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How the Enlightenment Discovered the Alternative Scriptures

How the Enlightenment Discovered the Alternative Scriptures

Last updated on: July 9, 2026 at 9:15 pm by Philip Jenkins

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How the Enlightenment Discovered the Alternative Scriptures 2026-07-09T21:15:42-04:00 Philip Jenkins

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I have long worked on what we might call alternative Christianities and especially the scriptures they produced. In the modern world, we are well used to the idea of early systems that get labeled heresies, but which actually (many believe) conveyed many of the authentic teachings of the early church. As we know from the work of Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, Karen King, and so many others, there were entire gospels that were somehow excluded from the emerging canon. Based on my own readings, I think that process of discovery started much earlier than we usually suppose, closer to 1900 than to 2000. But increasingly, I am finding much deeper roots, which are not well known or discussed. Today’s blog concerns what I find a startling wave of discoveries that happened still earlier, in the Enlightenment years around 1700, which look far more modern than we might ever have thought. Much of the main work came from clergy themselves, usually situated within the established churches. Even then, some people claimed to find whole new gospels.

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Inventing the New Testament Apocrypha

In the study of alternative scriptures, one date really stands out: 1703. In that year, German Classical scholar Johannes Albert Fabricius edited a sizable collection of ancient texts and scriptures in what he termed the Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti, the “Apocryphal New Testament.” That is the direct ancestor of all modern collections covering such materials, not least in his division between texts dealing with Jesus and those recording the deeds of the apostles.

So why then, why 1703? Partly, this was because New Testament scholarship had advanced so far in the later seventeenth century that scholars were delving ever deeper into related texts to find parallels and contexts. But also, “new” ancient documents had been turning up at such a pace in recent years. In 1552, Guillaume Postel published the very early Infancy Gospel that he unashamedly called the First Gospel, the Protevangelium.

European links with the Middle East continued to produce more treasures. By the seventeenth century, “Orientalists” were skilled not just in Hebrew but also in Syriac and Aramaic, and probably Arabic and other languages. We see the emergence of what we might call an essential scholarly infrastructure, with centers in Rome, Paris, Oxford, and Leiden. In 1697, the Leiden-based scholar Henry Sike published his edition and translation of an early Infancy Gospel that had survived in Arabic, but which represented a much older Syriac original: the manuscript had been obtained in the Ottoman realm in the 1620s.

Although this is a major separate topic, it is in this age that Egypt began to exercise such fascination as a likely source of really significant manuscript finds. One of the hit novels of the era was Jean Terrasson’s lengthy fantasy Life of Séthos: Taken from Private Memoirs of the Ancient Egyptians (1731), which was allegedly translated from a recently recovered ancient Greek manuscript. Among other triumphs, Séthos became the foundational source for Mozart’s The Magic Flute. When nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt started producing so many lost scriptures and Gospels, it came as a surprise to precisely nobody.

Apostolic Fathers

Also newly recognized in these years were the Apostolic Fathers. In 1627, the Patriarch of Constantinople presented the ancient Biblical manuscript known as the Codex Alexandrinus to England’s King Charles I. Not only did this magnificent document contain critical early evidence about the Biblical text, it also included whole literary works that had been venerated in the early church, but which had since been forgotten. The Western churches now rediscovered such historically informative documents as 1 and 2 Clement, from the late first or early second centuries. Those letters had once been plausible candidates for inclusion in that canon, and awareness of that fact stirred questions about the historical processes by which the canonical collection had been defined.

These “new” writings were contextualized with other works produced by the generation following the apostles, which included the Shepherd of Hermas, and the letters of Saints Ignatius and Polycarp, together with accounts of their martyrdoms. As the authors were presumably the pupils of those apostles, they came to be known as the Apostolic Fathers. In 1693, the Anglican cleric William Wake (a later Archbishop of Canterbury) produced a translation of these writings that subsequently went into many editions, not always properly credited to him. If not exactly scriptural, these texts were at least scripture-adjacent.

Fabricius

Fabricius’s collection offered a solid range of the “alternative” scriptures then to hand, including the Protevangelium and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which purported to add narrative details to the life and work of the Virgin Mary and to the infancy of Jesus. Other works included the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, Paul’s supposed letter to the Laodiceans and his correspondence with Seneca, and the collection of Apocryphal Acts attributed to Pseudo-Abdias. All of course were presented in Latin, untranslated. Moreover, Fabricius scrupulously collects all the Patristic references to the various alternative and “heretical” gospels that had circulated in antiquity, and which would attract such keen interest in later times.

Just as influential was Fabricius’s 1713 collection of what he termed the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, in his Codex pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti. These were writings falsely attributed to such Old Testament figures as Moses and Isaiah. Beyond defining the scope of the topic as it then existed, Fabricius also coined the name that would become standard up to the present day, namely pseudepigrapha. That collection likewise begat many later imitators, right up to the present decade.

Sympathy For The Devil

As they read these old/new scriptures, most European scholars were untroubled by any deviations they might show from standard Christian orthodoxies. By contrast, Early Modern thinkers often demonstrated not just an interest in the so-called heresies and their writings, but also an active sympathy, to a degree that might strike modern audiences as counterintuitive. All too often, we tend to assume that earlier generations were far more narrowly orthodox than they actually were. In fact, long before 1800, a lively literature extolled ancient heresies not just as legitimate in their own right, but as authentic voices of primitive Christianity.

That perspective grew out of the struggles of the Reformation, when embattled Protestants naturally sympathized with any Christian dissidents, past or present, who had been persecuted by the Catholic clergy. Such sympathy became all the more intense following the frightening revival of intolerance in France after 1685, when Louis XIV sought at a stroke to eliminate the country’s Protestants. By definition, it appeared, any and all victims of a historical Inquisition must have been heroic advocates of truth.

But Protestants were also concerned to rebut Catholic charges that their faith was only an upstart growth, and that they could claim no authentic connection with the earliest church. To construct patterns of historical continuity, writers both scholarly and popular framed many different groups from earlier eras as proto-Protestants. In some cases, such as the Waldensians or the Hussites, such descriptions were plausible, but similar re-evaluations were applied to many more surprising groups from across the spectrum, including Gnostics and Dualists, and the medieval Albigensians. In the English-speaking world, the word “Gnosticism” was coined in 1669 by Henry More, as a smear against Catholicism.

One skilled “Orientalist” was George Hooper, who in 1704 became the Anglican Bishop of Bath and Wells. In 1711 he published his (pioneering) book-length analysis of the Gnostic teachings of Valentinus, which he traced not to Jewish or Hellenistic roots, but rather located them in ancient Egyptian theologies. Of course, the inability to read hieroglyphics meant that his knowledge of the Egyptian context was hopelessly flawed, but his book, De Valentinianorum haeresi conjecturae. remains an intriguing foretaste of what was to come. Scholars were seeing the need to move beyond the all-too-familiar Latin and Greek Fathers.

In the 1730s, the French Protestant cleric Isaac de Beausobre even published a substantial and favorable history of Mani and the Manicheans, an erudite work that still won scholarly praise two centuries later.

Vindicating Heresy

The literature on early heresies now blossomed. In his ambitious Ketzergeschichte, a History of Heresy, published in 1746, German Lutheran cleric Johann Lorenz von Mosheim not only treated the ancient Gnostics with due objectivity and even respect, but assembled all the available Patristic references to them in a collection that was being cited into the twentieth century. The academic study of Gnosticism traces directly to his work.

Such advocacy for bygone heretics was central to religious debates in the rising Enlightenment. In his much-praised Nonpartisan History of Churches and Heresies (1699), the German Pietist Gottfried Arnold argued that, historically, it was usually the true followers of Christ who were labeled heretics under the oppressive regime of an institutional church. (Obviously, he was writing with France’s recent war against his own fellow Protestants very much in mind). Citing many historical examples from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, he argued that applying the label of heresy was a matter of power rather than of authentic religious concern, and that any official descriptions of such deviants were likely to be biased and inaccurate. In modern terms, any such statements must be subjected to a hermeneutic of suspicion. Enlightenment thinkers delightedly welcomed such a vindication of religious dissent: Goethe was an admirer.

Other Deist and skeptical writers used similar approaches. In 1730, the Deist Matthew Tindal saw the shifting definition of heresy solely in terms of the abuse of power in church and state:

And if we look into Church-story, we shall find it to have been the constant practice of a certain set of men, not only to impute their adversaries’ opinions which they disowned, but to represent those opinions as ready to prevail, was it not for their interposition. By which means they hoped not only to be highly reverenced for their great zeal, but to have new powers granted them to oppress mankind. Thus the consequences of betraying the followers of Wycliffe were the Statute de Haeretico comburendo, granted at the petition of the Clergy; and betraying the Albigenses, Waldenses, etc. raised a Crusade against those poor people.

Religious polemic killed.

Toland’s Nazarenus

The still more radical groups that flourished at the time and despised orthodox Christian teachings were especially enamored of ancient thinkers and their suppressed truths. Anti-Trinitarians singled out Gnostic teachers such as Cerinthus for rehabilitation in the modern world. In one historic instance, a freethinking anti-Trinitarian deployed what he sincerely believed to be a recently recovered lost gospel to advance his views. Through the seventeenth century, radical networks had circulated manuscript copies of an alleged Gospel of Barnabas that recounted the authentic history of Jesus, who was not truly crucified. In 1718, the Irish Deist John Toland published this incendiary work in an attempt to prove that the received history of early Christianity was a systematic lie, concocted by the deceiver Paul. His book bore the imposing title Nazarenus, Or, Jewish, Gentile, And Mahometan Christianity. In imagining this early Jesus movement free of what he saw as fanciful Christian dogmas, Toland invented the term “Jewish Christian,” which subsequently became a standard concept in the scholarly literature.

Such an overt preference for the dissidents and marginalized in Christian history sounds almost shockingly contemporary, as does the presumption that such groups were likely to be the authentic bearers of the message of Jesus and his first followers. However modern we might think such a historical vision to be, it was well established in Protestant Europe by the later seventeenth century, and, as now, religious discourse often contained a strong current of anti-clericalism and, often, anti-Catholicism. Those approaches conditioned attitudes to new documentary discoveries as they emerged, and raised hopes that such finds would produce ever more pristine truths concealed by the oppressive Catholic church.

This is an ongoing project of mine, but I think you will agree that there is a lot here that is surprising. That is all the more so when we realize how severely all European countries at this time persecuted heretics, real or supposed. England was quite liberal in these things, and it executed no heretic after 1612. Scotland, however, hanged the poor twenty-year-old Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy as late as 1697: you can find his startling views spelled out here.

Scotland, as so often, was different. I am sure we have all heard the chant, “No Scotland, no fanatical Calvinist persecution!”

Next time, on to the Deists.

I have developed quite a substantial working bibliography on these themes, which you are welcome to consult and download here. I hope that might be of use to you. Do note this is very much a work in progress.

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