce argue that the heart of Jesus’s teaching was gradually overshadowed by theology that served institutional needs. The forbidden books do not prove that argument on their own, but they show plainly that other emphases were available, were cherished, and were deliberately set aside.
Reading the Outsiders Today
Perhaps the most moving thread running through all ten books is not what they say but how they survived. Enoch and Jubilees endured in Ethiopia. 4 Ezra lived on in Syriac, Armenian and Georgian Bibles, and 2 Baruch in a single Syriac one. Barnabas and Hermas rode along at the back of Sinaiticus. Peter’s vision of hell came up out of an Egyptian grave. Thomas waited in a sealed jar for roughly sixteen centuries. In every case, somebody decided that a text was worth keeping, even when the authorities of their day said otherwise.
For anyone on a path of inner inquiry, there is something liberating in that. These books remind us that the spiritual life has never been settled by decree. Every generation inherits a library that someone curated, and every seeker has the right to ask what was left out and why. You do not need to accept the Gospel of Judas’s cosmology or the Watchers’ giants as literal history to recognise the questions they keep alive: Who is the God we pray to? Where does darkness come from? Is mercy larger than judgment? Where, exactly, is the kingdom?
The fence of 367 still stands in most Bibles. But the books on the other side never stopped speaking. They are simply waiting, as they always have, for readers willing to walk out past the line and listen.
