What gospels were not in the New Testament?

Answer 1

There are quite a few "apocryphal" or secret/hidden gospels. If you limit the definition to narratives of the passion as being a gospel, then there are:

• Gospel of Peter
• Gospel of Nicodemus (also called the "Acts of Pilate")
• Gospel of Bartholomew
• Questions of Bartholomew
• Resurrection of Jesus Christ (which claims to be according to Bartholomew)

Prior to the council of Nicea, there was no defined "Bible". It was only when Constantine told the empire that they were now all Christians that he decided he needed a canonical reference to point new members of the faith to, and to base law upon.

The major reason for excluding writings from The Bible was that many books used Persian, Zoroastrian symbolism, which the Church Fathers felt would not be understood by Byzantines. Only Revelation, the end of Daniel, bits of Matthew, and the end of John survived. All but Revelation were then removed by early Protestants that thought those additions must be Papist. As to the original logic, indeed, 90% of bogus scripture scholarship sources the very passages they were afraid would be misunderstood.

"Catholic" bibles, the ones that say "with apocrypha", contain the missing bits of Daniel, Matthew and John. Some of the texts left out of the Nicean bible are still not translated.

One possible other reason that they were left out is that many talk about a split in the early Church between the family of Jesus and the followers of Paul of Tarsus. One can make a pretty good case that the Pauling Christians introduced evangelical Christianity, the whole "came to die for you; confess Jesus is Lord" marketing spiel, and murdered his surviving family. No wonder Constantine was keen to see they were not included.