Chapter 5: Cinders of the Canon

This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Lost Texts.

"What we call the Bible is what survived. But much of what mattered was lost."

Imagine a Christian scribe in Carthage in the early 4th century. The city is tense. Roman authorities have begun enforcing new imperial edicts: all Christian gatherings are banned, and all Christian texts must be surrendered—or destroyed.

The scribe hesitates. In his care are scrolls of Paul's letters, but also writings attributed to Mary Magdalene, to Peter, to unknown prophets whose words still shape local devotion. Some are cherished by the community. Others are already controversial.¹

He buries a few. Hides others in a wall niche. Burns the rest. He does not know that centuries later, a bishop named Athanasius will issue a list of twenty-seven books to be considered canonical—a list that will one day become the New Testament. Nor does he know that the rest—the gospels of Thomas, Mary, Peter, the Didache (an early manual of church instruction), the Shepherd of Hermas (a popular allegorical text)—will vanish, condemned as heresy or simply forgotten.

What survives is not everything. What survives is what was saved—or overlooked.

From its earliest centuries, Christianity was a religion of texts—and a religion of loss. Roman persecution in the 2nd and 3rd centuries led to the destruction of countless Christian writings. Bishops like Cyprian of Carthage were arrested for refusing to hand over scriptures. Others, labeled traditores (those who handed over the sacred), became permanently suspect in their communities.²

After Constantine's conversion and the Edict of Milan (313 CE), Christianity gained legal status and began consolidating its theology—and its scriptures. Councils debated which gospels and letters were authoritative. Some books teetered on the edge for decades. The process wasn't smooth. It wasn't universal. And it wasn't purely theological.

Many early texts were lost not because they were wrong, but because they were unorthodox, unpopular, or politically inconvenient. Others were buried—literally—and forgotten for centuries. In monastic scriptoria from Egypt to Ireland, monks preserved what they were told to preserve. But sometimes, forgotten manuscripts survived in corners, hidden behind walls, or copied absent-mindedly into eclectic collections.

This pattern of selective preservation paralleled developments in other religious traditions. Jewish communities faced similar challenges during the rabbinic period, when certain texts were deemed authoritative while others—like many apocalyptic writings—were excluded from the developing canon. Islamic communities, as we saw with ʿUthmān's standardization, also made deliberate choices about which variants to preserve. The Christian experience was thus part of a broader pattern of canon formation that shaped all major religious traditions.³

The loss of early Christian writings shaped the very nature of the faith. With fewer voices, the theological diversity of the early movement was narrowed. Women, mystics, gnostics, and dissenters disappeared from the textual record. The church that emerged was more centralized, more hierarchical, and more uniform in doctrine.

The canon became both shield and sword—defining orthodoxy while excluding others. Councils like Nicaea (325 CE) and Hippo (393 CE) codified what would be read—and what would not. As Bart Ehrman notes, "The winners rewrote the history of the losers."⁴

But even within the canon, echoes of the lost remain. Paul refers to letters we no longer possess. Luke opens his gospel by acknowledging that "many have undertaken to compile an account."⁵ Some gospels mention sayings that match those only rediscovered in Nag Hammadi in 1945. We are reading a curated survival—not a complete record.

The exclusion of texts was particularly devastating for early expressions of Christian diversity that flourished outside the Roman Empire. Coptic Christianity in Egypt developed its own theological traditions, many preserved in manuscripts buried in desert monasteries. Syriac-speaking communities from Syria to India maintained distinctive liturgical and theological texts that were never translated into Latin. Armenian and Ethiopian churches preserved books that Western Christianity forgot entirely.⁶

Had Christian textual history preserved more of its early diversity, the landscape of theology and practice might look quite different today. Texts like the Gospel of Mary and Acts of Paul and Thecla portray women as teachers, visionaries, even apostles. Had these texts remained canonical—or even publicly circulated—Christianity might have preserved greater gender parity in leadership. Scholar Karen King argues that these losses shaped the marginalization of women for centuries, creating artificial barriers to female religious authority.⁷

Early Christianity included gnostic, docetic, and adoptionist strands—some emphasizing inner knowledge, others the humanity of Christ. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, offers cryptic wisdom sayings with no mention of crucifixion or resurrection. Their exclusion narrowed doctrinal boundaries, privileging hierarchical structures over spiritual experimentation.⁸

Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Ethiopian Christianities developed their own canons and liturgies. Many of their foundational texts were never translated into Latin, and some were actively suppressed by imperial Christianity. Emmanuel Papoutsakis notes that had these traditions remained central, global Christianity would have had a much more diverse theological backbone, potentially affecting everything from Christological debates to monastic practices.⁹

Some early Christian communities used open canons—adding texts based on need, relevance, or inspiration. The Muratorian fragment (ca. 170 CE) includes books that later disappeared and excludes others now considered standard. If this model had prevailed, Christian scripture might be viewed as dynamic rather than closed, more like the ongoing development of Jewish Talmudic literature.

Contemporary scholars offer varying perspectives on the significance and implications of early Christian textual losses. Bart Ehrman asserts that textual loss in early Christianity was not random but reflected deliberate theological and institutional choices. He sees canon formation as theologically motivated and institutionally enforced—often through the silencing of dissenting texts that challenged emerging orthodox positions.¹⁰

Karen King emphasizes that the exclusion of gospels like Mary and Thomas was about authority, not accuracy. She argues that "orthodoxy" was a retroactive category, constructed through suppression rather than representing any original theological consensus. Her work suggests that alternative Christianities were vigorous and widespread before being systematically marginalized.¹¹

John Dominic Crossan is more cautious. He acknowledges the losses but suggests that the canonical gospels offer profound theological unity despite their diverse origins. "It's not that we lost the truth," he writes, "but that we lost other ways of expressing it." His perspective emphasizes continuity rather than rupture in early Christian development.¹²

Emmanuel Papoutsakis calls for greater attention to Eastern Christianities, arguing that "canon formation was as much geopolitical as it was spiritual." He contends that including Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopian perspectives is essential to recovering the breadth of early Christian thought, particularly regarding questions of empire, persecution, and cultural adaptation.¹³

In 1945, Egyptian farmers discovered clay jars near Nag Hammadi. Inside were 13 codices, including the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Philip, and Apocryphon of John. Their language was Coptic. Their theology unfamiliar. Their existence a shock. These were not anti-Christian texts. They were other Christian texts—preserved by a community whose memory had been erased.

Today, we live in a moment of recovery. Manuscripts once buried are being digitized. Traditions once silenced are being studied. Projects like the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM at Georgetown University work to preserve and analyze Coptic Christian texts, while the Syriac Reference Portal documents the literature of Syriac Christianity. Digital humanities initiatives are making previously inaccessible texts available to scholars and communities worldwide.¹⁴

But much is still missing—and some voices will never return. The fires of persecution, the erosion of time, and the deliberate choices of gatekeepers have left permanent gaps in the record. What we now call the Bible is a remarkable inheritance. But it is not the whole story. It is the part that survived the fires—and the part chosen from the ashes.

Notes

The scene is reconstructed from documented persecution practices described in Maureen A. Tilley, "The Bible in North Africa: The Donatist World," in The Early Text of the New Testament, ed. Charles E. Hill and Michael J. Kruger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 322-337.
W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 16-24.
For comparative canon formation, see Lee Martin McDonald, The Formation of the Biblical Canon, 2 vols. (London: T&T Clark, 2017); for Jewish parallels, see Timothy H. Lim, The Formation of the Jewish Canon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1-15.
Luke 1:1; 1 Corinthians 5:9.
For Eastern Christian textual traditions, see Sebastian P. Brock, An Introduction to Syriac Studies (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006); Stephen J. Davis, Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and Divine Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Karen L. King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2003), 3-14.
James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 4th rev. ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979).
Emmanuel Papoutsakis, "Eastern Christianities and the Shaping of Canon," Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 72 (2020): 89-110.
Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 75-90.
King, Gospel of Mary, 45-66; Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 421-450.
Papoutsakis, "Eastern Christianities," 99-101.
For contemporary preservation efforts, see the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM at copticscriptorium.org and the Syriac Reference Portal at syriaca.org.

Notes

Further Reading