The Gospel according to the Egyptians.

        It was in beginning his first Homily on Luke that Origensaid, “The church has four gospels, the sects very many, one of which is called 'According to the Egyptians.' “ There seem to have been at least four uncanonical gospels that were well known in Egypt in the second century: the Gospel according to the Egyptians, the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Gospel of Peter, and the Gospel of Thomas.

        The Gospel of the Egyptians and the Gospel of the Hebrews were apparently so called because one circulated among the gentile Christians of Egypt and the other among the Jewish. Both were written in Greek, and we know them only from a few fragments. Egyptians was mentioned not only by Origen but, earlier at Alexandria, by Clement, at the very beginning of the third century. In his Miscellanies, Clement says that it was read and accepted by the ascetic sect of the Encratites, and quotes from it a conversation of Jesus with Salome, of a very ascetic character, discouraging the bearing of children: “For when Salome asked when what she had inquired about would be known the Lord said, `When you have trampled on the garment of shame and when the two become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female’” (III. 92). Again, when Salome inquired, “How long will death prevail?” the Lord replied, “As long as women bear.” To this she answered, “Would I have done well, then, in not bearing?” (III. 64, 66). According to the Gospel of Mark, Salome was a witness to the crucifixion (15:40) and to the empty tomb (16:1).She is fairly prominent in other apocryphal gospels.

        As early as about A.D. 140 some of these words were quoted in the Roman sermon we know as II Clement, but we do not know whether or not the preacher derived them from Egyptians. It is clear enough, however, that in Rome at that time materials also employed in Egyptians were not regarded as suspect. By the time of Clement of Alexandria, however, some doubt was already arising, perhaps because of the enthusiasm with which Gnostics were viewing this kind of tradition, and a generation later Origen headed his list of heretical gospels with it. Hippolytus of Rome, in his Refutation of All Heresies (v. 7, 9), written about A.D. 235, says, that the Naassene Gnostics support their doctrine of the “flucdity” of the soul by appealing to it. Later still, Epiphanius, toward the end of the fourth century describes the Sabellians as claiming its authority for their teaching that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are “one and the same” (Heresies lxxii. 2). Although this was the central position of their founder Sabellius, it is not likely that he himself appealed to Egyptians.