Originally Posted by
Char-Gar
The list is not of "banned gospels" but a list of pseudographica (false writing). The early Church was plagued by such false writtings. Folks would write whatever kind of nonsense they wanted and falsely state the author was some noted person. It was quite a problem in the early church to maintain a central core of its teachings. This was addressed in two ways.
1. The development of creeds which stated the core truth of the Christian faith.
2. The development of the Canon of Scripture. In developing what scriptures were "Canonical" and which were not. There were standards (canon) which were applied. They were;
A. Was it written by an Apostle or under the authority of an Apostle?
B. Was it accepted as genuine by the 1st. Century church, and circulated in those churches?
C. Was the content consistent with the undisputed four Gospels (Mathew, Mark, Luke and John)
Notes on A above: The false Gospels contained many weird and bazaar statements about Jesus. There were a number of "infancy gospels" in these false writings. One, I recall had Jesus as a child, making some doves out of mud. Along came some bully boys and smashed all of his mud doves. In retaliation, Jesus cursed them and they withered up and died. This is wholly inconsistent with what we know about Jesus.
As the Christian faith moved forward and was no longer under the leadership of those who knew Jesus, there was allot of folks trying to reinterpret Jesus and filter him through various Greek religions and philosophies. Gnosticism was one of the better known attempts to reinvent the Christian faith. It was a constant struggle for the early church to call balls and strikes on these perversions.
This struggle is not over as folks on the left and the right try and put their stamp on the historic Christian faith.
To call these false writing "banned gospels" is to display a massive ignorance of church history and the subject at hand. The scoffers love to point to them in their efforts to discount Scripture as the rule and guide for the Christian faith.