Just because it’s “found” doesn’t

make it important

Earlier in this section, we raise an important question: “How can such impor-

tant writings ever be lost?” Part of the answer is already in the question:

Important writings are rarely lost. For both the Jews and the Christians, the

only books that became lost were books not considered important by very

many people. Think about it — if a work is unknown and never quoted, or

only rarely mentioned by other ancient writers . . . then the fact of the matter

is that the work wasn’t really missed. These writings are the work of a small

group of people, and it’s therefore very easy to overestimate their importance

because of the romance of finding ancient writings!

Although it’s always important to find ancient writings to add to the evidence

for writing ancient history, it’s another matter completely to try to determine

how important a writing is. After all, somebody’s ancient grocery list may be

ancient, and it may tell historians something about ancient diets or family

meals, but it hardly belongs in the Bible as a sacred discovery. In short, age is

not the only issue here.However, the fact is that Christianity in the first few centuries was never so

centrally and powerfully organized. Nobody paid much attention to “central

leaders” until the Roman Empire became “Christian.” So, most of the time,

the early Christian leaders decided to endorse those writings that the Christians

already were using for over 200 years and finding really positive and useful.

Leaders weren’t imposing books on people who didn’t want them, just follow-

ing along with the “group decision.”

On the other hand, modern readers may wonder if there was some kind of

agenda (religious or political) that led to some books being excluded. If you

could make the historical case that a large number of people liked a particu-

lar writing that was excluded, then you may have a good argument that some-

thing is up — and you have reason to wonder what happened!

Although it doesn’t happen anymore, books may have been suppressed, or

even destroyed, among early Christians. In fact, some believe that the Nag

Hammadi Library is a group of writings that some early Christian didn’t have

the heart to destroy, so he buried them (or hid them) instead, and the docu-

ments survived to the present.

The real question is whether there’s any such thing as a modern conspiracy

to hide some religious writings. The answer should be obvious to anyone

who has visited a good university library! There they are in plain sight:

English translations of everything that has been found so fa