The more I investigate the more interesting it is to me, just how many writings were available and banned or excluded when the Christian bible was compiled.
As one reads the bible small references are made to this and that and no details revealed. Yet, these references seem to have come from oral or written information that furnished details and were excluded for various reasons.

Some are considered gnostic writings some are not.
History suggests that these many writings were widely used by the early christians.

If anyone wants information on what was written about Jesus early life and other events they can research much information that is not in the christian bible.

A few are the Book of Enoch, Thomas Gospel, Gospel of James, The Book of Jubilees, and one I found especially interesting is The Gospel According To Mary.

To accept a religion on information furnished only in a canonized version by what a few ministers decided to approve without further investigation on what was available is strange to me.

I would like to have a copy of the Ethiopia Old Testiment Bible which included much that the Christians choose to exclude.

It is a very interesting investigation whether you are religious or not.

from WHYY, December 14, 2005 · Scholar Bart Ehrman's new book explores how scribes -- through both omission and intention -- changed the Bible. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is the result of years of reading the texts in their original languages.

Ehrman says the modern Bible was shaped by mistakes and intentional alterations that were made by early scribes who copied the texts. In the introduction to Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman writes that when he came to understand this process 30 years ago, it shifted his way of thinking about the Bible. He had been raised as an Evangelical Christian.

Ehrman is also the author of Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, which chronicles the period before Christianity as we know it, when conflicting ideas about the religion were fighting for prominence in the second and third centuries.

The chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Ehrman also edited a collection of the early non-canonical texts from the first centuries after Christ, called Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament.

Read an excerpt from Misquoting Jesus:

Chapter One

The Beginnings of Christian Scripture

To discuss the copies of the New Testament that we have, we need to start at the very beginning with one of the unusual features of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world: its bookish character. In fact, to make sense of this feature of Christianity, we need to start before the beginnings of Christianity with the religion from which Christianity sprang, Judaism. For the bookishness of Christianity was in some sense anticipated and foreshadowed by Judaism, which was the first "religion of the book" in Western civilization.

Judaism as a Religion of the Book

The Judaism from which Christianity sprang was an unusual religion in the Roman world, although by no means unique. Like adherents of any of the other (hundreds of ) religions in the Mediterranean area, Jews acknowledged the existence of a divine realm populated by superhuman beings (angels, archangels, principalities, powers); they subscribed to the worship of a deity through sacrifices of animals and other food products; they maintained that there was a special holy place where this divine being dwelt here on earth (the Temple in Jerusalem), and it was there that these sacrifices were to be made. They prayed to this God for communal and personal needs. They told stories about how this God had interacted with human beings in the past, and they anticipated his help for human beings in the present. In all these ways, Judaism was "familiar" to the worshipers of other gods in the empire.

In some ways, though, Judaism was distinctive. All other religions in the empire were polytheistic -- acknowledging and worshiping many gods of all sorts and functions: great gods of the state, lesser gods of various locales, gods who oversaw different aspects of human birth, life, and death. Judaism, on the other hand, was monotheistic; Jews insisted on worshiping only the one God of their ancestors, the God who, they maintained, had created this world, controlled this world, and alone provided what was needed for his people. According to Jewish tradition, this one all-powerful God had called Israel to be his special people and had promised to protect and defend them in exchange for their absolute devotion to him and him alone. The Jewish people, it was believed, had a "covenant" with this God, an agreement that they would be uniquely his as he was uniquely theirs. Only this one God was to be worshiped and obeyed; so, too, there was only one Temple, unlike in the polytheistic religions of the day in which, for example, there could be any number of temples to a god like Zeus. To be sure, Jews could worship God anywhere they lived, but they could perform their religious obligations of sacrifice to God only at the Temple in Jerusalem. In other places, though, they could gather together in "synagogues" for prayer and to discuss the ancestral traditions at the heart of their religion.

These traditions involved both stories about God's interaction with the ancestors of the people of Israel -- the patriarchs and matriarchs of the faith, as it were: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rachel, Jacob, Rebecca, Joseph, Moses, David, and so on -- and detailed instructions concerning how this people was to worship and live. One of the things that made Judaism unique among the religions of the Roman Empire was that these instructions, along with the other ancestral traditions, were written down in sacred books.

For modern people intimately familiar with any of the major contemporary Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it may be hard to imagine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost exclusively concerned with honoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice. There were no doctrines to be learned, as explained in books, and almost no ethical principles to be followed, as laid out in books. This is not to say that adherents of the various polytheistic religions had no beliefs about their gods or that they had no ethics, but beliefs and ethics -- strange as this sounds to modern ears -- played almost no role in religion per se. These were instead matters of personal philosophy, and philosophies, of course, could be bookish. Since ancient religions themselves did not require any particular sets of "right doctrines" or, for the most part, "ethical codes," books played almost no role in them.

Judaism was unique in that it stressed its ancestral traditions, customs, and laws, and maintained that these had been recorded in sacred books, which had the status, therefore, of "scripture" for the Jewish people. During the period of our concern -- the first century of the common era, when the books of the New Testament were being written -- Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire understood in particular that God had given direction to his people in the writings of Moses, referred to collectively as the Torah, which literally means something like "law" or "guidance." The Torah consists of five books, sometimes called the Pentateuch (the "five scrolls"), the beginning of the Jewish Bible (the Christian Old Testament): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Here one finds accounts of the creation of the world, the calling of Israel to be God's people, the stories of Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs and God's involvement with them, and most important (and most extensive), the laws that God gave Moses indicating how his people were to worship him and behave toward one another in community together. These were sacred laws, to be learned, discussed, and followed -- and they were written in a set of books.

Jews had other books that were important for their religious lives together as well, for example, books of prophets (such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos), and poems (Psalms), and history (such as Joshua and Samuel). Eventually, some time after Christianity began, a group of these Hebrew books -- twenty-two of them altogether -- came to be regarded as a sacred canon of scripture, the Jewish Bible of today, accepted by Christians as the first part of the Christian canon, the "Old Testament."

Tapeworm, thanks for the info.
After the Christian bible was compiled a list of banned reading was issued to the churches. Much was hidden rather than destroyed. Hopefully, more will be one day recovered intact in the region.
There were literally hundreds of different writings concerning early religious and Christian beliefs/views of events/stories.

Mhh, to my knowledge, these gospels were written later than the 4 gospels included in the canon. One major reason why they were not accepted back in the day as well as today is that the have much of legends. The theory is that that as time went by, Jesus was more and more transformed into a kind of "superman".

Originally posted by lil skittle
Mhh, to my knowledge, these gospels were written later than the 4 gospels included in the canon. One major reason why they were not accepted back in the day as well as today is that the have much of legends. The theory is that that as time went by, Jesus was more and more transformed into a kind of "superman".

How much more of a superman could someone be, as Jesus was said to die then rise from the dead, followed by ascending up into heaven. Let's see superman out do that.

Still, the book of Jasher is mentioned in the Old Testament, and even referred to by Joshua, yet it too was omitted. No one has ever been able to answer why.

I have not read all of the "lost gospels" but I have read some of the Gospel of Thomas. This is my favorite quote;

"Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty."

well I have to admit I didn't read these gospels. The "superman" thing also refers to Jesus doing loads of funky wonders for no real reason... in these four gospels at least most wonders have the function to help people in some way or to teach them something...

The books in the old testament are another deal. From what I remember, they (or most of them?) weren't put into the canon by the Jews cause they'd been written in greek, which means they weren't as old as the others. Some (not all!) of them also include questionable theological contents... of course "questionable" is something you could argue about. I guess they didn't quite fit with the rest of scriptures...
maybe there were more reasons but I can't think of them right now..

Originally posted by stillJR
How much more of a superman could someone be, as Jesus was said to die then rise from the dead, followed by ascending up into heaven. Let's see superman out do that.

Still, the book of Jasher is mentioned in the Old Testament, and even referred to by Joshua, yet it too was omitted. No one has ever been able to answer why.

I have not read all of the "lost gospels" but I have read some of the Gospel of Thomas. This is my favorite quote;

"Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty."

The entire life story of Jesus was not an original story at all but taken from pagan mythology almost in its entirety.

Jesus may NOT be the biblical messiah awaited by the Jews. We know that the messiah complex is a mental illness and finding it manifested in ancient times is no less sad than when we encounter it now in the population.

Three Jesuses who thought they were messiahs are mentioned in the xn bible. Eight Jesuses who thought themselves messiahs are listed in the writings of Josephus.

"There were plenty of godmen at the time of Jesus, and a great number of them were called Jesus. Only in the New Testament we have Jesus Bar Abbas (in later manuscripts called Barabbas) and Bar Jesus. Josephus identifies a few of these messiahs: Jesus son of Danmeus, Jesus son of Sapphias, Jesus son of Ananus, Jesus the high priest and son of Onias, Jesus son of Gamaliel, Jesus son of Gamala, Jesus son of Saphat, Jesus son of Thebuthus. Couldn't Jesus have been inspired by some of these messiahs?"

A large part of the Christ story is a synthesis of these ancient Pagan myths about the dying and resurrecting of Godman Osiris-Dionysus. Why did they adopt these myths and apply them to Jesus?
The ancient myths about the Pagan Godman Osiris-Dionysus, the 'virgin birth', 'resurrection after death', etc., existed 500 years before the birth of Jesus. It's a stolen idea from the pagans. The story in the bible is not original, authentic in any in any sense, because Isaiah got the idea from old Pagan myths, figuring that he could pass them off as new to another generation. Later, the myths were applied to Jesus.