Fragment of the text found. PHOTOGRAPH: Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society

Juan Chapa, Dean of the School of Theology of the University of Navarra and professor of New Testament, has edited in England a papyrus of a probable apocryphal gospel, until now unknown. The fragment recently discovered by the expert belongs to the collection of papyri from the ancient Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus. These are preserved and edited at the University of Oxford under the sponsorship of the Egypt Exploration Society of London and the British Academy.

Of small dimensions -7 x 7 centimeters-, it is written on both sides and contains the remains of twenty-two lines. "On one side it relates part of an exorcism performed by Jesus, which does not find its exact parallel in the four canonical gospels. More than a new exorcism, it seems to be a synthesis of those already known from the other Gospels and testifies to the importance that this activity of Jesus had among the first Christians," explains Professor Chapa, who has been collaborating for years with the project papyrus edition of the British collection.

On the other side, the document contains some words of Jesus addressed to his disciples and that "are a call to radical discipleship, with an allusion to Jerusalem and the Kingdom," adds Juan Chapa.

According to this specialist in papyri, the scope of the finding is still unknown, but he highlights its great importance: "It will offer new lights to know better the Christianity of the first two centuries and what the first Christians of Egypt read and thought, as well as about the training of the Gospels".

One of the few manuscripts of the period

"Very few manuscripts of that time are preserved, and even fewer testimonies of the 'apocryphal gospels', which are the texts that by their content or form resemble the four gospels included in the canon of the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John".

In this sense, he comments that from the first two centuries only a little more than ten manuscripts of the four canonical gospels and only four of the apocryphal gospels are known: the Gospel of Thomas, the so-called Egerton Gospel -an unknown gospel that is only known from this manuscript-, and two others that some attribute to the Gospel of Peter.

The professor of the University of Navarra indicates that the four gospels included in the New Testament are those that the Church has transmitted as authentic testimony coming from the apostolic period. "The other books of the same genre that could have been written at that time were lost because they did not add anything new to what was contained in those four, or because they were elaborated from them in order to spread a particular doctrine, sometimes in disagreement with what is found in the canonical gospels," he concluded.

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