Scholar Says He Has Found Fragments of ‘Lost Gospel’

KANSAS CITY, Mo. —  An American professor said Tuesday that he and a colleague have identified fragments of a rare “lost Gospel” that contains accounts of conversations between Jesus and his disciples.

Paul Mirecki, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas, said he is confident that the text is an early Coptic account of the teachings of Jesus. If true, this would mark the first time since 1945 that a so-called lost Gospel has been identified.

Mirecki said that apart from the New Testament’s four Gospels, scholars recognize about six other lost Gospels that detail Jesus’ teachings. The gospel of Thomas, discovered in Egypt in 1945, was the last such text to be identified, Mirecki said.

Mirecki happened on this manuscript in 1991 in the vast holdings of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum, but it has taken him until now to piece together the document’s content. He does not know how the manuscript found its way to the museum.

The newly found Gospel was written in the first or second century, he said. Mirecki has been editing and translating the manuscript with Charles Hedrick, professor of religious studies at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, Mo.

Each man studied the manuscript independently while working at the Berlin museum. They decided to collaborate after a chance encounter at a 1995 convention in Philadelphia.

Mirecki said the manuscript is written in Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language that uses Greek letters. It was probably the work of a Christian minority group called Gnostics, or knowers, he said, and recounts a rare “dialogue Gospel” of conversations between Jesus and his disciples that supposedly took place after Jesus was resurrected.

Only 15 pages remain of the manuscript. Mirecki said it was probably the victim of an orthodox book burning in about the 5th century.