Now here are some conversations between Jesus and one of his women followers I bet you’ve never seen before!

When Salome asked, “How long will death prevail?” the Lord replied “For as long as you women bear children.”  But he did not say this because life is evil or the creation wicked; instead he was teaching the natural succession of things; for everything degenerates after coming into being.  (Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, 3, 45, 3)

Why do those who adhere more to everything other than the true gospel rule not cite the following words spoken to Salome?  For when she said, “Then I have done well not to bear children” (supposing that it was not necessary to give birth), the Lord responded, “Eat every herb, but not the one that is bitter.”  (Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, 3, 66, 1-2)

And when the Savior said to Salome, “Death will last as long as women give birth,” he was not denigrating birth — since it is, after all, necessary for the salvation of those who believe.  (Clement of Alexandria, Excerpts from Theodotus 67, 2)

 

These snippets are taken from the long-lost Gospel of the Egyptians, known to us only because it is quoted six times by the late-second century church father, Clement of Alexandria (that is, we don’t have a manuscript of the Gospel itself).  These quotations are my translations from The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament, edited and translated by, well, me and my colleague Zlatko Pleše (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

If you want to see full translations and introductions to this non-canonical Gospel — and to about 40 others! – that’s a good place to turn.

But for now:  who is this woman disciple named Salome, and what is the Gospel of the Egyptians?   Here’s how I explain it all  in our book (pp. 115-17; slightly edited here).

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Only Clement quotes the book, six times altogether.  On two occasions (sayings 2 and 5) he mentions the Gospel by name: in both instances it involves a conversation between Jesus and a woman disciple named Salome, who Salome is known to us from two passages in the New Testament (Mark 15:40; 16:1 and several non-canonical texts).  In four other instances, Clement cites Gospel quotations of a conversation between these two; by inference, these quotations are also generally understood as having come from the Gospel according to the Egyptians.  All these quotations deal with the same basic issues: sexual abstinence, the relation of the genders, and the legitimacy of childbearing.

None of Clement’s quotations of the Gospel is disparaging; on the contrary, he appears to hold it as an authority.  But he does assert that the teachings of the Gospel have been twisted by those who take them in a literal way to denigrate sexual activities and procreation.  Clement quotes the Gospel in order to provide his own allegorizing interpretation of it.  A more straightforward reading of the Gospel suggests that it was indeed written to support an ascetic lifestyle that rejected the pleasures of sex and denied the value of procreation.  Its views appear to be based on a close reading of the Adam and Eve stories of Genesis 2-3, where, for example, pain in childbirth is seen as a direct result of sin having entered into the world.

It is impossible to say anything definitive about the extent and character of the Gospel: it may have been a sayings Gospel like the Gospel of Thomas or, it may just as well have been a full narrative Gospel such as those that made it into the canon.  If the latter, there is no trace in any of our sources of the rest of the Gospel, just the conversation(s) Jesus had with Salome, presumably, but not necessarily, during his earthly ministry (it is also possible that it consisted of conversations from after the resurrection).

Some scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were keen to tie this Gospel to other, equally scarcely known documents: the Gospel of Peter; sayings of Oxyrhnchus papyri 1 and 655 (which are now known to have come from the Gospel of Thomas); the Gospel of the Hebrews; the apocryphal Epistle of Titus; the Strasbourg Coptic fragment (see later in the collection) and so on.   The reality, though, is that we simply do not have evidence to make any of these suggestions plausible.

There have long been debates concerning the name of the Gospel, and of what the name might signify.  W. Bauer maintained that it was the Gospel used by gentiles in Egypt, and that it was called the Gospel according to the Egyptians to differentiate it from the other Gospel widely in use there, but by Jews, the Gospel of the Hebrews (Orthodoxy and Heresy, p. 50).  Other scholars have seen this reasoning as faulty, since Jews also could be Egyptian, and there were other Gospels (many other Gospels!) in use by Christians (Jew and Gentile) in Egypt.  More likely is the view that the title was devised by non-Egyptians to designate a Gospel used by the Christians of Egypt.

The Gospel must date before the earliest known references to it, that is, prior to the writings of Clement of Alexandria in the late second century.  Most scholars date it to around the middle of the century.  Given its title and its early attestation by the Alexandrian church fathers Clement and Origen, it is widely assumed to have been written there, in Egypt.  There is now another Gospel called “according to the Egyptians,” in the Nag Hammadi Library.  These two books have nothing in common and are not to be confused with one another.

Here are some other places you can find brief discussions of this now-lost Gospel.

Bibliography

Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.  (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971; German original 1934).

Elliott, J. K.  The Apocryphal New Testament.  Oxford: Clarendon, 1993; pp. 16-19.

Klauck, Hans-Josef.  Apocryphal Gospels: An Introduction.  London: T&T Clark, 2003; German original Stuttgart, 2002; pp. 55-59.

Schneemelcher, Wilhelm, “The Gospel of the Egyptians” in New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher; tr. R. McL. Wilson.  Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1991.  Vol. 1, pp. 209-15.