The book is equipped with a reference apparatus: notes to the introductory articles are located at the end of each part, comments to the texts follow immediately after them.

In the translations, square brackets indicate gaps in the text and their filling, in parentheses there are additions made by the translator for clarity, in angle brackets there are corrections of errors made by the copyist in the ancient original, in curly brackets are taken the passages that have been rewritten for the second time.

The following notations are used when quoting: in the texts of the New Testament, the first Arabic numeral indicates the chapter number, the second and subsequent numerals indicate the verse number. In the Nag Hammadi texts (with the exception of the Gospels of Thomas and Philip), the Roman numeral indicates the ordinal number of the codex (book), the Arabic numeral indicates the number of the work, the number of the page and the line (separated by a dot). The Gospels of Thomas and Philip are quoted with the number of the sayings. In references to the works of ancient and Christian writers, Roman numerals indicate the number of the book (scroll), Arabic numerals indicate the number of the chapter and paragraph.

The author of introductory articles, commentaries, translations of texts and notes of Part I "Apocryphal Gospels of the New Testament Tradition" is I. S. Sventsitskaya. He is the author of introductory articles, commentaries, translations of texts and notes of Part II "Gnostic Apocrypha from Nag Hammadi" by M. K. Trofimov.

Part I: The Apocryphal Gospels of the New Testament Tradition

The Emergence of Early Christian Literature

The problem of determining the time and place of the origin of ancient Christian literature, the features of its genres, the origins and sources of books, both recognized and not recognized by the Church as sacred, has not been fully solved in modern science [1]. The New Testament, a collection of books revered by all Christians, includes twenty-seven works: the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), the Acts of the Apostles, and twenty-one Epistles of the Apostles. The Church attributes the authorship of fourteen of them to the Apostle Paul (they are addressed to certain Christian communities or specific people), there are also the Epistle of James, two Epistles of Peter, three Epistles of John and the Epistle of Jude: they are usually called "catholic" or "catholic", i.e. addressed to all Christians. The New Testament ends with the Revelation of John the Theologian. The texts of the New Testament are considered canonical ("normative"), the Church proclaims them to be divinely inspired. They were written in Greek, the spoken language of many of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire (although in Palestine itself, where the first Christian preachers appeared, they spoke mainly Aramaic).

However, the writings of the New Testament were only an insignificant part of the vast Christian literature that was created in the first and third centuries, i.e., before the recognition of Christianity as the official religion. Christian writers of the end of the second and fourth centuries mention, quote, and retell various Gospels: Peter, Andrew, Bartholomew, two Gospels of Thomas, completely different in content, the Gospel of Mary. In a fragment of a letter by the theologian Clement of Alexandria (c. 200 AD), it is said that three Gospels of Mark were also in circulation: the canonical (admitted), the "forged" (written by a certain preacher named Carpocrates) and the secret Gospel (allegedly written by Mark himself for the "elect") [2]. Some gospels are named after the Christian groups among which they were venerated (although it is possible that their true names also contained the name of an apostle), for example, the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Egyptians. Bishop Irenaeus of Lugudun (modern Lyon) (1st half. II–early III centuries) in his work "Against Heresies" he writes with indignation that the followers of Valentinus (the most prominent representative of the religious-philosophical trend in Christianity, Gnosticism) "reached such a degree of audacity that they called their recent work the Gospel of Truth" (III. 11) [3].

In addition to the Gospels, the works of Christian writers mention other books that were not included in the New Testament, which were revered by various Christian groups as sources of doctrine: the Apocalypse of Peter, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Acts of some of the Apostles (Paul, Philip, Andrew), the Epistles, the Shepherd of Hermas, etc. The largest among these discoveries was the library of the Christian Gnostics from Nag Hammadi (Egypt). In order to understand the long and complex process of dividing the sacred books of Christians into recognized and unrecognized (canonical and apocryphal), it is necessary first of all to imagine the features of the formation of early Christian literature as a whole.

The first Christian preachers thought least of all about writing down their teachings. It can be said that the doctrine in the exact sense of the word had not yet been formed until the end of the first century. The wandering prophets passed on what they knew about the savior crucified in Judea during the reign of the emperor Tiberius (14-37), the anointed of God Jesus Christ, in whose resurrection they believed. Christian preachers used as a model the parables, teachings, and stories about individual episodes from the lives of famous teachers (rabbis) that existed in the Jewish environment. This is how the oral Christian tradition was created.

The very word "gospel" (Greek for "good news") originally meant in the minds of Jesus' followers a sermon that revealed the meaning of the new faith. In Paul's epistles, particularly in Galatians, the writer opposes those preachers who, in his view, distort the meaning of the "good news" of Jesus. He anathematizes those who preach the gospel (in the Greek text the verb "evangelizo" is used) "not that which we have preached to you," and adds: "The gospel which I have preached is not of men" (1:8, 11). In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians there is a similar usage: "For if any man had come, and began to preach another Jesus, whom we have not preached... or any other gospel which we have not received, you would be very lenient to it. But I think that I lack nothing against the higher [4] Apostles" (11:4, 5). The Epistle to the Romans says: "In the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge the secret deeds of men..." (2. 16). From the above passages it is clear that for the author the Gospel was in no way scripture. The very word "gospel" in the pagan environment of Christians was associated with the cult of the emperor: in the inscriptions glorifying Augustus (27 BC – 14 AD), the day of his birth was called the beginning of "many gospels" [5]. Having adopted such terminology, Christians gave it a fundamentally different meaning: not the "good news" about the emperor's earthly affairs, but the only "good news" about Jesus, the savior and messiah, became the content of Christian preaching.

Preachers spoke primarily in the synagogues that existed in the cities of the eastern provinces, as well as in private homes, in the open air, in empty craft workshops. Such a picture emerges from the Acts of the Apostles and some other works, including anti-Christian ones [6]. In the work "Didache" (Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), written, in all likelihood, at the beginning of the second century, it is said about the wandering apostles: "Every apostle who comes to you, let him be received as Lord. Let him not stay more than one day; and if there is a need, then another (day); but if he stays three, then he is a false prophet... When leaving, let the Apostle take nothing but bread to the place of lodging for the night" [7].

The oral tradition continued to exist in the period when the first scriptures appeared. Eusebius of Caesarea (IV century) in his "Church History" quotes the words of the Christian writer Papias (1st half of the 1st half of the 1st century). II century) from Hierapolis (Asia Minor), who collected oral traditions: "... if I happened to meet someone who communicated with the elders, then I carefully asked about the teaching of the elders, for example, what Andrew said, what Peter said, what Philip said, what Thomas or James said... For I thought that book information would not so much benefit me as a living and more penetrating voice" (Eusebius, Church History (Historia ecclesiastica), III. 39.

The identification of the origins of the ancient Christian tradition was facilitated by the use of scientific methods known as "criticism of the text" and "criticism of form" [8]. They were developed in most detail on the analysis of the first three Gospels of the New Testament, which are usually called "synoptic" because of their similarity. The first method has existed since the end of the XIX century; Both of them aim to move from the teaching of Jesus set forth in the Gospels to the teaching itself, to its authentic core. The texts of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke (taking into account the manuscript versions) were compared, the grammar, vocabulary, and syntax of the Gospels were analyzed. Proponents of "textual criticism" proposed that the commonalities discovered as a result of such a comparison should be used as the basis for the reconstruction of the original text. However, no matter how important the observations of analogies and discrepancies in the Gospels were, it was still impossible to find an exhaustive explanation of them by breaking the text into phrases and words and constructing an archetype. Therefore, in order to confirm their hypotheses about the sources of the Synoptic Gospels, scientists turned to their general characteristics, to their connections with the ideological life of the era.