The British Library holds several manuscripts in this archive: the Egerton Gospel papyrus, the Askew Codex of Pistis Sophia, and the Syriac manuscript of Mara bar Serapion’s letter. London was also where William Hone published his Apocryphal New Testament in 1820 and G. R. S. Mead his Echoes from the Gnosis in 1907.
Where to start
Written or found here
5-
AD 1502nd century (papyrus c. 150–200)
The Egerton Gospel (Papyrus Egerton 2)
Unknown; tr. Mark M. Mattison
Fragments of an unknown second-century gospel on papyrus: Jesus tells the rulers to search the scriptures, escapes arrest, heals a leper and answers a question about paying kings. Among the oldest surviving non-canonical Gospel texts.
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AD 550Arabic Infancy 5th–6th c.; Abgar letters by c. 300; Hone 1820
Hone’s Apocryphal New Testament: the Arabic Infancy Gospel and the Abgar Letters
William Hone (ed., 1820), from the translations of Jeremiah Jones and William Wake
From William Hone’s 1820 Apocryphal New Testament: the Arabic Infancy Gospel, with its legends of the Holy Family in Egypt, and the letters of Jesus and King Abgar of Edessa that Eusebius reported. Legends, not history.
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✠1907 (on Acts of John 97–102, 2nd–3rd c.)
G. R. S. Mead, The Gnostic Crucifixion (1907)
G. R. S. Mead
A 1907 theosophical study by G. R. S. Mead of the Vision of the Cross in the Acts of John, where the Lord tells John on the Mount of Olives that he did not suffer what the crowd will say. A docetic text read through an early-20th-century lens.
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AD 2503rd century (Askew Codex, 4th c.); tr. 1924
Pistis Sophia
Unknown; tr. George Horner (1924)
A Coptic Gnostic work in which the risen Jesus, eleven years after the resurrection, ascends in light, returns and teaches the disciples, Mary above all, about the heavens and the saving mysteries. Narrated revelation, not history.
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AD 75Date uncertain (proposals range from after AD 73 to the 4th century)
The Letter of Mara bar Serapion to his Son
Mara bar Serapion
A Syriac letter of consolation from a prisoner to his son. It compares the killing of Socrates, Pythagoras and the Jews’ ‘wise king’. He is not named and the letter’s date is debated, but many readers identify him with Jesus.
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