The British Museum Gospel.

        Sometime in the second quarter of the second century a Greek Christian in Egypt wrote a gospel, or rather he condensed the Four Gospels into one, omitting their numerous duplications of material, which amounted to at least half their total length, and combining with them some new units, either remnants of Palestinian tradition about Jesus and his work that had found their way to Egypt, or new products of Christian reflection. He had no heretical or schismatic axe to grind but was controlled by a practical purpose to produce a gospel which should be at the same time shorter than the fourfold one and also richer. The possibility of this must have been immediately apparent to the earliest users of the Fourfold Gospel, as it has been to so many others-ancient, medieval, and modern. But unlike other combiners of the four, such as Tatian and his later successors, who, in interweaving the gospels into one, hesitated to add new elements of lesson or story, this Greek evangelist embellished his narrative with new details in the old stories and even added some altogether new stories. Since no one had yet come to think of the gospels as scripture, like the Law and the Prophets, and so not to be tampered with, the new gospel writer had no inhibitions of that kind. He saw how the Fourfold Gospel could be improved, as he thought, and so he blended the four into one.

        Who he was we do not know, nor can we as yet identify his work with any of the numerous new gospels mentioned by early Christian writers. One would expect it to be the Gospel of the Egyptians, but it does not show the encratite or ascetic leanings which marked that book. And yet, the five columns of the work that came to light in 1935 in the British Museum are, of course, only a small fraction of the whole book, and other parts of it may have shown heretical bias of one kind or another; moreover, the Gospel of the Egyptians was not thought of as heretical for a long time. Neither can we identify it with the Gospel of the Hebrews or with that of Peter, although it must have been written in the same generation with them.

        The writer of this British Museum gospel probably had the Fourfold Gospel in his possession and made use of every one of the four. He may not have used all they had to give him, but he did not hesitate to introduce some new material. There is very little probability that this was authentic Palestinian tradition from Jesus' immediate circle of followers. More probably, it was the product of Christian reflection, developed in the course of the century that had elapsed since Jesus' day. Its value, if we could recover it, would be for the light it would throw on the Egyptian Christianity in its earliest period.

        For the fragments of five or six leaves of this old papyrus book that came to light in 1935 cannot have been written later than about 150, and the book of which they are a copy may well have been composed somewhat earlier. It is surprising to find the Four Gospels in circulation in Egypt at so early a date-although we must remember that the book, though found in Egypt, was not necessarily written there. Our evidence about the gospel usage in Alexandria, at least, goes back to Basilides (about 117-38), and he seems to have known all four gospels, if not more. In various communities various books were doubtless favored. Another papyrus fragment published in 1935 comes from a leaf-book that was certainly copied in the first half of the second century. This is the Rylands papyrus that contains verses from the eighteenth chapter of John on both sides of the fragment. From their location we can calculate the size of the original book, which probably contained only the Gospel of John.

        The contents of the British Museum fragments may be briefly outlined. Jesus tells the rulers that the scriptures bear witness to him, so that Moses becomes their accuser. They protest that they do not know whence Jesus comes. In a second fragment the rulers try to seize him, but he slips from their hands. In a third, a leper explains how he caught the disease by eating with lepers at an inn, and Jesus cures him. In another, the question of paying tribute to Rome is discussed. Another, badly broken and obscurely written, tells of Jesus on the bank of the Jordan.