Other Gospels.

        Among the Gnostic documents published by Till are the Gospel of Mary and the Sophia of Jesus Christ.[24] The former, partly preserved also in a fourth-century Greek papyrus in the John Rylands Library, contains the risen Savior's revelations to Mary Magdalene and shows how reluctant the disciples were to admit that he could have revealed anything to a woman (his favorite disciple according to the Gospel of Philip). The second, also partly preserved in Greek in an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, has a content close to that of the Apocryphon of John.

        All these documents seem to be based on Greek originals, although in the course of transmission and translation some editing undoubtedly took place. The order of the sayings of Jesus in Thomas, for example, is somewhat different in Coptic from what it is in the Greek fragments, and in Philip some sections are connected by plays on Coptic words, not Greek. On the whole, however, it is likely that the documents reliably reflect the originals, which probably come from the second and third centuries.

        We have already seen that Irenaeus ascribed the Gospel of Truth to the Gnostic teacher Valentinus. In addition, Origen specifically mentions a Gospel of Basilides (Homily 1 on Luke). But there are no clear traces of such a book in the surviving fragments which come from Basilides, a Gnostic teacher at Alexandria during the reign of Hadrian (A.D. 117-38), or his followers. He did write a commentary, the Exegetica mentioned by Clement of Alexandria (Miscellanies iv. 81), but it seems to have been based on the church's gospels, not his own. On the other hand, we know that his followers quoted some apocryphal sayings of Jesus now found in the Gospel of Thomas, and that they held a peculiar view of the crucifixion. According to them, Simon of Cyrene was crucified in Jesus' place, while Jesus stood on the Mount of Olives and derided the authorities. This notion may have been based on a severely literal reading of Mark 15:21-25, or possibly on a work by Basilides himself. Orlgen also speaks of songs by Basilides (On Job xxi 11-12) — perhaps the “incantations” which Irenaeus says his followers used (Heresies 1. 24. 5).

        It seems likely that other gospels ascribed to heresiarchs, if not this one, owe their existence to the imagination of antiheretical writers. Epiphanius mentions a Gospel of Cerinthus (Heresies li. 7); Jerome, a Gospel of Apelles (Preface to Matthew). No traces of such works survive, whether or not they ever existed.